Drive Growth
We believe that growth is critical for the long-term success of any business. By growth, we do not mean simply revenue growth, but rather profitable growth. Many companies have chased growth for the sake of growth, but revenue without profits creates risk (more working capital, higher fixed costs).
We focus on profitable growth. The value of the company is fundamentally driven by its revenue, margin and the multiple of that margin. The growth framework we use to guide our work is the growth road map [insert link to growth road map] which breaks down each of those levers into their underlying drivers. Each company is different, and it is important to determine a program customized and specific to the situation of the business.
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Why your business has more growth potential than you realize?
A frequent growth model we help our clients develop has the following flow:
Develop overall growth strategy
Identify revenue growth opportunities and operational weaknesses
Improve efficiency to expand margins and improve customer service
Build team to expand organizational growth capacity
Execute new sales and marketing strategy
The growth strategy is critical. It is important to look at your market, customer needs, and changes in supply markets. There are many potential growth levers, whether penetrating current customers more deeply, seizing emerging opportunities in adjacent segments, or refocusing how to serve emerging categories that require a new way of doing business. The key is to develop an understanding of where the future opportunities are and how to best position your company to capture them. Our starting framework is the growth road map:
Most firms are really capable in a few areas but have weaknesses in other areas. Frequently, companies allow their strengths to “carry” the weak areas. But this is a huge mistake. First, your weak areas are holding you back and may be costing you more business than you realize. Second, your weak areas almost always hurt efficiency – increasing your cost structure.
Many successful growth programs start with operational efficiency – both to improve he capabilities of the company and to unlock resources to invest in growth. A next step frequently is building the leadership team {insert link to below} so increase the organization’s capacity for growth. Concurrently, new initiatives may be pursued, pricing restructured to more closely reflect value delivered, and the incentives throughout the organization can be more aligned with growth objectives.
The key is to have a clear understanding of where growth is possible, a well-defined strategy to achieve that growth, and a team with aligned incentives to go deliver it.
Want to learn more about
Why your business has more growth potential than you realize?
Building an outstanding growth-oriented leadership team
One of the challenges many successful business owners face is that they spend more time working in their business or instead of working on their business. This often happens when they get so involved in the crush of day to day needs that they spend too little on the overall direction of the business, building the team they need to run the business, and making sure they are investing in the capabilities to succeed in the future.
Once you have the right growth road map, you need to have a team aligned with achieving it. You may need to create new roles in the organization or hire additional senior leaders to create more capacity for growth.
Process to build outstanding growth-oriented leadership teams
Understand what needs to happen to execute your growth road map
Identify roles that need to be created to achieve those goals
Define clearly the objectives for each leader in the organization
Hire leaders to take ownership of their responsibilities
Create processes to maintain alignment and provide incentives
We have a proprietary process that executes these steps and importantly can bring in new talent to add capabilities to your firm. You want to bring in stars who are already have state-of-the-art skills and can immediately have an impact on your firm. Many business leaders fall prey to the “penny wise / pound foolish” mentality of trying to minimize salary burdens. Instead, you should imagine what it would be like to have multiple additional leaders who are passionate as you are about your business AND bring outside skills and resources you presently lack.
The key bottleneck to growth is leadership capacity. Most firms run out of leadership capacity before the run out of operational capacity. Make sure you are addressing the most fundamental bottleneck when you enter a growth program.