Building a Business Beyond The Glass Ceiling

When the managing editor of Small Business Enterprise Magazine (Vinil Ramdev) contacted me requesting that I contribute an article on small business growth for their July issue, I reflected on my entrepreneurial background to identify the challenges I faced. The article, “Beyond The Glass Ceiling,” is featured on pages 16 and 17 in the print edition.

I recalled the early years when I quickly launched and grew a logistics business (in the 1980s) that went from zero to 8k to 120k per month in the first thirteen months and (in the ’90s) from $40k to 500k per month during a period of 36 months.

In the first business, we hit the glass wall at 120k per month for various reasons. Indeed, there are multiple factors in the growth of any business. Still, for a small business, it comes down to the essentials: not the least of which is your cash-flow pipeline (billing, collections), the ability to penetrate the marketplace to secure new clients, and the ability to satisfy those clients with a job well done.

When I launched the first business, there were three of us: me, my 16-year-old brother-in-law, and my 18-year-old younger brother, all working within a single 13 x 13 office. As the business revenue grew, so did the business; we expanded the staff, the office size, the fleet of cars, and office toys. Without any formal business background, I never relied on business theory. Partly because I didn’t know what those theories were, I was all about getting stuff done; by force of will, I went out and secured new clients, doing whatever was necessary to service them, and juggling cash flow. It seemed relatively easy at the time until we hit the glass ceiling.

Looking back with the clarity that only time can provide, I now realize that what I really had back then wasn’t a company at all—it was a solopreneurship powered by me alone. A group of employees carried out a series of tasks and followed protocols I had developed, but they all reported having trouble with it all.

Building A Business Beyond the Glass Ceiling

In today’s competitive marketplace, a company is only a company when it can keep working efficiently without its founder. I suggest [in the Small Business Enterprise article] that to grow beyond the glass ceiling of solopreneurship, an owner may have to reconfigure their entire company structure. This means management, protocols, collaborations, and systems — especially in our new automated world.

When I launched my second logistics company in the 1990s, it was then that I started to recognize that it wasn’t just internal systems that required protocols. Still, for those who build their business in collaboration with others, it is just as essential to have a business-wide and systematic protocol in place as well.

In today’s technologically driven world, which produces new information and techniques at the speed of thought—something I outline and identify in the article Get Stuff Done—a company can only grow with an effective, systematic process and a motivated, self-learning, and proactive team.

If in fact, the marketplace that your service/product serves will support your growth, it requires the individuals of the company to be at the forefront of their specific discipline, and then share that knowledge across the enterprise — to form an effective unit that can adjust accordingly to the changes in the marketplace.

This shared knowledge, along with systematic protocols, the company vision, mission statement, and philosophy, all become transparent, allowing the team to contribute to the company’s effectiveness and, by default, make them part of the guiding committee as well.

You can read the version I wrote for Entrepreneur Magazine HERE

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