Part 2: Managing the Growing Pains of Adolescent Companies

Taking your company from toddlerhood to teenager is all about giving it lots of oxygen and room to grow.

In my last blog, I referred to Ishak Calderon Adizes’ belief that companies, like people, move through a series of developmental stages — childhood, adolescence, maturity — that present unique challenges to the organization. The challenges are hard but natural parts in the growth of any company and meeting them head on is critical to healthy advancement to the next stage.

Companies that reach maturity either thrive as they reach their “prime,” marked by a balance of flexibility and innovation tempered by control, or shed their youthful qualities and ossify into a bureaucracy and wilt away.

So, what can make a successful, and unsuccessful, transition from adolescence to prime? Here’s my experience.

What got you here won’t get you where you’re going

In 2011, I took the helm of a company that had been entrepreneurially run by an owner/ president for 23 years. This represented the company’s childhood, or what Adizes calls the “Go-Go” period. What the company lacked in product portfolio, resources, and systems needed to grow beyond the entrepreneurial stage, it more than made up for in a passionate team who loved their unique product and boasted a growing market share of the expanding independent natural retail market.

Over the next seven and a half years, we raised the company from an active child to a precocious teenager by focusing on the following priorities. First, we grew our team, hiring senior marketing, operations, and sales leadership. These hires enabled us to scale up our operations and systems, which in turn led to our tripling revenues.

In the relative blink of an eye, we pivoted strategically from a focus on independent retailers, to an omnichannel model, while continuing to serve our retail partners.

At the same time, we doubled down on culture, including a movement to greater transparency, a business accelerator, the adoption of conscious leadership for professional development, and successful application to become a Certified B Corporation.

In other words, we reached the point where we looked and acted exactly like a company bursting with late adolescent creativity and seriousness of purpose.

Pump in the oxygen

I’ve been using a lot of business speak, so I want to bring it home with a personal example. This is very similar to my daughter, a senior in high school who, with college applications, has had to start integrating her life experiences into a plan of action. My wife and I are very fortunate to have been able to help fuel her curiosity about food systems and biology by funding her visit to a regenerative farm in Costa Rica. Her experience there formed the basis for her college essay devoted to the topic “most influential non-classroom learning experience.”

In her essay, she writes of being “inspired by the passion the Costa Ricans have for their homeland” and that she was “surprised” to learn the country plans to become “the world’s first carbon-neutral country by 2021.” Later in her essay, she connects the dots between her upbringing and this experience:

“From an early age, the food on my plate and the way I fuel my body has played a significant role in my daily life and driven my academic interests. I am grateful that my parents taught me to value healthy food and to understand the importance of eating well. This inspired me to appreciate fresh, organic produce and to appreciate where it is from and how it is grown….My early experiences with food followed by my trip to Costa Rica has heightened my passion for helping people through food and the environment and has me excited about my pursuit of an Environmental and Natural Resources degree.”

Anybody who’s raised teenagers knows you’ve got to pump in the oxygen in terms of giving them room to try things, fail, celebrate, and explore different avenues. In the case of managing a business, this often translates into hiring a few more people than you need, investing in a new marketing or packaging approach to see what will stick, or taking a risk with a new channel, even though you might upset current customers.

Without oxygen the learning won’t occur — without the learning, it’s impossible to pursue your passion as you mature. It’s a balancing act to be sure, and one Adizes admits doesn’t always succeed. “To succeed in Adolescence, companies must improve their controls,” Adizes writes. “The challenge is to implement these controls in a way that does not smother the entrepreneurial spirit. This is a delicate balancing act because too much flexibility will also prevent the Adolescent company from reaching Prime.”

My daughter is in the middle of this balancing act, and we’re giving her room to breathe and grow. As for my previous company, in 2014 we became a wholly owned subsidiary of a much larger, acquiring company. For several years, the two entities operated relatively separately. Then, in 2017 with a new CEO aboard, the acquiring company turned its attention to us.

The result was that the smaller firm was asked to begin to operate more like a larger, more mature company. Was it ready to grow up? That question is debatable; however, what seems clear to me is that maturing from adolescence to adulthood isn’t good or bad — it just is. But it can be accomplished better or worse, and that’s the topic of my next post.

Sincerely,

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!