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Beneath the glossy veneer of financial growth there lies a hurdle. Just how do you adapt your business to develop and subsequently cope with the new demands that are being placed upon it?
Over the past few years, translation company Prestige Network have experienced growth beyond their wildest expectations. In the 2007/08 financial year, their levels were up an incredible 40%. They began to find, however, that the transition period between the kind of company they were, and the company they were becoming presented them with a real challenge. They found, as demand for their services increased, that their resources needed to undergo radical restructuring to adapt with the swift change.
The South East England Development Agency is a Government funded organisation dedicated to optimising the performance of businesses operating within the South East region. They operate to ensure that businesses in the region have the ability to compete effectively at the levels they operate at, that their staff are trained to high standards and that businesses have a beneficial, rather than superficial, effect on the local community.
David Pollard, a mentor from SEEDA, identified Prestige Network as one of only two companies in the South East experiencing this kind of major expansion. David visited them at their headquarters in Thatcham, Reading to see how they could reap the maximum rewards from their new found popularity and to help them manage the company in a way that would encourage similar trends in the future.
He comments, “Prestige have a small full-time staff base, and an enormous number of self-employed subcontractors…It’s a major problem to manage this resource as the company grows…we could see that one of the things Prestige needed to do was to build a business structure that enabled them to grow significantly – [in terms of] management, strategy and infrastructure.”
A leadership development advisor was assigned to work with the team of directors at Prestige Network. Over a 5 day programme they worked with the company on developing leadership skills and strategies that would resolve the issues that were potentially hindering further growth.
The suggestions and implementations now in place as a direct result of SEEDA’s involvement, such as the inclusion of a middle management tier, have proved to be massively beneficial to the company.
Shohreh Fleming, CEO of Prestige Network agrees, “When you are involved in small things you cannot think about long term issues. Now we have more thinking time – to spend on bigger issues – because we know the management team will take care of the rest.”
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