Strategies for Accelerating Growth
Growth is easy, isn’t it?
Discount your prices and your revenues go up. Recognising that you also need to make a profit, you cut your costs and the margins quickly improve. Wanting to drive even more dramatic growth, you acquire another company and you can double your size in no time. But it doesn’t last.
Sustaining growth is not easy. Sustaining profitable growth is hard. Creating significant and sustainable growth is the imperative for every small business, and indeed the challenge for every large business today.
Achieving great results creates expectation that you can do it again and again. You need to sustain it. Investors want to see evidence of the future profit streams that will give them a decent long-term return on their investments. Customers recognise that growing companies are doing something right and want to be part of it. Employees know that growth creates a bigger pie in which to take a thicker slice.
Yet few companies manage to sustain profitable growth. They appear to reach a block – when they reach the perceived limits of their current world, their existing markets and models, capabilities and ambitions, energy or inspiration …