REEF provides mobility and logistics solutions for urban areas, including parking, electric vehicle charging and delivery services. The company also offers REEF OS, a software which allows restaurants to offer food from multiple brands for digital delivery and takeout. You can strategically focus your efforts and resources for maximum impact by identifying your current position and potential growth areas. Follow this comprehensive guide to understand business growth, decide on the best type of growth to pursue, and develop a strategy and actionable steps to help your business scale in the future.
They know that growing faster than capabilities dictate is possible in the short term but that doing so over the long term can cause lasting damage to reputation and culture. Good growth strategists do not fall into the trap of thinking they can grow fast now and fix things later. They recognize that more-measured growth over a sustained period will lead to much better financial results than explosive growth for a short period of time. Industry (along with moves up and down the value chain) is only one aspect of the “where to grow” issue. Just as it is hard to achieve overall growth if your core business isn’t thriving, it is unlikely that you can raise your growth trajectory without winning in your local market.2Defined as the largest region in the portfolio by revenue. We allocated each business segment in a corporate portfolio to one of 12 geographic regions.
Researching the state of your industry is diverse city the best way to determine if your desired growth is both necessary and feasible. Examples could include running surveys and focus groups with existing and potential customers or digging into existing industry research. It’s possible that your growth plan will encompass more than one of the initiatives outlined above, which makes sense — the best growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Others—such as Danaher, Johnson & Johnson (for which I have provided consulting services in the past), and Berkshire Hathaway—took the opposite approach in pursuing diversification strategies. This decrease may indicate the beginning of a slump if it happens consecutively for several periods. But company data needs to be evaluated to find out what should be improved upon regardless. The best indicators of company growth are a high gross profit growth rate, sales growth, good cash flow, and improved customer retention rate.
This metric is an indicator of whether a business is profitable and can be measured at any growth stage. Investors use the numbers to determine if a business is worth funding, while executives use them to plan and allocate resources. Method decisions are tightly connected to choices about the rate and direction of growth. Consider the case of Virgin Group, which my colleague Elena Corsi and I studied. The company’s growth strategy is to expand into new markets and industries where the Virgin brand can drive customer acquisition.
Acquisitions reduce competition, give you access to proprietary technology, and expand your customer base. A business growth strategy is basically an action plan, based on relevant market research, that explains exactly how your business will grow. Notice the difference between the Pal’s approach to growth and that of most other companies. Pal’s does not set a growth goal on the basis of market potential or target financial returns. Instead, it recognizes its critical bottleneck resource—in this case, store managers—and paces growth according to the rate at which it can develop them. This approach has almost certainly meant slower growth in number of stores and revenue, but it has been critical to maintaining the company’s unique operating model and its superior financial performance.
Rihanna said they made this choice because their brand goal was to get Fenty to as many people as possible. If an interested customer prefers to shop for their clothes, makeup, and skincare products at once, the brand now serves as a big draw. To appeal to a bigger customer base, it has since added face and body products, a collection made up of ASOS products and other popular brands. With organic growth, a company expands through its own operations using its own internal resources. This is in contrast to having to seek out external resources to facilitate growth. “I think that does reflect some change in consumer behavior or people that are concerned about being the designated driver but still want to enjoy an outstanding-tasting beer,” Newlands said.
In fact, growth leaders across the C-suite are 70 percent more likely than peers to have growth as their top priority.4Biljana Cvetanovski, Eric Hazan, Jesko Perrey, and Dennis Spillecke, “Are you a growth leader? The seven beliefs and behaviors that growth leaders share,” McKinsey, September 26, 2019. Business growth refers to a stage where your business expands as a result of new clientele, the business owner finding additional ways to generate more profit or other factors. It’s important to note that there is no single metric used to measure growth. There are a number of data points that can show a business is growing, such as sales, revenue, profits, number of customers, number of employees, profits and value.
It all depends on your unique business model and the strategies you implement. The three strategies that have emerged in more recent years include building an innovation culture, using sustainability as an accelerant to growth, and portfolio reallocation, including what we call shrinking to grow. The bold moves you make could include divesting assets where you may not be the best owner and then reallocating those resources toward growth opportunities. Diversification requires a lot of capital and has the highest risk of failure out of all of the business growth strategies outlined in this article. This type of business growth strategy can be risky, but also has a high return when executed correctly.
Growth leaders generate 80 percent more shareholder value than their peers over a ten-year period. Beyond creating shareholder value, growth attracts talent, fosters innovation, and creates jobs. Growth is the lifeblood of any successful business, but achieving growth that is both profitable and sustainable has proved especially difficult in recent years. Business leaders need a strategic approach that combines courage, innovation, and a willingness to make bold moves. For more discussions on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform. A cost reduction business growth strategy relies on organizations to reduce their operating costs.
Outperformers use the full growth blueprint to excel in adjacencies, with a particular focus on strategies that build on core competencies. They use and refresh growth maps to consistently surface opportunities, to understand which are most achievable, and set growth strategies to capture them. They choose among the different avenues to grow adjacently, such as M&A or business building, and they evolve their operating models to support these growth choices.