A Perth entrepreneur has developed a strategy for sustainable SMEs to help deliver on their founders’ vision.
Bill Withers is on a mission. The IT entrepreneur believes small to medium enterprises have a special place in the economy but lack the appropriate systems to oversee their unique needs.
Having owned and operated a variety of IT-related businesses, Mr Withers is not alone in believing SMEs are the backbone of the nation, expending vast amounts of capital and employing more people than any other sector.
Where he is more of an outlier, though, is in having developed a systemic approach to lead these businesses.
Mr Withers said he learned the hard way, having founded and then become immersed in business ventures that were hard to control.
He decided to find a way of doing it differently.
Despite scouring the world for answers, Mr Withers said he struggled to find what he wanted.
Worse, he believes most professional advice and a great deal of business academia is focused on large enterprises, run by hired leaders on behalf of distant shareholders.
That way of doing business was at odds with what successful SMEs required, Mr Withers told Business News. So, he pieced it together himself and established a business offering solutions.
The latest step on that journey is a book to help others navigate the many challenges.
Succession Thinking is the result.
It provides the steps that a founder, or founding group of partners, need to take to build a sustainable enterprise that delivers on their vision for starting a business in first place.
Mr Withers’ journey to SME wisdom started as a service provider to big businesses in the mining sector: a global IT systems consultancy called Acquire Technology Solutions.
“I had this extraordinary laboratory to try and work out how you build an SME,” he said.
“And at the same time, I was deploying enterprise software into corporations. This is where everyone told me of their wonderment in leadership and wonderment in culture and wonderment in business building. This [corporations] is where you [were meant to] find it, right?’
“While I was building mine, I said, ‘Wow, I never built my business the way they’ve built it’.
“I got to this incredibly weird place where I go, ‘Wait on. We’ve got more organisational memory than them [sic], we’ve got a tighter culture, we know our processes and systems way better than them [sic]’.
“So, I couldn’t quite reconcile ... if that’s the place to learn, what’s going on here?
“In 2003, I was like anybody else. I thought we and BHP were the same thing.
“We’re both, you know, capitalistic businesses, both founded on the Corporations Act.
“So, I went on this journey, and it took me probably the next ten years, because we grew rapidly, globally.”
Mr Withers said his technology was installed on 500 mine sites around the world, with offices in Chile, Brazil, Canada, the UK, and Johannesburg, as well as Brisbane and Perth.
“While we were building this thing out, I’m just getting more and more fascinated by how you build an SME,” he said.
“In fact it became a passion. “I started to realise that all the MBAs and all the business education was oriented to the corporation.
“And I would interview people and [think], ‘Oh well, no, we’re not doing that, we’re not putting in HR’.
“I don’t want to be called a CEO. The culture needs to be owned by the owners of the business.
“The culture needs to be fundamental because I’m going to be here in fifteen years’ time and I can’t treat it like it’s some sort of just function of the business.”
Mr Withers said the success of Acquire gave him the latitude to go on a journey of discovery.
Among the benefits was a research budget of up to $500,000 a year for what he called “commercial research and development on how to build an SME”, especially one that gave the owners what they wanted out of it: usually more than annual profit growth and the pressure of delivering it year on year.
“This passion for succession thinking is driven by my own journey, because you get to a place where you’re really lonely,” Mr Withers said.
“You’re lonely because you don’t have many people to discuss your tensions and anxieties [with] and there are lots of them.
“Employees can’t really feel that anxiety in the same way.
“I was surrounded by wonderful people.
“I attracted incredibly smart, great people, and people who became great leaders and that sort of thing. But they can’t really identify with the entrepreneurial anxiety … and you don’t want to take it home.
“It’s a confluence of many different things, really. I’ve got a lot of empathy for anybody who deploys their own capital in service of getting after a vision.
“And I genuinely have become far more interested in the whole SME economy.
“Why is it that we aren’t cared for more?”
Mr Withers is adamant that succession thinking is not succession planning.
Instead, he said, it was about the owner(s) of a business getting out of it what they intended when they started.
Like many SME owners, Mr Withers said he found becoming immersed in the day-to-day decisions of running a business overwhelming, as success led to growth.
He said succession thinking was about determining the goal as an owner and then establishing the processes to make that happen, including building leadership capability that went beyond the founder.
Most SMEs were run by a technically skilled person or group of people who saw an opportunity within the field they knew best, he said.
Growth usually resulted in confusion between leadership and operational aspects of the business, which were generally deemed ‘management’, a word Mr Withers said he avoided.
“There is not one bit of clarity for them about which roles they are performing,” he said.
“Operational and reactive always wins.
“They start [their business] as incredibly strategic but become incredibly reactive.
“They need to park the car and have a conversation about being the owner.”
Once an owner understands their role, Mr Withers said, they needed to build a vision.
This was seen as an SME’s superpower, because the owner and the leader were one and the same, unlike a big corporation.
“That means all the decision rights are in the room. If you want to turn left on Monday, you can turn left on Monday,” Mr Withers said.
“That’s a superpower.
“Now, if you combine that with them being smaller systems, I mean, it can still be 200 people, but they are one integrated system, with one vision, where we can actually form that vision, and the vision custodians are visible.
“This is why SMEs are so good at innovating.”
In the end, the owners need to understand why they are there and then build the leadership and the culture required.
Maintaining that is achieved through what Mr Withers calls the ‘business way’, which could be summarised as the rules, expectations and other information that help guide the company’s leadership and keep them on the track laid down in their vision.
This data, he insists, should not be confused with operational information.
Instead, it is the values of the owners effectively put into code.
“It’s the greatest thing about owning an SME,” Mr Withers said.
“You take all the pain but you get to set what the culture is. And it’s real. It’s not made up.
“All SMEs have values. Some of them that could be implicit, we just help bring them to the surface, make them explicit.
“And they’re a critical part of your business way, and your business way is the is the real point of difference.
“Every business needs one.”
