Building the £10m micro-corporate – Step 1 of 7

Step 1 – You cannot do it all by yourself Working with clients who are on the pathway to £10m in private sales, there is one absolute given that cannot be avoided. All of the Principals I am working with so far have the strong desire to continue their clinical careers. As a consequence, there are simply are not enough hours in the day for you, the Principal, to get everything done. You need a full-time Managing Director for your fledgling micro-corporate. The MD will work with you to lead your management team. Your organisational structure will be as the graphic above shows. I am most often working with clients where the MD is the spouse of the Principal or, in one case, the son of the Principal, a qualified chartered accountant who has changed his career direction to become part of his father’s dental business. Perhaps there is a theme developing here, that family-run businesses are more predictable and easier to control? The alternative, I believe, is that you recruit an individual who you intend to mentor into the role of MD over the coming years. That way, they don’t arrive with preconceptions of how a business should run , with grand ideas about their own ability or with someone else’s bad habits. Getting the right leadership team in place is going to be mission critical going forward and that may well involve some advance funding before sales and profit follow. In business that is called a J-curve (going into debt in order to grow) and there will be a cash flow building exercise that you will need to complete to calculate your funding requirement. You will see that I have popped your business coach in there, advising the Board – that’s what I do.