- Date published
Strategic expansion powered by Elevate.
You’ve made it past startup and now you’re a big success. Congratulations! But as you scale from being a solopreneur to double digit employees and making more revenue, most CEOs find that business operations have to change.
To make time for administrative, managerial and visionary functions, most CEOs find themselves becoming more distant from the day-to-day operations. That’s where Elevate provides crucial support for scaling businesses. It’s a dual-pronged approach. Participants learn:
- Via guided virtual conversations with other Missouri CEOs.
- And by accessing a dedicated team of experts who identify areas for expansion while providing invaluable tools and research to spur growth.
Taking the keys
Nathan McCartney, manager of Arctic, recently completed the program, which is offered through Innovate SOMO, a Missouri SBDC program offered in partnership with the Edward Lowe Foundation. He had watched his dad build Arctic for 30 years and was faced with the opportunity to step into the leadership role.
“Taking on an executive role does have its pitfalls,” Nathan said. “You don’t get to see a lot of results of things quickly. It takes months to turn the ship.”
Not one to shy away from a challenge – he’s an Air Force veteran and entrepreneur four times over – he joined the family business, slowly added responsibilities and began looking for ways to grow and build efficiencies.
“Why would I spend 20 years trying to get to where he’s at now?” he thought. “It was like dad’s basically giving you keys to a sports car. It’s an established business with good cash flow and a good reputation.”
But his dad, who still works in the business on big projects and running calls, had no interest in expanding. Nathan knew that’s how he could put his own stamp on the business, even though it brought a unique set of obstacles, too.
The timing was right to explore growth strategies when he opened an efactory email one day. That’s how he connected with Lance Coffman about Elevate.
Finding huge opportunities
In Elevate, Arctic worked with a team of consultants to granularly pinpoint their ideal customers, and then access rich databases for prospecting customers.
They detailed their ideal customer’s:
- Title
- Location
- Company revenue
- Food service budget
- Culinary space
And the consultant team produced a huge list that Nathan expects would be valued at thousands of dollars. With this type of potential customer list, Nathan’s expecting to make headway toward his goal of balancing the scales of the two sides of Arctic – sales and service.
“One of the growth strategies we discussed was also to make our current customers more valuable,” Nathan said. “They already trust us, so now we need to make them more aware of the other side of our business.”
This is something he also discussed at the CEO roundtables.
Common ground. Shared experiences.
“There were a lot of good connections made during the roundtable,” Nathan said.
He met people in related industries and many who were not. He was pleasantly surprised, though, that they all had so much in common. And since the cohorts are curated to not include direct competitors, the participants could be open about their struggles and exchange tips.
“It’s lonely being a small business owner. You don’t want to talk to people in your industry about your problems, because they’re going to use that against you,” he explained.
Even those who care about you the most can rarely relate to the plights of business ownership.
“I’ve got a lot of friends that are doctors, lawyers and school teachers, but they don’t understand. So, it was very nice to spend time with people that shared struggles and were willing to bounce ideas off each other.”
