We support your company’s evolution to market leadership.
How We Help
What value can an investor add to your business?
Entrepreneurs should ask every potential investor this basic question. If you are not pleased or impressed with the answer, then move on.
We roll up our sleeves and spend time evaluating, executing, and keeping track of potential innovation as the business scales to address growing demand.
We learn about the unique needs of your business and finding ways we can support growth.
Our experience has highlighted several operational challenges for small companies looking to scale
Do these challenges weigh on you? Are there other challenges you are working to address? We should talk.
Select common operational and growth-oriented challenges:
Building and Maintaining Culture at Scale
Challenge
Employee retention requires a steadfast belief in an organization's cause and camradarie with colleagues. Though the formula sounds simple enough, it takes considerable time, attention, and authenticity to implement. It becomes challenging to continue this effort as the company experiences rapid growth.
Skylark’s Partnership
We make people the priority by taking measured steps to protect and improve our partner company's culture at scale. An authentic culture can attract top talent in perpetuity and helps create long-term value for any business owner.
Developing Talent at Every Level
Challenge
Recruiting exceptional talent and ensuring development takes time and dedication and is often one of the many hats worn by the entrepreneur or executive leader. Focus on a company’s mission and dedication to customers can wane as the organization expands.
Skylark’s Partnership
Hiring the right personnel, fostering careers, training, and rewarding people for their growth is the best long-term strategy to sharpening a company’s competitive edge. Skylark has experience codifying the people development function and instilling it throughout the organization. When the time is right, Skylark will help select and guide a qualified human resource leader.
Constructing a Best-in-Class Sales Team
Challenge
For many entrepreneurs, the company has relied on their strength as Chief Salesperson to drive growth. Entrepreneurs are reluctant, and seemingly wise, to avoid hiring outside salespeople as prospects. New hires are expensive and the wrong hire could lead to lost revenue and / or brand deterioration.
Skylark’s Partnership
Skylark provides strategic and operational support to build a sales team of talented, well trained individuals. Functional management of the sales organizations, including hiring a competent sales leader and implementing sales systems are prioritized. Systems and codified processes drive considerable long-term value for the organization.
Real Time Business Insights: IT / Financial Reporting
Challenge
Entrepreneurs have exceptional gut instincts when it comes to running their firms. They can read a few numbers on a spreadsheet or within an email and instantly understand the financial health of the company. The downside to such processes, however, is that this valuable knowledge does not scale across the organization.
Skylark’s Partnership
We seek to invest in well-trained professionals and systems to capture real-time metrics. We then coach employees to evaluate these metrics, like an entrepreneur. Real-time data allows for pro-active monitoring of company-wide strategic execution and, when necessary, re-allocation of investments.
Strategic Thought Partner
Challenge
Entrepreneurs carry the weight of their vision and the many challenges, crises, and failed strategic endeavors as their company matures. In our experience, there is a point in the entrepreneurs’ journey where capital limitations place an artificial ceiling on dreams to grow revenue, increase profit, and steal share from competitors.
Skylark’s Partnership
We passionately support the growth of our partnerships and believe capital should never limit a company's growth potential. Two minds are sharper and more resilient than one. Our expertise and co-ownership of a growth strategy will help ensure a consistent focus on long-term development and progress.
Supplementing Organic Growth: Acquisitions
Challenge
Leadership teams are focused on delivering long-term organic growth. The process of evaluating acquisitions is constant and time consuming. Identifying and closing an acquisition is the easy part - successfully integrating the add-on and extracting value from the combined platform is the final obstacle.
Skylark’s Partnership
We have handled dozens of add-on acquisitions and successful integrations and can act as an outsourced business development arm for the leadership team. Importantly, we understand when to say “no” to a prospective add-on opportunity, limiting the disruption of other strategic initiatives.
