Two fundamental steps for keeping your company agile
There comes a point in every successful company’s business lifecycle when accelerated growth generates increased complexity. While a certain amount of the latter is to be expected, too much can impede a business’s ability to advance toward long-term objectives. This makes reducing complexity a key component of scaling your company without losing the creativity, agility, and enthusiasm that made it successful in the first place.
It’s helpful to view complexity through two lenses: operational and financial. The components often intersect, and addressing both is central to building a strategy that minimizes complexity across the organization.
When your company is moving from the growth to the established stage, relying exclusively on a vertical management structure with one person at the top responding to a steady stream of changes can leave your organization too brittle and rigid to deal with increasing complexity. Avoiding this scenario may mean injecting more flexibility into your processes.
“To boost adaptability, you want to shorten your management process without flattening it, and the key to that is expanding the authority to make decisions horizontally in a way that increases agency and innovation throughout your entire team,” says Scott Cathcart, Florida Regional President at Truist.
To boost adaptability, you want to shorten your management process without flattening it, and the key to that is expanding the authority to make decisions horizontally.
- Scott Cathcart, Florida Regional President at Truist
These steps can help lay the groundwork for that change.
Regardless of your industry, innovations in technology can help minimize complexity—especially when it comes to financial processes.
“Companywide systems that eliminate physical inputs in tasks like invoicing, payroll, and data entry help simplify your internal processes even as your staff and client roster expand,” says Cathcart.
Implementing automated payments and receivables, for example, can help reduce paperwork, mitigate fraud risk, minimize human error, and better predict cash flow through real-time financial insights.
“When a company is empowered with better data, they can apply payments with pinpoint accuracy and speed up realization on incoming payments,” says Cathcart. “That can positively impact the cash conversion cycle, which creates free cash flow, which goes straight to the bottom line.”
Your Truist relationship manager can help you understand the best uses of automation in your financial processes.
With a more agile management process and digital payment solutions in place, you’re positioned to begin drawing up other customized strategies to reduce inefficiencies and clear bureaucratic hurdles. While the specific measures organizations use to streamline operations and shrink complexity vary, these tactics can aid almost every firm.
Upskill your employees. Escalating and resolving complex issues quickly is central to reducing complexity. Ensure your team members are trained on an ongoing basis with the skills and tools needed to identify problems and test and apply solutions that work.
Consider spinoffs and subsidiaries. Spinoff companies allow you to further horizontally extend your command structure by grouping teams and functions into a subsidiary with its own executive. That can help your team more easily coordinate its management efforts.
Schedule regular policy reviews and updates. Another term for adjusting your management approach to deal with increasing complexity is “creating a change program.” At the heart of that term is the idea that the customized management framework you’ll implement for dealing with change needs to be subject to change as well.
Applied to fit the overall context of your company, each of these steps is a procedural tool that helps build the autonomy, speed, and efficiency of your teams. They also increase the flexibility with which you can coordinate objectives companywide and decrease complexity across departments.
“You may have a management structure and legacy systems that make these changes easy, or ones that require a bit more effort and guidance to calibrate,” says Cathcart. “But if you’re attempting to minimize complexity in the face of accelerated growth, working with professionals is going to help avoid the sort of excessive restructuring that can be its own source of complexity. Our advisors and strategists can help give you the coordination and clarity to ensure that whatever adjustments you implement fortify your ability to achieve long-term goals.”
Talk to your Truist relationship manager about strategies to help you increase efficiencies while growing your company.
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