Stage 5: The End Game

As in chess, your final moves are as crucial as the first—perhaps even more so, since your objective is victory and not just hanging on. And like chess, you won’t win unless you figure out your strategy long before you execute it. If you can, you’ll achieve what you foresaw, be it a handover to a new generation or a sale that sets you up for a golden retirement.
Characteristics:
- All of the company’s functions, including strategy, are now delegated.
- Planning begins back in Stage 3, when you’ve decided you want to move out of that stage’s cruising speed and go for expansion and/or succession.
- Your focus tends to revolve around three questions: whether the company will continue; how you’ll retire; and how you should measure ultimate success.
- It typically takes years to develop a Stage 5 company—and you can’t skip Stage 4, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Take Note: One of your key questions here is who will succeed you in running the business. If it’s one of your children, do they have what it takes? Keep in mind that if you were a Stage 3 success when they joined, they won’t have the school of hard knocks experience you endured. They’ll be missing an organic understanding of why the company works. That isn’t necessarily a death knell, but it will require that you work extra hard to put systems in place. Those systems are the key to getting your company to this level.
No matter what innovations come to the remodeling industry, these five big-picture stages are timeless and predictable. Your company will follow these if you don’t realize it—but like most things in business, you’ll be most successful if you do so deliberately.
So how to get from Stage 1 to Stage 5? First, identify where you are, and where you want to be. Then, take a closer look at the seven functions mentioned at the beginning of the article: Where do you need to focus your attention first to move forward? This approach will help you minimize discomfort as you forge your path through the predictable stages of growth—and keep you moving forward with purpose.