Keep Your Startup Pruned to Achieve Optimum Growth

In his book, Necessary Endings, the management guru, Dr. Henry Cloud, creates an analogy between growing a prize-winning rose bush and developing a successful business. Per Dr. Cloud, one of the keys to success in both endeavors is to “prune” or cut away parts of the rose bush or the business to focus all energy on the strongest and best branches. A startup can follow this advice through all stages of its growth to develop a viable and long-lasting business structure.

Prune the Deadweight

Pruning focuses on eliminating the three parts of a business that can prevent it from achieving its maximum potential. First, and perhaps most obvious, a business needs to cut its deadweight. A Startup, in particular, cannot afford any non-functioning parts that drain resources from a business structure. An entrepreneur may find it difficult, for example, to jettison an idea that catalyzed some part of a startup, but if that idea has stopped bearing fruit, it needs to be discarded in favor of the concepts that are working. The same holds true for employees or partners who may have been around to help a startup at its inception but who are no longer contributing to the startup’s growth.

Prune non-functioning branches

Second, a startup needs to eliminate those branches that are showing signs of sickness with no chance or ever recovering from that sickness. A once-great idea that got a startup off the ground can lose steam as competitors begin to latch onto an idea that the startup might have created. Instead of focusing on a sick or dying branch, cut it off and preserve the startup’s energy for newer and more powerful ideas.

Prune the good ideas, focus on the best

The third and perhaps most difficult part of a startup business that should be pruned are healthy ideas that may be good, but otherwise are not the startup’s best ideas. A rose gardener will prune healthy branches that have two or three buds in favor of the branches that have seven or eight buds. Entrepreneurs are fond of great ideas, but too many ideas can threaten the focus of a startup company. Focusing on the best idea and cutting the remaining good ideas will give the startup the best guarantee of long-term success.

Every entrepreneur will benefit from stepping back from her startup to assess which ideas will give the best chances of future growth, and which other ideas have died or show signs of slowing down.