I am on the Boards of 4 of my clients, and I had 2 Board meetings in the last several weeks.  There were common themes in both that you’d expect – cash flow management, generating sales, developing new markets.But the topic that got the most attention…Talent management.That&r... [More]

I’m visiting family in Connecticut, and spent last evening walking around the grounds of the old Collins Company Axe Factory, which in its day produced 1300 products, was a major supplier to the California Gold Rush, and was the site of the invention of die casting (see its history here and he... [More]

In my last post, I talked about what shows up when a Stage 2 business looks at itself in the mirror.  Well, Stage 2 CEOs, let’s take a look at you… One of the great things about being a Stage 2 CEO is that your organization is a mirror of you.  Of course, a Stage 1 company i... [More]

All the attention Crain's is giving Second Stage businesses has really amped up the volume of a question I've been answering for years, “What is a Stage 2 company?”Breaking Down Stage 2Generally, organizations that define this kind of thing have said Stage 2 includes companies with 10-10... [More]

Few books have captivated my elementary-school-age kids like Rebecca Rupp’s tales of the 3-headed dragon Fafnyr Goldenwings.  The quote above is from a story that Fafnyr tells about a boy who wants to be a knight fighting dragons…until he meets Fafnyr and learns that he’d rat... [More]

In a recent post, I described why a vision is important to Second Stage companies as they grow, and I said that effective visions have 2 characteristics – they create buy-in among the leadership team and staff, and they are specific.  Those 2 elements enable staff to use th... [More]

In my last post, I talked about the importance of using Return on Investment as the frame for Second Stage strategic decisions.  In this post, I want to explain the 3 most important ingredients for an effective ROI assessment.It’s not unusual for a decision-making framework to have 6-12 d... [More]

Crain’s Second Stage coverage has had some great articles in its 3 months, but far and away my favorite was Fruitful Discussions:  Mango Languages finds growth requires strategic spending plan.I want to highlight 2 quotes...“When you're first starting out, the real estate decision f... [More]

A company doesn’t survive in Stage 2 without having some form of regular and structured communication among its management team. In fact, a key shift for a leader going from First Stage to Second Stage is to change the company’s meetings from ad hoc assemblies to work over the gory deta... [More]

In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of agility, which I define as the flexibility of skills and mindset to address any situation with the most effective approach. In that post, I said: “A Stage 2 company needs to get more specialized and more generalized at the same t... [More]