Discover in 5 minutes how to improve your revenue growth today.
The opportunity: 1) Make more growth the most critical step to benchmark almost every decision.
A growth business has a different DNA from other businesses – it changes how it thinks, acts, and communicates.
Most businesses — restaurants, barbershops, plumbers, local accountants, lawyers and many more are built not to grow fast.
The change in thinking
- Make something you can sell to a bigger market. That’s the difference between Google and a plumber. A plumber doesn’t scale.
If you start an accounting practice, you only have to compete with other local accountants. To start a search engine, you compete with the world.
(a) make something many potential buyers want, and (b) reach and serve all those people.
The same problem applies to all levels of business – franchises, buying groups – these are all local businesses built to grow locally and grow slowly.
Yesterday’s newsletter spoke of the opportunities for breakthrough technologies to help break out and grow faster, reduce costs and improve productivity. For every business size – read more here. #####
- Growth drives everything,
- Change how your business thinks makes more growth viable, and technology is the best source of rapid change,
- Faster growth makes any business more valuable,
- Growth explains why successful businesses almost invariably get acquisition offers – M and A,
- To acquirers, a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous as well,
How to change any business to a growth business.
A) The Harvard Grow faster rules.
Every business, regardless of size and age, should follow these three rules when building products and services.
- Better before Cheaper,
- Revenue before cost,
- There are no other rules,
B) Make Strategy – Planning what you will do – your competitive advantage.
Anyone in leadership (board and executives) knows the typical strategy sessions model – broken.
One of the problems
- The best in each business focus is immediate issues that become more complex – robbing the business of planning more growth and profitability for the next quarter and year(s).
C) Change how your business thinks – to pro-growth.
What is a reasonable growth rate – each week?
Fast-growing businesses – a reasonable growth rate is 5-7% weekly.
Exceptional businesses will hit 10% growth a week.
weekly growth yearly growth rate
1% 1.7x
2% 2.8x
5% 12.6x
7% 33.7x
10% 142.0x
Change how your business thinks – Focus on hitting a weekly growth rate reduces the otherwise bewildering problem to a single problem to solve – How?
Growth focuses all your decisions; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto correct.
- Should you spend two days at a conference?
- Hire another programmer?
- Focus more on marketing?
- Should you spend time courting some big customers?
- Should you add the x feature?
- What will get you your target growth?
Growth businesses usually have three phases:
- An initial period of slow or no growth while the business plans and experiments with new products and services,
- As the business supplies something many potential buyers want and finds how to reach these buyers, there’s a period of rapid growth and experimentation,
- Eventually, a successful business will grow into a big company. Growth will slow until more new growth products and services – start all over again.
Start with an initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth.
You may end up with a different company than you started – a more valuable business.
You may have started with local accounting or barbershops – but now you have scaled the existing business into effectively two businesses – local and national (with new products and services). Are you trying to figure out how?
Anything that grows consistently at 10% or even 1% a week is undoubtedly a better approach than you started.
If there’s one number every business should always know, it’s the weekly growth rate.
Risk Mitigation
The test of any investment is the ratio of risk-return. The core business – your ‘local’ business supports your national (startup) business. Proper risk mitigation, risk and reward matrix is essential at every step.
Why change now?
Technology has produced significant opportunities for every business to accelerate.
We now live in a Social Selling economy.
Every industry is changing: it’s a global phenomenon.
The best businesses of all sizes and industries in every country are reinventing themselves to Social Selling to win more new buyers from new markets – faster.
Social Influencing and Selling (#socialselling) – this is where your ideal potential buyers walk towards your business rather than your business is chasing them.
Please see hello on Twitter @accebusiness.
Step one: It starts with Strategy – Planning. What are the possible, probable and preferred futures for your business – move from operational to transformative growth – how do you collectively think, act and communicate that delivers significant growth?
Step two: Get professional assistance – reframing a business from one of the local to now many opportunities requires specialist assistance.
Step three: It is not one planning session – it is a series of steps and sessions that transforms and challenges the business to grow fast.
Step four: move from the possible to a robust and dominant pro growth – pro profit business.
There is no better time than now to anticipate future opportunities and capture emerging opportunities than now.
If this newsletter resonates with you, we provide a range of services that challenges and provides solutions for faster growth.
contact [email protected]
Regards
David
