Advice for Growing Businesses this Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a holiday to celebrate gratitude and focus on the good that we have in our lives. A time to take a moment from the hustle and bustle of our busy schedules and reflect. We are so thankful for our Flock family, amazing clients, our continued business and the list goes on.
Looking back to when we started eight years ago, we were the small kids on the block, or if you asked us, the cool kids on the block. And as we journeyed through the ups and downs expected for any growing business, we had our fair share of lessons that we embraced and learned from, as they are only considered failures if we don’t grow because of them. And as we grew, so did our reputation and today, we are fortunate enough to say we have worked with fortune 500 companies all over the globe and have a set of tools that services brands and agencies with their marketing transformation needs. It took grit, our flock values and personality to get us here. So, as a company that knows what it’s like to be a rookie, here are some tips for growing companies to use along the journey:
Current Skillsets vs Future Growth
Plan for today’s talent and tomorrow based on your marketing mix and anticipated needs to deliver on business goals. For example, increasing customer touchpoints to drive conversion may require more CRM skills.
Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge sharing (to keep the team informed as you grow) – develop a scalable documentation system that’s indexed or searchable, and externally logical. A good gut check is to ask, does it make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the information? Gather source material throughout the company and make it part of the day-to-day process to catalogue knowledge, documents, contacts outside of email and general chat, into a centralized, easy to access source. This could be on any platform you already use such as Google Docs, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.
Onboarding
Make sure to have readily available and easy to locate information such as key historical documents, index of information, project leads on past initiatives, sunset reviews that reflect on project wins and losses. One of the pitfalls of growing quickly is that many organizations expect new joiners to “jump right in”, “sink or swim”, “trial by fire”, “drink from the firehose”, the list goes on. Strongly linked to knowledge sharing is dedicating the time to brief new joiners with relevant information and continue to check in with them throughout.
Listening for Talent Motivation
Identify what ways of working that may need to be customized by consistently seeking team feedback and optimize. Do members of your team like to contribute in different ways (introverts vs. extroverts), do individuals seek out peer mentorship or more structured formats, etc.
“The road to success is always under construction”
Lily Tomlin
Our tools
Marketing Skills Assessment Tool
If you would like to talk to us about your marketing transformation needs, please fill in the contact form below.