The 3 Characteristics of a Great Company
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“The biggest reason to shoot for significant and consistent growth is because it allows you to keep the great people you have and attract great people.”
— Mike Goldman
1. Significant + Consistent Top and Bottom Line Growth
- Crucial for financial stability, attracting and retaining top talent.
- Profitability enables investment in employee development and competitive compensation, enhancing performance and
talent retention.
2. Growing + Fulfilling Environment
- Communicate a clear, powerful vision for purpose and fulfillment.
- Value team feedback and prioritize needs for a fulfilling, purpose-aligned work environment.
3. Greater Impact on The World
- Focus on organizational purpose beyond profit, aiming for meaningful impact.
- Understand and align efforts to solve ideal client's major problems, achieving their goals.
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On a podcast, you're not supposed to talk about what month it is or what day it is or what time it is. Cause you could be listening to this at any time. You could be listening to this two years after I recorded any day of the week, morning, noon, and night. But for some reason, I feel compelled to tell you that I'm recording this on a Saturday night.
I don't know why I feel compelled to tell you that maybe I feel like a loser recording a podcast on a Saturday night. I guess that kind of proves I'm 59 years old and I have nothing better to do on a Saturday night. But honestly, I love this and I've got a whole bunch of really busy weeks ahead. So I've got to get ahead in some of my podcast recording, but let me get into it.
Why do you care that I'm recording this on a Saturday night? What I want to talk about on the show tonight, Saturday night, is I want to talk about what I think are the three characteristics of a great company. And I want to talk about it because I feel like we tend to take creating a great company, or we tend to take, you know, our goals in creating a great company for granted.
And a lot of the leaders that I speak to get so mired in what they're doing that they forget to kind of pick their heads up and remember what they're doing and why they're doing it and that it's not just about the money. Or some get so wound up about their company's mission that they forget it's about making money.
And without that money, you can't keep things going. So the characteristics of a great company would seem simple. And when you hear what I think they are, they are simple, but they're also profound and they're also super important. There were also something that we need to keep focused on every single day.
So let me start with the first one. And the first characteristic of a great company is I think the obvious one. It's what you'd expect to hear. I believe the first characteristic of a great company is a company that has significant and consistent top and bottom line growth. Obvious I know but when I ask
my clients and I asked CEOs why growth is important. I feel like most miss the most important thing, right? When I say why is growth important, especially profitable growth, consistent, significant, profitable growth. They say, well, you know that gives me more money in the bank you know, that's part of the reason I started the whole business.
That's a symbol of how successful we are. It enables us to invest in new products and services, invest in our clients. All those things are super important. But what I think most miss is that one of the biggest reasons, I think the biggest reason to shoot for significant and consistent growth is because it allows you to keep the great people you have and attract great people.
It allows you to utilize something that I call the profit talent cycle. And the profit talent cycle could either be a vicious cycle going down or a... oh, it's another V. I forgot the name of the word. It's not victorious, but the opposite of a vicious cycle. Going up. I'll think of that word before we're done.
So what do I mean by that? What's a vicious cycle going down in the profit talent cycle? Well, if you are not profitable consistently, or if you're barely profitable or breaking even, you're going to have a very difficult time. Keeping your best people and investing in your best people, your best people want to grow.
Your best people want to be challenged. Your best people want more responsibility. They want you to invest in coaching them and developing them and training them. And if you are not profitable or barely profitable, you're going to have a real difficult time finding the money and the bandwidth to do that.
If you are not profitable or barely profitable, you're going to have a really difficult time attracting the right people. The right people are people that are high performing. And a lot of those folks are folks who want more, not only more money, but more responsibility, more challenges. They want to get promoted eventually.
And without growth, you've got nowhere to promote them to without growth. You may not have additional challenges for them without growth. You may not be able to pay them what they deserve. So what happens in this vicious cycle going down this profit talent cycle is if you are not profitable or barely profitable, that leads to you not being able to keep and attract great people. Or if you can't keep and attract great people, your performance will go down as your performance goes down.
Your profitability goes down as your profitability goes down. You have an even harder time keeping an attracting great people, which makes your performance even lower, which makes your profitability even lower. And so that vicious cycle goes down. As opposed to the other way, you know, we want that cycle going back up.
I'm going to call it a victorious cycle, but there's a different word for it. Someone will email me or comment on this episode, if you remember what that word is. And I don't, but for this victorious cycle going up, if you are significantly and consistently profitable, you can invest in your great people, you can challenge your great people.
You can give them more responsibility. You can give them promotions. You can give them more money. You can keep them and keep them getting better and better and better. You can attract people from the outside because you've got more and more opportunity. So significant, consistent profitability leads to being able to keep and attract great people.
Being able to keep and attract great people leads to higher performance. Higher performance leads to more profitability. More profitability leads to great people. And so it goes on and on and on. So significant and consistent top and bottom line growth is absolutely one of the things it takes to be a great company.
Now, I spoke to a CEO recently who was very, very happy with slow growth. They were in a situation where they were comfortable with flat to 2 or 3 percent top and bottom line growth every year. Now, I don't judge that. There are situations where someone's at a point in their lives where they're not looking for significant growth anymore.
That's okay. But this same CEO was complaining, was incredibly frustrated that he was having a difficult time keeping and attracting great people. My message to him is while he certainly had the right to grow at any level he wanted to plan to grow at any level he wanted as long as that growth was slow or no growth.
He was going to continue to be frustrated by his ability to keep great people and find great people. You can't have both. If he wanted great people, he's going to have to figure out a way to start growing again. So enough said about that number one characteristic, kind of the obvious one, but maybe not for an obvious reason is top and bottom line growth.
