7 Keys to Smart Business Growth

ARLIN SORENSEN
Like IBM or Kleenex, Arlin has become his own brand. Everyone, it seems, knows Arlin. As the CEO of Heartland Technology Solutions, a managed services and IT consulting firm in Harlan, Iowa, Arlin has successfully grown his business into an 80-plus-employee company that spans several states. But Arlin will be the first to tell you that growth didn’t come easy, and offers his advice for successfully expanding your business, learned through experience over some 20 years.

ALEX ZIOGAS
Likewise, Alex has found growing his business to be somewhat painful, at least in the beginning when good advice like Arlin’s was hard to find. Alex, who is president of Chicago-based AZ Business Solutions (AZBS) Inc., started his IT services company in 1993 as a sole proprietor and currently has 12 employees. He also offers his perspective on smart business growth, but from the vantage point of someone who is on the path but has not yet reached his ultimate destination.

1. The Growth Mindset

Arlin: The number one key to growth is the attitude a partner takes toward growth. There are too many VARs who think because they got up and opened the doors today that tomorrow their companies will be bigger. It doesn’t happen like that. People have to choose to grow.

Alex: Everybody says they want to grow, but growth is just a buzzword. They simply want to make more money. Growth means having a larger company, a broader span of clients, more service offerings, and geographic reach.

Arlin: That’s exactly right. Some partners think that growth is adding a few more customers or having more dollars at the end of the year. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Only 15 to 25 percent of VARs understand what it means to grow, and 10 percent or less are effectively growing. It’s easy to add a few customers and take care of them with your current skill set. But when you add employees and new markets, you need business skills.

2. Getting It All Started

Alex: The first thing you need is a strategic objective. Define what you mean by growth. Then create the business plan or road map for where you want to be one year, three years, or five years down the line

Arlin: It’s critical that VARs know their MVV—mission, vision, and values. That’s the foundation that sits under the growth objective Alex mentions. You need clarity: This is who we are, this is what we do, and this is how we do it. It also has to be documented so you can use it to teach people, because they don’t get it the first time, or even the second time.

Alex: The CEO or visionary has to create the game and the rules. In my company, for example, one of our rules is that we acknowledge each call within one hour. So we not only have to define where we’re going, but how people will work when they join our team.

Arlin: Also determine not just how you will do business every day, but what that’s going to yield at the end of the year. You have to plan for profit. It doesn’t accidentally happen. You have to understand what your target is and what end result is acceptable.

3. Business Metrics and Hiring

Alex: It’s not enough to hand someone a job description. You have to articulate the milestones or KPIs [key performance indicators] for your business. Let’s say a network engineer is responsible for bringing in 1,600 billable hours every year. You don’t wait until September and hope that the engineer makes 1,600 hours—every month and every quarter you need to review where they are in relation to their target. These are milestones or rules that everyone in your company has to know.

Arlin: We call them commitments. I want my team to know what success is in my eyes for their position. That’s really important. We now have an onramp document, which is a six-week training program for every new employee—it’s an effort to transfer our culture and processes. Part of the training is sitting with me for 45 minutes to learn the history of HTS and why we do what we do. When you first start hiring people you don’t think about that—you think that because you see these people every day that they should just “get it.”

You have to be willing to fail in hiring. You also have to be willing to accept the fact that the people you hire are not going to work for you for the rest of their lives. People don’t stay in their jobs for 30 years like they used to. You need the mindset of a businessperson rather than an engineer or a salesperson.