Scaling Up Quotes

“Another central element is the list of candidate competencies that align with your culture and strategy. As experienced leaders discover, it’s more important to hire for this kind of fit than for specific skills, so long as a person has the capacity to learn and grow (though it’s best if you can find someone who’s a match in both cultural values and skill set).”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“It’s between $1 million and $10 million that the team needs to focus on cash. Growth sucks cash, and since this is the first time the company will make a tenfold jump in size, the demands for cash will soar. In addition, at this stage of organizational development, the company is still trying to figure out its unique position in the marketplace, and these experiments (or mistakes) can be costly. This is when the cash model of the business needs to be worked out (e.g., “How is the business model going to generate sufficient cash for the company to keep growing?”).”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Valleys of Death” — those points in the company’s growth where you’re bigger, but not quite big enough to have the next level of talent and systems needed to scale the venture.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“The goal is to reverse the first law of entrepreneurial gravity and develop a viable business model in which the faster you grow, the more cash you generate — through larger deposits, faster collections, shorter sales and delivery cycles, etc. Then you’ve built a company that can self-fund its own growth.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. — R. Buckminster Fuller”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Growth sucks cash. This is the first law of entrepreneurial gravity. And nothing ages a CEO and his or her team faster than being short of cash. In fact, Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, in their best-selling book Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, found that successful companies held three to 10 times more cash assets than average for their industries, and they did so from the time they started. (We highly recommend that you read this book, Collins’ first that directly addresses growth firms.)”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You, by Rosanne Badowski. She is Jack Welch’s longstanding executive assistant and has written a book that we highly recommend all executive assistants read.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting Rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“You can get by with decent People, Strategy, and Execution, but not a day without Cash. Cash becomes even more critical as the business scales up, since “growth sucks cash.” The key is innovating ways to generate sufficient profit and cash flow internally, so you don’t have to turn to banks (or sharks!) to fuel your growth.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“To move faster, pulse faster.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“That’s why it is good to remind ourselves that in business and in life, the journey, not the destination, is the reward.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Bobby Fischer, the great chess champion, once said, “Winning in this game is all a matter of understanding how to capitalize on the strengths of each piece and timing their moves just right.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Charles Darwin found that survival is determined by the ability to adapt to circumstances.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“In the end, what matters most in life are the depth of your relationships with friends and family; and the sheer number of people you’ve helped along the way. These represent true measures of wealth.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Goals without routines are wishes; routines without goals are aimless.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“David Meerman Scott says, “You are what you publish.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Routine sets you free”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Amazon has adopted something similar for fulfillment-center workers called Pay to Quit. In an employee’s first year of work, the offer is $2,000. It goes up by $1,000 every year after that until it hits $5,000. The idea, writes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his 2014 letter to shareholders, is “to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“To get to 10 employees, founders must delegate activities in which they are weak. To get to 50 employees, they have to delegate functions in which they are strong!”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“More companies die from indigestion than starvation.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“You don’t have a real strategy if it doesn’t pass two tests: First, what you’re planning to do really matters to enough customers; and second, it differentiates you from your competition.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

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― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“An A Player, by the Smarts’ definition, is someone in the top 10% of the available talent pool who is willing to accept your specific offer. Read that definition again. They are not implying that you have to pay beyond what your business model can sustain. They do mean that you need to attract the largest and most capable talent pool excited about the job and willing to accept your compensation package”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Largely ignored, by gurus and governments, are the older, high-impact growth firms. Though they generate almost all of the innovation and job growth in economies, there are not enough of them to garner the favorable attention of politicians or book publishers. For more on this topic, read Verne’s interview in Business Review Europe titled “Give the Gazelles a Break”.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“There are roughly 28 million firms in the US, of which only 4% ever reach more than $1 million in revenue. Of those firms, only about one out of 10, or 0.4% of all companies, ever make it to $10 million in revenue, and only 17,000 companies surpass $50 million. Finishing out the list, the top 2,500 firms in the US are larger than $500 million, and the top 500 public and private firms exceed $5 billion. Data indicate that there are similar ratios in other countries.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“A Core Competency has three attributes, according to Prahalad and Hamel: 1. It is not easy for competitors to imitate. 2. It can be reused widely for many products and markets. 3. It must contribute to the benefits the end customer experiences and the value of the product or service to customers.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“In setting Strategy, follow the definition from the great business strategist Gary Hamel. You don’t have a real strategy if it doesn’t pass two tests: First, what you’re planning to do really matters to enough customers; and second, it differentiates you from your competition.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“In general, looking forward is great management; looking backward is micromanagement.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Senior leaders need to be in the market 80% of the week, either figuratively or literally.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't

“Individuals or organizations with too many priorities have no priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of significance.”
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't