How long does a process with GrowthWheel take?

A process with GrowthWheel can be designed for anything from a 1 hour one-to-one session to a year long process with monthly or quarterly meetings and anything in between.

The GrowthWheel Toolbox is very comprehensive with more than 300 visual tools of various kinds. This is how it enables an advisor to work with a 360° perspective on a company and empowers a client to make decisions and take action in any area that can help the client grow.

However, it will rarely —if ever— be useful to share a large amount of tools with a client, because there is a limit to how many decisions they can make and carry out in a certain time period. Rather the art of designing a good process with a client is to find perhaps 3 Focus Areas and concentrate on the few decisions and actions that will move the company forward the fastest.

Using GrowthWheel in a one-hour session
Many GrowthWheel Certified Advisors are in touch with more than 100 clients on a yearly basis, but some of the interactions are just a single meeting. This can be either in a situation where the client is not qualified to continue with the service, if the client is a ‘tire kicker’ who is just curious to check out the service, or it can be that it is the timeslot allocated for one-to-one sessions combination with a training program or similar.

One way to use GrowthWheel in a one-hour session can be to spend the time doing a 360° Screening with the client. It will take 10 min. for the client to make a screening and select 3 Focus Areas (if not done in advance) and it can take 20 min. to discuss and agree on these. This leaves 30 min. to discuss decisions and actions within the three most important areas of the business and the client can leave with a one-pager, a strong sense of clarity, and a number of specific things to work on.

Another way to use GrowthWheel in a one-hour session is to select 1-3 of the 100 GrowthWheel Decision Sheets and focus on them. A Decision Sheet typically takes 20-30 min. to work through and even less if the client company has received the tool in advance. Even if a final conclusion is not likely to be reached in this time frame, the client will leave with a deep understanding of the decision to make, and a number of next steps to move the decision forward.

Many GrowthWheel Certified Business Advisors have said that the use of a visual tool to create a common language and a structure is reducing the time it takes to conclude a discussion to 1/5 (!). If this is the case you can achieve the same in a one-hours session that would otherwise take as much as a 5 hour conversation.

Using GrowthWheel over the course of a year
Also many GrowthWheel Certified Business Advisors are working with some clients over a long period of time, sometimes a year or even longer. When this is the case the GrowthWheel Toolbox is comprehensive enough to follow all along, and it makes sure that the advisor continues to have new tools to work with for the many new decisions that will surface as the company is growing through the life cycle.

Should it be the case that a business advisor over a longer period of time manages to take a client through each one of of the 20 Focus Areas and make decisions and action plans for them all, there will still be plenty of use for the GrowthWheel Toolbox, because many of the decisions discovered when using GrowthWheel will re-surface. Some decisions turned out to be wrong and must be re-visited. Other decisions just naturally reoccur, including decisions about product development, organizational development, marketing initiatives, and ways to maintain productivity and profitability.