When I was in high school, I played basketball. Even at that level, we understood something: You have to build your bench before you need it.

Game day is the wrong time to start recruiting for a new center after your starter fouls out.

Even though this seems so obvious it hardly needs to be said, many growing businesses fail to do this.

They push for growth without planning for the additional load on the team.

One of the most frequent reasons growing businesses stall out is not having the leaders and skilled workers they need when they are needed. Too little, too late doesn’t translate well anywhere.

Business isn’t an exception.

Know what game you are trying to win

Are you happy to just play ball on the weekends? Or do you want to win a championship?

Both are legitimate options. But they require different kinds of players, different levels of commitment, skill, and preparation.

The same is true in your business.

Before you know what kind of bench you need, you need to know what kind of future you are preparing for. What do you hope to accomplish in three to five years?

Define that, even if it is just a best-guess exercise.

What strategic planning isn’t?

Here’s how to know what you need to win

What number best represents growth or the goals you want to hit? For most businesses, this is revenue. For others, it might be locations or number of customers served. For this illustration, I’ll use revenue.

With that number in mind, determine what it actually represents. How many customers, projects, or widgets sold does that mean? What or who will be needed to sell, build, provide, administrate, and manage all of this?

Map out the ideal organizational structure that can easily carry that growth. What new leadership or management will be needed? What new or additional skills or capacities might be needed?

What needs to mature, evolve, or be supported? Growth often drives a need to mature tactics or strategy. Leadership and management are often constraints. Financial management is a common weak point. So is operational capacity to keep up with sales. Administrative needs often become more sophisticated and involved.

For all management and technical positions, what will their core responsibilities and capabilities be? Importantly, define this without names. Just think about the needs of the organization and how each role will contribute to success.

Which current roles will grow or change their responsibilities? As organizations grow, some roles multiply their responsibilities. This means expectations for that role will change.

Important: Do this without names. Design the ideal organization. Decide who fits where later. This helps you avoid building around people who aren’t growing with the organization.

That isn’t a problem. But it needs to be understood in advance.

I have a free template for this as part of my Succession360™ Toolkit. Look for the Strategic Staffing Guide. Download that here.

Start filling your bench early enough to be ready

Don’t wait until you need a position filled to begin looking for someone. Anticipate when you’ll need them and work backward:

• How long does it take to get a good hire up to speed? Six months?
• How long does it take to onboard a good hire? One month?
• How long does it take for someone to start once they’ve accepted the position? Two weeks to one month?
• How long does it usually take to recruit, filter, and hire someone? Three months?

In that example, you should begin looking for this person no later than eleven months before you need them up to full speed.

Use the same exercise if you are training from within.

For your key leadership and technical positions, hire or promote for solid matches only. Think of these people as the primary structural columns that you’ll build on. They need to be reliable enough that you aren’t constantly compensating for them.

The same exercise applies to systems

In basketball, you don’t introduce new plays on game day.

But sometimes we try to do this in business.

Perhaps growth doesn’t only require new people or positions. Perhaps you have to upgrade your accounting system, implement a new AI integration, or acquire and move buildings.

Leaders frequently make the mistake of letting those changes have a life and timeline of their own, independent of the larger strategy and story of the organization.

As a result, these upgrades are massively disruptive. This causes them to either be delayed too long or shoehorned in on top of other critical tasks, displacing the energy and bandwidth necessary to run the organization well.

Instead, if you know that you plan on, say, doubling your revenue in three years, anticipate the systems or facilities you’ll likely need. Determine how long it will take to find them, transition to them, and get fully up to speed.

Then decide how much time it will take, or what it will take, to make this as smooth and undisruptive as possible.

Conclusion

Don’t only think about how you’ll grow. Everybody thinks about that.

Think about the people, structure, systems, and capacity you’ll need to support growth. This is a competitive advantage. Chances are low that your competition is preparing in advance.

Chances are high they’ll wish they had.

Take good care,
Christian

Click here for a free copy of my Strategic Staffing guide.