Every business goes through several stages on the path to long-term success. Each stage presents unique challenges for moving to the next level — together with pitfalls that lead to stagnation and/or failure.
The stages of success are: Courtship, Infancy, Go-Go, Adolescence, and Prime, described below. Stable appears successful but is actually the first step in the aging process leading towards organizational Death.
Mandelberg specializes in businesses moving from Go-Go through Adolescence into Prime.
Courtship
Everyone has good business ideas. Some of us try to implement them, and a small number of these new businesses succeed. Courtship is all about that first wacky, crazy, tempting idea and what happens when you decide to act on it. It’s about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Courtship has two keys to success. First, find people with knowledge and experience in the same field as your idea and validate it. Look for competitors, look for others who have tried to do it before, and figure out if it’s something anyone would pay for. Remember, you are not your prospect!
Infancy
Once you have acted on your idea and actually have something to sell, the goal is finding customers and leveraging early success to expand your market.
Look for signs of why people are buying from you, and what the experience is like for them. Your customers are much more creative about why they buy your stuff and how they use it to create value than you can ever be. Listen and learn from your customers. They will help you see the rainbow leading to your pot of gold.
Go-Go
If you’ve done your job well in the first two stages, you will begin to feel successful and your sales will grow with or without your help. That is one of the most desirable aspects of being in Go-Go, and one of the most poisonous as well.
Be cautious: Don’t believe the stories you hear and read about yourself. If you do, you will become sloppy and wasteful. With the success that comes with Go-Go, those weaknesses are hard to recognize. Don’t fall into the Go-Go trap and kill your idea before it gets into a more stable stage. Caution and attention to detail are critical at this time.
Adolescence
If you’ve made it to Adolescence, you’re part of a very special group of people. Putting in systems and creating controls may not feel good to you or your employees, but they are the critical component you must insist upon if you want to keep moving forward toward prime. Adolescence is the phase when most entrepreneurs fail, when the freedom and flexibility that drew them to business gets locked out by the rules. The freedom to bob and weave becomes a liability and must be contained.
At this stage, you must learn that more is no longer better. Quite the opposite: Better becomes more. If you can sink your teeth into that strategy and act on it, you are destined for great things.
Prime
“Prime is the optimal position on the lifecycle, where the organization finally achieves a balance between control and flexibility. Prime is actually not a single point on the lifecycle curve. Instead, it is best represented by a segment of the curve that includes both growing and aging conditions. Sometimes the Prime organization is more flexible than controllable, and sometimes it’s not flexible enough.”
Excerpted from Dr. Ichak Adizes’ website.
Stable
“Stable is positioned at the top of the Lifecycle curve, but it is not the place to be. Companies that are in the Stable phase have started to lose their vitality and are aging. When an organization first begins to age, the symptoms won’t show up on its financial reports. In fact, the opposite is true. Stable companies are often cash rich and have strong financial statements.”
Excerpted from Dr. Ichak Adizes’ website.
About Dr. Ichak Adizes
Dr. Ichak Adizes is one of the world’s leading experts on improving the performance of business and government organizations by making fundamental changes without the destructive conflict that plague many major change efforts. Since 1973 he has been involved with companies that range from the Global 100 to start-ups in more than 40 countries serving many different industries. He has also consulted to several heads of state. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into 22 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Inc. Magazine, Financial Times and the New York Times. Dr. Adizes is the Founder and Professional Director of the Adizes Institute.
