GURUS OF GROWTH.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC
• Position: Advice from Boru Corp. - Company Profile

Think you know how to grow? Does your company feel like a three-ring circus with you as the ringmaster? If not, maybe you're one of the lucky ones. Then again, maybe you're experiencing the business equivalent of piling as many clowns as possible into one tiny car. James Fischer, president and CEO of Boulder's Born Corp., has a few ideas about how to help you before things get out of hand.

BORU CORP. THINKS IT HAS THE ANSWERS TO COMPANIES' GROWING PAINS AND AIMS TO SPREAD THE WORD

Fischer founded Boru Corp. in January 1999, and at first focused on R&D, investigating and modeling the phenomena of corporate growth via indepth interviews with the brains behind 150 booming Front Range companies.

Now Fischer and his diverse troop of nine employees, or "Boruvians," are gunning to take their message to the masses. In the process, they hope to practice what they preach by -- surprise! -- optimizing their own projected growth.

"Out of our research, two major things came out: Companies don't know how to grow; they don't know how to model their growth. No. 2, they don't understand how to get the company to be a learning business," Fischer said from Boru headquarters, which was designed as a prototype for the office of a growing company.

The high-growth companies Boru researched "weren't learning quick enough. They weren't getting the feedback from the customer or the marketplace. They were maybe repeating the same mistakes. The knowledge learned from one thing wasn't being transferred over to another sector of the company, so the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing."

Statistics suggest navigating growth without a map is a fool's errand. According to the national Chamber of Commerce, some 250,000 new businesses are started in the United States every year. Only 10,000 remain in business long enough to celebrate their 10th birthday. In Fischer's eyes, the concept of "business as a machine" no longer holds water. The more relevant model for the workplace of the 21st century, where brainpower has replaced physical assets as the key corporate commodity, is "business as an organism." A key tenet of this philosophy, said Fischer, is that "the way the organization operates is different at every level of growth." The ability to learn and adapt, as in nature, is paramount to survival.

"There's a dynamic that's very similar in nature that happens in an organization that's growing very rapidly," Fischer explained, "And there are rules, clear rules, of the road. When the level of complexity grows, then (unprepared companies) start running into a lot of very serious issues." These issues include ill-defined delegation systems, high turnover, lack of departmental co-ordination, cultural conflicts -- in other words, utter mayhem. To help ward off these troubles, Boru has developed a model of the "Seven Stages of Growth" that provides a road map for...