Developing and Implementing a Leveraged Growth Strategy
Download Velerity's White Paper on Leveraged Growth:
Velerity Leveraged Growth White Paper
Are You Achieving Your Growth Targets?
Setting growth targets is easy - achieving them can be difficult. Do you know why you are not hitting your growth targets? Many companies are challenged in realizing their growth objectives, including both emerging enterprises and established businesses. Customer preferences shift, new technologies are introduced, regulations change. Competitors lower productions costs or increase performance and functionality. New entrants introduce disruptive business models. Markets don’t react to new products and services as expected. The process of reassessing your growth strategy, whether for an emerging enterprise or an established enterprise, can be daunting. The ranges of questions that may need to be addressed cover a wide range, including figuring where to allocate scarce resources, decided what products and services to offer, identifying which customers to target and what channels to pursue, and figuring out how to successfully position against the competition.
The process of developing a Leveraged Growth Strategy, introduced in this white paper, has been developed and refined over many years. The key difference that this approach gives you is that it explicitly considers the strengths, capabilities and competencies that you bring to the table, as part of developing your growth strategy. Any company offering product and service extensions, entering new businesses and markets, or acquiring other companies, have to bring something unique and valued in the marketplace to the table. Explicitly bringing competitive advantage with you as you enter new markets or offer new products and services is required for success in our now ultra-competitive business environment.
Implementing this approach to developing a growth strategy reduces uncertainty and creates organizational focus for developing and implementing successful growth strategies. The following sections cover the key elements which define the Leverage Growth process.
Each company’s circumstance, stage, resources and capabilities are unique and requires an approach contoured to its specific circumstances. Developing and implementing a leveraged growth strategy is best accomplished in discrete stages, depending on your company’s needs.
A leveraged growth strategy should be contoured to meet your company’s most pressing challenges and issues, to get your growth on track quickly. Developing a leveraged growth strategy can be accomplished in several discrete steps.
1. Identify Your Company’s Key Growth Issues – Conduct a series of one-on-one interviews with management and employees to identify objectives, ambitions, challenges, issues and recommendations. This is followed by conducting a half-day workshop to identify key issues that need to be addressed in order to have a growth strategy. The outcome is a prioritized list of key questions that the company has to answer in order to hae a growth strategy. Because this hierarchy of issues is developed in a group setting, there is buy-in and ownership of the key issues and challenges, which facilitates moving forward smoothly.
2. Establishing Your Company’s Shared Ambitions and Vision - Establishing your company's ambition, future vision, goals and objectives through a one day workshop can be an important first step. It can be extremely helpful in making sure the management team and core initiatives are aligned.
3. Prioritize Products and Services for Growth – Identifying which products and services upon which to focus your scarce resources is a critical step and lies at the core of developing a leveraged growth strategy. There are a series of steps which can be accomplished through three separate workshops complimented by market assessments. The sub-steps in this process include: (1) Brainstorm potential products and services; (2) Establish evaluation criteria including Attractiveness Criteria and Fit Criteria; (3) Characterize, score and prioritize potential products and services; (4) Select top products and services that merit more detailed financial and operational evaluation; and (5) Synthesize top products and services into a strategic plan.
4. Develop Implementation Requirements and Task Plan – A well delineated implementation plan is an important for getting moving on your growth initiatives in a clear, efficient and timely basis. The implementation plan should be developed with representatives from each of the impacted divisions and organization in the company. There are multiple steps, beginning with mapping out the business processes that will form the foundation of the each growth initiative. From there, additional requirements will be identified, considering equipment, software and personnel, suppliers and partnerships.
To learn how you can develop and implement a leveraged growth strategy, read the Velerity white Paper "Leveraged Growth Strategies" and contact Brad Bradshaw, the President of Velerity, via email brad@velerity.com.