No Man's Land: Where Growing Companies Fail

by Doug Tatum

If starting a company is difficult, leading a company once the business has caught fire is infinitely more so. Thousands of startups each year approach the dangerous transition that Doug Tatum calls No Man's Land--when they are too big too be considered small but still too small to be considered big. Rapid growth is every entrepreneur's dream, but it never comes easily and is usually rife with dilemmas. Such growth should spark self-discovery, acquired...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591842492
• ISBN13: 9781591842491
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Portfolio
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Outstanding, accessible and remarkably to the point

Doug Tatum has created a small masterpiece here (what his colleague Bo Burlingham might call a Small Giant). As a serial entrepreneur and tech investor, I've seen this phenomenon all too often (and been through it myself). Many executives and investors think the primary risk to a company is at the beginning and later in life only competitive pressures hold sway. This book makes clear that there is a lesser known but equally vital intermediate period that everyone thinks is unique to their own businesses but is just as general as formation issues. I read this book right in the middle of No Man's Land with my current business - it could not have been better timed. Right now I'm anticipating a 1,000,000x return on the purchase price.

A must-read for any leader or manager in a young company

The author presents the hurdles a company must take when growing. The book gives a very realistic view of what you are about to encounter when driving your company for growth. I would recommend this book to all people involved in young and fast growing enterprises.

If you have ever tried to build and grow a small business you will understand how good this book is.

In this book "no man's land" is that volatile time a small business experiences during rapid growth. Basically, there are three things that can happen. The small business retreats from the kind of growth that would transform the business and remains a successful small business. This is the kind of choice made by the businesses described by Bo Burlingham as "Small Giants". The business might lose its way and end up failing because of the pressures, changes, and decisions demanded by rapid growth. The third possibility is to make the kinds of transformations necessary to become a large company. Nearly every big company went through this phase one time in their career (the exceptions being big companies that were created by combining already larger companies). Doug Tatum has put together a terrific book to help the entrepreneur who wants to navigate through rapid growth without being torn apart in the rapids or smashed against the rocks. The book has eight chapters that are each interesting reading to any entrepreneur who wants to learn about this phase of their corporate career. The first chapter describes the problem of being "to big to be small, to small to be big". The second chapter talks about the way pressures of growth can cause the company to become misaligned from its market. These have a variety of sources and each is dangerous to fatal. These can have a physical basis, a forgetting of what the core value is while racing to grow and grab market share, and forgetting who your customers are. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 talk about the dangers of outgrowing your management, your model, and your money. These three topics are central to successfully making the transition. If your management cannot get out of the entrepreneurial mindset, you are doomed to stay small or fail. I worked for a growing company one time where the owner loved the detail work of the company and could not focus on what it would take to actually handle the growth he was experiencing. And he picked his managers based on how much they thought like he did and would indulge his expediting. Of course the business failed! Another problem occurs when you outgrow your business model because it won't scale. If you hang onto the model that worked when you were small get horrible to fatal problems. If you adopt a new model that doesn't work, you get problems that are also horrible to fatal. This is one reason you need to get the right management. The third problem is outgrowing your money. More small businesses on the make die from the lack of oxygen money can provide. It seems like a growing small business should be able to get funding. But they find that banks aren't interested because of the risk and lack of collateral. Venture capitalists aren't interested because the deal is too small and the 10x payoff they are looking for isn't obvious, plus the entrepreneur is often unwilling to cede control of his baby. And you have likely used up all your friends and f

Now what?

Curious to know the origin of the word adolescent, I checked the Online Etymology Dictionary and this is what I found: "1482, from M.Fr. adolescent, from L. adolescentem (nom. adolescens), pp. of adolescere "grow up," from ad- "to" + alescere "be nourished," hence, "increase, grow up," inchoative of alere "to nourish" (see old). The adj. is first attested in 1785." According to Doug Tatum, most (if not all) organizations resemble human beings in that they also proceed from birth through infancy to childhood; then into adolescence, an especially critical stage of their development. They require different kinds of nourishment in order to "increase, " "grow up," etc. Not all become mature. In fact, only a small percentage of them do. Consider these statistics that Michael Gerber shares in E-Myth Mastery: "Of the 1 million U.S. small businesses started this year [2005], more than 80% of them will be out of business within 5 years and 96% will have closed their doors before their 10th birthday." These are indeed chilling statistics, as are those that Tatum cites in his book. As he explains, thousands of public and private firms each year reach a point in their development, "an inflection point at which they are transformed from small to large, from upstarts to new business categories, from intriguing ideas to America's [if not the world's] de facto research and development department." In this book, Tatum focuses this pivotal stage in a business's life cycle, "the adolescent stage in which a rapidly growing firm is too big to be small, but too small to be big." This is the "no man's land" to which the title refers, a transitional stage in the life of a business that is "treacherous geographical terrain." In this book, Tatum achieves a number of separate but related objectives: 1. He provides a "map" that will enable C-level executives (especially entrepreneurs) to determine their business' current location, either before entering or after having entered No Man's Land. 2. He helps those whose business has yet to reach No Man's Land to prepare for the perils that await them there. 3. He helps those whose business is now in No Man's Land to make appropriate decisions that will enable their business to reach the next stage of the life cycle. Note: In this context, I am reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation, "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." The No Man's Land to which Tatum refers is analogous to the complexity to which Holmes refers. 4. Meanwhile, Tatum achieves another objective that I consider the most important of all: he enables decision-makers to complete a series of reality checks to measure the effectiveness of their business' market alignment, management competence, business model, and allocation of resources. He correctly stresses the importance of sustaining sufficient momentum (the "fifth M") to push their business