Growing a business yields many benefits. It can attract talent, provide economies of scale, reward investors and head off obsolescence. For these and other reasons, even businesses that don't need growth to prosper might seek it out anyway.
But not all types of growth pay off. Some can actually destroy value, as when an acquisition fails or when management spends more than it should on a given initiative. Other growth trajectories are unsustainable. And the bigger or more mature a company is, the harder it can be to achieve significant growth at all.
So, truly successful businesses rarely rely on a single plan of action. Instead, they combine multiple growth strategies to win, including market development, disruption, product expansion, channel expansion, strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and organic growth.
The ways to develop a foolproof strategy is to factor in the following:
- Start with SMART Growth Goals
- Develop Strategies to Support Those Growth Goals
- Consider Tools That Support Your Goals and Strategies
- Implement Your Growth Strategies
- Analyze Your Results
- Optimize Your Growth Strategy
- Set New SMART Growth Goals
Key Points
- Implement more than one business growth strategy to reduce risk and maximize market share expansion.
- Choose business growth strategies that align with your budget, goals, timelines, competition, and desired market share.
- A business growth strategy is more effective when you’re true to your positioning, possess deep audience insight, and can pivot quickly as needed.
- First and foremost, you need to have a clear grasp on your brand identity and DNA. You also need to know your strengths, positioning, and differentiation.
- Growth comes from a relentless focus on your core competencies. Walmart is a prime example of this. By delivering the lowest prices for customers, they’ve created stratospheric growth.
- Second, deep audience insight is crucial for any successful business growth strategy. You must know your customers pain points and desires, and satisfy
- their needs better than your competitors. As a result, you'll build customer loyalty and more word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals.
And, most importantly, growth marketing requires nimbleness. You'll certainly need to pivot in small ways, such as changing marketing tactics to match current trends or customer behaviour. But, you also might need to make large scale changes to achieve growth objectives.
Leadership and Management.
Leadership is the power, the driving force behind any business. Leadership includes such vital elements as purpose, vision, mission statement, and planning - all of which set the course for the organization. Leadership also includes the management philosophy, policies, procedures, planning, analysis and systems adopted to run an organization. Leadership is important no matter the size of the organization. Small organizations need excellent leadership and management just as much as larger companies. (Analytics falls partly within this category, and partly in the Information Technology category.)
The product or service the organization sells and delivers.
Does it do or provide what people want? How does it compare with competitors products or services? What is the quality level of the product or service? Are clients/customers happy with the product or service?
Personnel and Personnel Development.
This includes all aspects of managing people, to include hiring and retaining good people; having excellent training programs that develop and enhance your people; managing your people to get maximum job performance and hard work from each person; handling problem people; and knowing who to let go. What we call Personnel Development goes far beyond the typical and usual HR stuff that most companies follow.
Organization and Structure.
How is the company structured? Are all the people - management, professional staff, and workers - organized into a united, efficient, well-oiled team with everyone working toward the same company goals and purposes? How are jobs defined and job descriptions developed? There is an exact science to this, an exact formula to produce the optimum organization, structure and job definitions.
Operations.
Operations means the actual actions, policies, procedures and "how to" the business uses to create the product or service that is sold and delivered to clients or customers. Operations is how the ingredients of Leadership and Management, Structure and Organization, the Product or Service, and the Personnel are put together and used to create, sell and deliver the product or service. Operations dictate the flows of the business - flows of the product or service, flows of information, flows of people, etc. Operations define “Who does what to whom - and how, where and when.”
Marketing.
You can offer the best product or service in your industry. But if no one knows about it, you will go bankrupt. Market penetration is important. The aim of this strategy is to increase sales of existing products or services on existing markets, and thus to increase your market share. A market development strategy is a business growth strategy that focuses on introducing existing products to new markets. Companies often use market development strategies to identify and develop new opportunities to sell their products in previously unexplored markets. ...
Quality Control.
Quality Control divides into two parts. The first ensures that the product or service being sold is of high quality. The second part ensures that the quality
of the organization's operations, personnel, systems, technologies and equipment are operating at high standards. Successful businesses have systems and procedures in place to correct any deficiencies as well as continually develop personnel and improve the quality of the entire organization.
Communication.
Good communication actually is a key part of all the other ingredients, and is perhaps the most important individual ability needed for success. We split out communication as a separate ingredient to success because of its importance. Communication divides into (i) internal communications, within the organization, between the team members; and (ii) between employees and customers/clients of the organization. It also means effective interactions between management and the people being managed. Telephone Skills are a major part of the communications ingredient in such businesses as medical or dental practices, law firms, and architectural firms, accounting firms, financial planners, chiropractors, consulting firms, design companies and other professional businesses. For these types of businesses, phone skill is actually one of the very most important elements of all in terms of revenues and profits - in particular, handling incoming calls or leads from prospective clients/patients. We have found that the skills, or lack of skills, of people handling incoming calls can earn or cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. RSNA Growth Strategies offers an effective phone training program that is guaranteed to generate remarkable increases in revenues.
Sales.
You could have an excellent product or service. You can be doing effective marketing which brings in a lot of potential customers or leads. But at some point, this potential customer must make a decision, and that decision is whether to buy your product or service or go elsewhere. Are your sales people trained well enough to close a high percentage of sales? Or are they wasting leads and prospects? If your company has more than one sales person, is there a sales manager? Is the sales manager fully trained, competent and skilled as a sales manager not just as a sales person? If your company doesn’t have sales people, what is the sales process?
Accounting and Finance.
Money provides the energy to keep an organization going. And the most fundamental principle of accounting and business is to earn more money than is spent. Good accounting procedures are also necessary because of all the numerous and complex state and federal laws and regulations. Finance includes all the options for obtaining funding, as well as managing revenues.
Compliance and Legal.
A business operates in a society full of laws and regulations, which must be followed or penalties can result. And some industries require far more compliance than others, such as securities trading, healthcare and banking. Also, any business can get into situations where they need good, competent legal advice or counsel.
IT (Information Technology).
This includes computers, networks, software, platforms, data management, security procedures - even written paper or any manual information flow. Analytics falls partly into this category and partly into the Leadership and Management component. (IT could also be the product or service a business developer and sells.)
How we help
We help you uncover good growth opportunities in a reliable and systematic way. As part of this, we work with you to:
- Examine your business portfolio to identify strategic growth initiatives
- Target opportunities that are close to what your business is good at
- Assess how well you meet your customers’ needs
- Investigate ways to make more money from things you’ve already paid for
- Surface ideas that exist within your own organization
- Analyse prior failures (e.g., failed bids, lost customers, product launches that never landed, etc.) for lessons to inform future initiatives
- Identify good ideas you can adopt from your competitors
- Extract ideas for incremental growth from going through the customer experience
- Evaluate potential mergers and acquisitions
- Model a longer-term vision for your business
- Examine the opportunities that disruptive technology could bring about
Your benefits
- Reduced risk of failed growth initiatives
- More stable profit margins as growth initiatives are pursued
- A larger pipeline of vetted growth opportunities
Successes
A Loss Making government run National Broadcasting House in Africa that was run with budgetary support was turned into a successful commercial enterprise with profits. This was as a result of rationalisation of price tariffs based on prevailing regional practices, Entering into Coproduction opportunities, Availing international Grants from other countries and streamlining Agency Distribution Channels. The revenues went up by more than 240% as a consequence