Do You Have An Approach To Building Real Sustainable Business Growth?

A business that is able to achieve real sustainable growth is able to continuously step-out from their competitors and achieve a competitive posture that its competitors find impossible to assault.

Competitors almost become irrelevant as the focus of the enterprise is inward in ensuring the traits necessary for growth are present, developed and evolving and outward in ensuring absolute focus on improving customer value.

The achievement of the traits in an enterprise that will nurture and develop real sustainable growth require the adoption of an approach to business growth that goes far beyond a simple view of growth such as, that of increasing sales by finding new customers. It requires, instead, an approach that examines the design, processes and culture of the enterprise so that the right traits are developed at the core of the enterprise and supported by its systems.

For Business Leaders to ensure their enterprise is capable of achieving real sustainable growth, they must understand the agents of business growth and model their enterprise to manage these agents. A clear view of the agents of growth will underpin the development of the right approach for your enterprise.

The agents of business growth may be broadly broken into three categories which reflect the underlying activity that will lead to that growth. Within each of these categories there then exists a range of agents representing simple tasks (expanding existing geographical markets) through to complex tasks (creating new markets that presently don’t exist). An enterprise approach to real sustainable growth must encompass all three categories and all the agents within each category:

1. Expansion: expanding the existing market presence of the business
   

2. Monitoring: the markets in which the business competes to identify discontinuities in the market that may represent an opportunity to be explored
   

3. Creation: the redefining of customer value and the identification of new markets that have not been previously recognized.
   

A Business Leader will quickly recognize that as an enterprise moves from simple expansion to creation that not only do the opportunities for stepping-out from competitors increase dramatically, but that the complexity of the effort grows. The true challenge of leadership lies in building an enterprise that is capable of continuously stepping-out, evolving, reinventing itself and improving customer value beyond the capability of its competitors.