Four months after we first met Charlie Lehmann, the young man tapped to run AutoData Systems when he was studying for the bar, and he was acting more like a CEO than an aspiring attorney fresh out of law school.
I call that the Upsize Growth Challenge effect, which I have witnessed and along with our experts helped to create each year for the past 11 years through this unique and transformative experience. We wrap up this year’s challenge with this blog post, and the October/November issue, where we detail our two winners’ final results. See you in the spring when nominations open and the contest will begin anew.
Presented by Winthrop & Weinstine, the Minneapolis law firm dedicated to supporting business owners, the Upsize Growth Challenge pairs winning CEOs with experts who meet and advise them during two workshops, separated by four months. Western Bank is a key partner as well, providing sharp financial and operations advice.
The mission is to focus that business owner’s efforts to reach an audacious and succinctly stated goal. It’s amazing what the companies accomplish in a very short time.
Lehmann, for example, came in with solid results under his belt. He had taken an “orphan” company that its parent had neglected for years, stopped the flow of red ink through painstaking line-by-line expense analysis, and turned it cash-flow positive in about 18 months.
But now he needed a strategy, and through encouragement from our experts, he came to see that all eyes were on him to come up with one. In the first meeting, he was considering a wide variety of possibilities but settling on none, and speaking vaguely of low-hanging fruit.
By the second, he had used his company’s own tool—surveys to gain customer feedback—and asked healthcare users, his No. 1 market, to tell him what they liked about the product, and what they’d like to see improve.
Most notably, he had identified healthcare as the best option to grow for the next several years, and was even nearly ready to tell his shareholders when he expected them to come forward with additional investment. In other words, he wasn’t the acolyte, eager to learn and grateful for the opportunity, that we’d met in the spring.
Bridget Manahan with Western Bank encourages Lehmann to keep it going. “It’s driven by you, the guy who is running the company,” she says. “But then it’s about bringing people in at a very high level, very early on, and keeping them engaged. And then you’ll be the one drilling down.”
Dean Willer with Winthrop & Weinstine seconds the point. “You have to drive your investors and board in the direction you want to go,” he says, adding with a laugh: “You have to tell them,” when they need to reinvest, “don’t ask them.”
Positive results tell the story best: Big goals, smart leaders and thoughtful advice are a winning combination to improve performance at any growing company.