5 Steps Singapore TechCEOs Should Take to Scale Business
Given it’s strategic advantage of location, Gov support, eco-systems and access to technology – why do TechCEOs in Singapore struggle to expand their business?
Here is a clue. It has nothing to do with what you are doing right now.
We find a lot of Singapore TechCEOs get stuck at $3-$4 million revenue mark. They linger there for a very long time. It has everything do with NOT having a clear revenue strategy and framework to process information and take decisions.
We have come across many Singapore mid sized tech firms who demonstrate excellent delivery, have an impressive customer retention rate, and has been in business for over 4 to 7 years. At the same time, when it comes to growing revenues consistently, TechCEOs struggle and always at logger head with marketing and sales teams causing discord and missed revenue goals.
Every tech firm needs a foundation to build on, figurative “pillars” that hold up the rest of the business and help you grow. By remembering your roots, though, it’s always easier to cut through those shiny distractions and keep your growth goals in mind.
Here we’ve listed the five pillars that every TechCEO should have in place in order to facilitate growth in your tech firm:
Challenge #1 – Understanding who you are and why you matter?
What are the reasons you started your tech business?
You obviously wanted to seize the opportunity that fast changing tech landscape has provided, but passion is going to be an integral part of maintaining your drive to succeed. Once you start asking yourself, “Why am I even doing this?” you’ve already lost the battle.
Your mission and core values are going to serve as the backdrop to any product development, sales or marketing initiative you will undertake. While tech landscape around you changes fast, you need to be focussed on why you matter to your client and why do you exist.
Communicating your value as a tech firms means being able to build one thing above all else with clients: trust.
If you can empathise with your prospects and show that you have good and true intentions in terms of helping them with their cases, signing them on as a client will be that much easier.
Draw up a mission statement that clearly states, in 100 words or less, why your tech firm exists. Consider what your goals are, what you want any associates or other team members to achieve, and what your clients’ motivations should be when they come to work with you.
Challenge #2 – Lack of clarity in scaling your business
It does not matter if you are a 20 person or 200 person tech shop. Having a clear strategy backed by an execution plan and focussing your activities in the right direction will yield results. This is even more important if you are in a market expansion mode.
Here is a sample revenue strategy and execution we put together for one of the mid sized tech firms that wanted to 2X revenue within next 12 months.
Do you have a clear strategy that everybody in your selling and marketing team understands?
Challenge #3 – Lack of systems and processes that allow you to scale
Most of the small and mid sized tech companies are relatively disorganised and chaotic. Sales initiatives are adhoc, there are no regular cadence, processes lack KPIs, meetings run long with no discernible purpose and no clear action steps.
Initiatives are loosely organised, following processes that are made up as they go.
Everybody’s winging it. Nothing wrong but this is just not scalable and repeatable.
This presents a tremendous opportunity for someone who understands the power of frameworks.
Framework are able to bring clarity to situations. Good frameworks focus everyone’s thinking, allowing the team to drown out the noise and hone in on the questions that really matter. Frameworks can clear logjams and facilitate faster solutions. There are rarely perfect answers in business, and the ability to make faster decisions can often mean the difference between success and failure.
For example, when you use TechCelerate, Our Revenue Acceleration Framework you exactly know what you have to measure, what process you have to run, who should run it and what can you expect.
Are you currently using a framework to accelerate revenue growth?
Challenge #4 – Lack of team support
It is common to see TechCEOs of firms not making full use of their teams.
The right way is to delegate. The wrong way is to abdicate.
If you’ve got chronic pop-ins, and fear about the quality of work done by your staff stresses you out, it’s because you’ve abdicated. That means you assigned a task to someone, but you didn’t make the success criteria, timeline and process crystal clear.
For example, you didn’t set ground rules for when to involve you and how to involve you. You didn’t eliminate the need to ask the same question twice. But most TechCEOs make the mistake of confusing “I have to get the sale work done” with “I have to do all of the work.”
That’s a fundamental mistake.
The most important thing is that the work gets done right, not that the work gets done by you. In fact, it’s best if the work isn’t done by your because it gives you more time to serve more clients.
As part of TechCelerate we teach our clients a framework called “Delegation Liberation” It has four steps:
Decide what’s exactly you are delegating.
Determine what successful initiative or project look like.
Enumerate success criteria.
Implement and iterate.
This whole process will be painful at first because you have to document everything. (Of course, we at Agility nexus have a few tricks up our sleeve for solving that problem. But I can’t give away all our secrets, can I?)
Challenge #5 – Making continuous investments
Sales & Marketing for tech firms. Business growth. Expansion of your organization. We’re talking about building up or out, here, people.
The idea of growth in almost every case requires an investment of some sort. You water a plant before it’s able to bear fruit. In order to get your work done and please your clients, you need to have access to the necessary resources.
In the case of your tech business, you can contribute to its growth by reinforcing weak areas in the organisational structure. Here are some suggestions to get started:
Are you the single decision taker at your firm? Try segmenting and delegating decision making process so you at least have the option to delegate during busy periods.
Do you have team members, but there are bottlenecks to their productivity? Enable them with the right software, or with new procedural guidelines.
Has the influx of prospects slowed down recently? Dedicate blocks of time to develop messaging, ask for referrals, reach out via social, or otherwise market your tech firm.
By establishing and regularly revisiting these pillars, you’re able to maintain the integrity of whatever marketing plan you choose to follow.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways I can help you grow your tech business :
1. Grab a free copy of useful stuff that can help you grow your tech business. More in our blog.
4 Ways to Position Your Tech Business to Attract More Clients Click here.
3 Mistakes to Avoid In Your Tech Business To Grow Revenue Click here.
2. Schedule a 15 Minute assessment call with us – Click here.
We have worked with a bunch of tech companies and have offered them systems, strategies and coaching to attract and convert clients. We help you install sales and marketing systems that automate stuff and help flood leads and drive higher revenues and margins. Talk to us.
3. Join our TechCelerate Implementation Program and be a Case Study
I’m putting together a new coaching case study group at Techcelerate this month… stay tuned for details. If you’d like to work with us on your client-getting and scale plans… just reply to this message and put “Case Study” in the subject line.
Life is short. Take action now and grow. Best Wishes.
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