7 KEYS TO GROWTH PART 2

3. ADVANCED CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

Advanced Customer Management - providing customized solutions to segmented customer groups through unique delivery channels. Do you have specific customer niches or groups to whom you target the sale of your products or services? For example, women’s religious retirement communities are a niche. Retirement communities aren't.

Do you provide customized solutions to these niches or the same solution to most customer groups?

Do you use the same sales or delivery channel to service each unique niche group?

4. ROBUST PROCESSES

Robust Processes - defining and developing effective and efficient core business processes

Would your leadership team agree upon the core business processes of your business? (Most don’t.)

Would your leadership team agree upon the amount of flexibility or efficiency these key processes should have?

Have you specifically improved at least half of your key processes in the past two years?

Would you define your key processes as ‘best in class” or best practice? How do you know?

5. DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Differentiated Products and Services - providing superior, innovative and differentiated products and services

Would your customers define your products or services as innovative or unique?

Do you have a ‘world class’ new product or service development process?

Do the products or services you've introduced in the last 3 years account for at least 50% of revenues?

7 KEYS TO GROWTH Part 1

1. RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT SEATS

Having the right seats filled with the right people is fundamental for business success and growth. Most entrepreneurial organizations are lacking the strategic talent they need. This is partly due to the difficulty of finding superior talent, but mostly due to not knowing what to look for, or how to develop existing talent. If you want to improve your business performance, you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your talent, increase the value that your team adds to the business strategy, and ensure that your talent is a key part of your competitive advantage.

What do you look for and how do you assess it?

Research shows that successful companies first define how they compete and what their strategic priorities are. This means that if a company focuses on being a product leader, then their product development talent should be their best talent. 

With the strategic priorities defined the talent development process begins.

A successful talent development program focuses on these four key areas:

• ·         Skills – are the skills needed for the job? Technical, problem solving, etc.
• ·         Knowledge – what knowledge is needed? Industry, customers, strategy, products, services
• ·         Behaviours – what behaviours are required? Leadership, decision making, values, ethics
• ·         Results – what results are expected? Revenues, profits, new products, new processes

Questions to ask yourself to know if you have the Right People in the Right Seats

• Have you defined how you compete and your strategic priorities?
• Do the skills of the people in your key seats support your strategic priorities?
• Is your leadership team the team to grow your business or just maintain it?
• Do your key people have all four of the right characteristics listed above?

2. EFFECTIVE GROWTH PLANNING

Effective Growth Planning – the development of an effective growth planning process which delivers tangible strategies and tactics to grow the business, supported by the alignment of the leadership team

If we asked your leadership team to define the goals for the business, would we receive unanimous, consistent and specific answers?

Have you prioritized your company’s method of competition? Product leadership, Customer Intimacy and Operational excellence are the only three options. Which one do you want to be great at? Which two do you want to be good at?

Do you have a analytical process for developing your plan? One that includes tools such as a SWOT analysis, Ansoff’s Matrix, Balance Scorecard?

Do you have less than 7 tangible goals to accomplish in the next year or two? (A goal is not tangible unless numbers are attached to it.)

Have you quantified how much of your growth is going to be through new customers or existing customers? New products or services or existing products or services?

Do you review your goals at least quarterly with your team?