Is Your Business Growth Decaying?
Is your business not growing and actually heading for decline, even with a good technology base? Do you face challenges about where to focus resources among existing customers and applications or new opportunities? Do you find it difficult to delegate given the current strength of the leadership team and talent? How do you spread valuable resources among the various opportunities to grow revenue and cash flow quickly? What strategy will guide your company through this, without sacrificing the core?
Reasons for Growth Decay
There are five big reasons you business may find its growth decaying.
1. You are stuck in yesterday’s success.
Your existing markets continue to grow, but your historical success is being attacked by an increase in competition, customers who want more for less, and general evolving business maturity.
Your product quality is being maintained, but your existing customer base is maturing and becoming increasingly intra-competitive. One way to try to overcome decline is to look to suppliers for lower prices, a trend that sees no end.
As your competitive environment becomes more intense, your rivalry with your competitors intensifies. You try new things and your competitors quickly follow. The result is new costs without much price or share to go along with it. You may not see this happening until it has already happened.
Your well-established ways of doing things (your work processes) are beginning to let you down. Today’s environment calls for Speed, Agility, and Simplicity. Figuring out where to begin the change process is a daunting task.
Generally, your business challenges for future success have a little of some or all of these decay drivers. Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew which ones to attack first or even if we had a change process that could address multiple issues?
Grow or Die! Surviving in Today's Competitive Environment
“Grow or die” has been a long-held axiom that is even more important in today’s increasingly competitive environment. Too often, companies forsake their organic growth strategies for growth through acquisition and paying premium prices, adding to their burden of translating growth into profits. Companies can grow organically in many ways. Here are a few keys mechanisms for growth:
- Expand value propositions to leverage existing capabilities to existing markets.
- Find new markets to which to sell existing and expanded value propoositions
- Bring new products to commercialization faster and more effectively
- Define a new business model in markets currently served
- Increase productivity through new work processes and organizational capacity improvements
The Fundamental Questions
There are also some fundamental questions businesses need to ask themselves when laying out a growth strategy.
Do you really know your position in the market(s) you serve?
Do the industries you serve have the potential for growth?
Do your value propositions provide benefits to the most valuable segments?
Is your channel approach valued by your most valuable segments?
Is your pricing strategy optimal, given price sensitivity in your most valuable segments?
Are your value propositions’ benefits well communicated to your most valuable segments?
Are your costs higher than your competitors’ costs?
Do you use a value delivery system that requires different core skills than your competitors?
Are you underperforming in key processes relative to competitors or to customer requirements?
Do your processes contain steps to build your customer franchise in the highest value segments?
Is your organization aligned to support effective execution and continuous improvement?