The second characteristic of a great company is a growing, fulfilling environment. If you've got crazy growth and high profitability, but you don't want to get up in the morning and go to work because it makes you miserable and it makes everyone else miserable. I would argue, I don't care how profitable you are.
That's not a great company. So what do you need to do to create a growing, fulfilling environment? What are you doing to coach and develop your people?
What have you done to create a powerful vision and communicate that vision so that even on the tough days, people feel fulfilled because there's a bigger reason they're doing it.
You know, are you listening to your team? Do you even know if your team feels fulfilled? When's the last time you surveyed your team? You did an employee net promoter score or an employee pulse survey, not with 20 questions and that focus on benefits and employee handbooks and that kind of stuff, but getting to the heart
of how people really feel as simple is that net promoter score question, asking them on a scale of one to 10, how likely are they to refer someone to come work at your company? And then most importantly, what could you do to improve that score? What are you doing to listen to your team? Are you speaking to your leadership team about the voice of the team member or the voice of the employee so that you could make sure you're providing a fulfilling environment.
For everyone. In fact, a friend of mine who was on this podcast not too long ago, Brad Giles in his book made to thrive, talks about having an employee promise. An employee promises is similar to a brand promise. A brand promise is a promise you make as a brand to your core customer. It is, you know, what is the biggest problem your core customer has, your ideal customer has that you solve better than anyone else?
Well, what promise are you making to your employees, to your team members? If you look at your purpose as a company, your reason for being. One of the ways you can ensure you could live that purpose is to make sure your brand promise is aligned with that purpose and your employee promise is aligned with that purpose.
Do you understand what your team members need? Do you understand what's most important to them so that you can do a great job keeping your great people and attracting great people? Do you feel like you're growing? Do you feel fulfilled by your work every day? If you don't feel it, trust me, no one else is going to feel it.
If you wake up every day and you just feel like you have fallen out of love with your business. I promise you, as you cascade down through the organization, no one's going to love it any more than you do. So you've got to learn to love your business. And if you don't know how to do that recent episode called the 13 ways to fall back in love with your business, give a listen to that because it doesn't get better as it cascades down through the organization, it gets worse.
So number one characteristic of a great company is significant top and bottom line growth. Number two is it's a growing and fulfilling environment.
And number three is about impact. And number three is about having some bigger impact on the world. Now, when you hear that, when you hear impact on the world, you might think I'm talking about saving the planet or feeding the hungry.
And if that's what you're doing great. I just got out of a two day kickoff session with a new client and they're all about creating clean air. So they are about saving the planet at some level. But your version of impact on the world could be just making the world better for your clients. It doesn't have to be some
big save the earth kind of purpose. But if you are going to have real impact, you do need to understand what your purpose is as an organization. What's your reason for being that goes beyond just making money?
If you're going to have true impact on the world or your definition of the world, you better understand who your ideal client is. How well do you understand them? What's the biggest problem they have that you solve better than anyone else? What are their goals? How are you helping them achieve their goals?
How are you staying focused on your impact on the world, your world? How are you giving visibility throughout your organization to that impact you're having or the impact you'd like to have.
Now I look at these three things, growth, fulfillment, and impact, as a never ending cycle. If you don't have a growing, fulfilling environment but you're highly profitable, I don't believe that high profitability is going to last very long as you fall out of love with your business as your team members fall out of love with the business as you lose the ability to keep and attract great people.
So if you're not creating a growing, fulfilling environment, that cycle stops. If you're not having great impact on the world, I don't believe that significant and consistent profitable growth will continue because I believe the profitable growth you have is a symbol of the great impact you are having on the world.
So that's it. That's my view of the three characteristics of a great company that we need to focus on. Now by the way there are companies that we read about every day, maybe even your company, that you may view as great. But it's missing all three of these things. We've all read about companies that are let alone growing.
They're not even revenue positive yet. They have miserable environments where everybody's just waiting around until that magical day, six months from now that they're going to sell to Google for a billion dollars. Now if that's you or you're reading about a company like that, that's great. If that's you, I may want to get to know you.
You may be very wealthy one day soon but I know that the clients and CEOs that I work with every day and I know if you're listening to this chances are pretty good that you're listening because you want to grow a sustainably great company. Not something you're just gonna pick up and sell to Google six months from now. Now by the way, if you have a plan of exiting a year from now three years from now five years from now. That's beautiful I'm not judging that at all.
That's wonderful. That's why a lot of us got into business but I don't care if you have an exit strategy. That doesn't mean you don't need to be a great company anymore. I can remember when my son was young and he and I were taking Taekwondo. They taught us to break the board with your fist. You didn't aim at the board. If you just aim to hit the board, you hurt your hand and the board wouldn't break.
The idea was to aim behind the board, punch through the board. So if you've got a goal of exiting in three years. I'd encourage you punch through the board. Don't figure out how you're going to be. How do we create a great company three years from now? Because that's where we want to sell. Figure out how you're going to create a company that'll be great 10 years from now.
And by you creating a company that would be great 10 years from now, that company is going to be way more valuable three years from now. And the company is going to be way more valuable if you hit these three characteristics. One more time before I let you go. Number one, it's growth, consistent, significant, profitable, top and bottom line growth.
Number two, fulfillment. Make sure you're creating a growing, fulfilling environment for you as the leader and cascade it down throughout the organization. And three, you've got to have an impact on the world. What's your definition of the world? What impact are you having? Go make it happen. Go create a better leadership team so you can create a great company.