An entrepreneurs' School of Hard Knocks

So just how necessary is an MBA or similar degree to run a business today? Is an advanced degree that much more valuable as opposed to what is learned from the success and failures in the business world?

Five years ago, we experienced a business divorce and since then we have systematically tackled some of the biggest challenges that businesses face. To rebuild, we developed our People+People Plan, a methodology we use to build an organization that attracts, engages, and retains both clients and talent to accelerate growth. We did it by tapping into advice from "the company we keep" - our network of friends and business mentors. Here are the steps we took the past five years to get our "advanced degree"

Lesson 1: HR leadership and culture alignment

The first thing we did was to establish our mission, vision, values, and purpose which set our foundation and has remained our guiding force. In 2019, we began the fifth year of our ten-year vision. To ensure we achieve our goals for the next five years, we engaged the entire team to write department and individual visions that would ladder up to our corporate goals.

Having values is one thing, living them is another. Our business doubled over the past five years and our culture became a bit diluted. We now put them front and center in everything we do so we are attracting a culture fit in new hires and new clients. We use our values in hiring to assess candidates and, through the recognition and review process, to reinforce their importance.

Lesson 2: Financial transparency and literacy

"Profit Provides" is a phrase we live by. It supports our ability to sustain as a business and allows us to invest in the growth of our people and passion for giving back to the community. We self-implemented a version of Open-Book Management (OBM) in our first year of business. With fast growth, we continued to be open book, but we lacked the financial literacy of the team to fully benefit. We knew we needed to elevate our game.

In 2018, we began using The Great Game of Business (GGOB) methodology and business operating system. The difference from Open Book and GGOB is the Financial Literacy training and individual ownership. The GGOB philosophy is people support what they help create. Each member of our team owns an expense line item on the income statement and can also deep dive into revenue with ownership of sales forecast and billings. It empowers everyone to have a stake in the company's, and their own, financial success.

Lesson 3: Sales and marketing alignment

You wouldn't think aligning sales and marketing would be a challenge for a marketing firm, would you? Well, the cobbler has no shoes analogy has never been truer for us. Although we had been producing and sharing meaty content, we had not had a true content marketing strategy that was filling a pipeline of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for sales.

We were also lacking the sales infrastructure to capture, qualify, and nurture the top of the funnel leads, thereby losing potential opportunities. Last year, we implemented an integrated marketing plan in which there was a theme, a content calendar with webinars, podcasts, blog articles, and PR that supports the theme, digital campaigns and social marketing to share all directed to landing pages that capture contact information. All leads, no matter the source, funnel into our CRM with criteria that scores each lead and sets a priority for follow up.

Lesson 4: Operations

In our experience, everything can be improved with tools, process, technology, and people. This year, our focus is finalizing our own agency playbook to create greater efficiency in our operations. The goal here is to examine the pillars of your business; finance, operations, HR, sales/marketing, and technology and prioritize the greatest gaps. We have developed our plan to be specific in outlining the tasks required along with the resources and estimated hours to accomplish to be able to set an achievable implementation time table. In the past, we erred in thinking we could do more than we could in any given year and the result was never finishing an objective.

Lesson 5: Digital Transformation

Often not made a priority, looking at your business technology stack can ultimately have the greatest impact on both the top and bottom line of your company. In each business pillar, there are opportunities to leverage technology for automation. While you might immediately think about automation in sales, marketing, and finance there are also affordable human resource platforms, that can improve the candidate management experience, employee engagement, and professional development. Beyond system selection, there is a chance to leverage the integration of these systems to get access to more profound business metrics.

Advice from the front line

Whether you are being educated in an MBA program or the school of hard knocks business success is defined by how strong your own People+People Plan is. You need to be able to attract, engage, and retain both clients and talent to survive and thrive.

Most often we are working in rather than on our businesses. My advice is to focus on what is your greatest challenge. Engage your team in the planning so they are part of the solution. Lastly, leverage outside sources to fill the gaps which are not your expertise.

To quote German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" I would also add profitable and scalable.

• Julie Poulos is vice president of Red Caffeine in Lombard, a growth consultancy that uses strategy + branding + marketing + technology to solve the common challenges of brand awareness, lead generation, sales enablement, employer branding, and digital transformation.