4. Growth Prospects

Challenge

Your marketplace is mature and you are struggling to find some new avenue for growth.

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Three Fundamentals to Consider

To get your company on a strong growth track, consider:

1. Get top management personally involved in sales, marketing, customer service, and growth.
2. Be open to new or unexpected customers and/or growth opportunities.
3. Seek out profitable and growing niches where customers actually do value (as opposed to ‘should value’) what you offer.

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Relevant Blog Posts to Read

• Things to Start Doing Today to Re-Charge Growth
• Get Out of the Office and Get Your Business Growing in Three Days
• How to Grow Your Business in Five Steps

• Are You Open to New or Unexpected Customers?

• It’s All About the Customer (Five Steps to Growing Your Business in a Down Economy)
• “Do You Want Fries With That?” – An Opportunity for Profitable Growth
• Grow and Win With New Product (and Service) Development
• Growth By Acquisition – An Introduction

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Pertinent Book Summaries to Review

• How to Grow When Markets Don’t (Adrian Slywotzky and Richard Wise with Karl Weber)
• Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy (Joan Magretta)
• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs (Craig Stull, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott)
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (Chan W. Kim and Renée Mauborgne)

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Appropriate Book Chapter from 110% Success

• Chapter 6 – A Successful Company Grows

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Related Quotes to Think About

•  In his effort to transform IBM into an integrated, customer-friendly organization, Lou Gerstner required his top 200 executives to make face-to-face problem-solving visits to at least five customers each, and then get personally involved in every visit report.  (From Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance by Lou Gerstner)

•  “It’s all about solving a problem that embodies real pain, for real customers who are willing and able to pay for a solution.”  Martin Zwilling (Author of Do Have What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur?)

• “Be focused like a hedgehog. With what products and in what markets, can you be deeply passionate about what you are doing, be the best in the world, and be able to make a profit and drive your economic engine?” Jim Collins (Author of Good to Great)

• “Creative destruction is an easy excuse to avoid blaming leaders for failures caused by their unwillingness to recognize trends and take actions to invest in them which will create winning businesses.” Adam Hartung (Consultant and author on business growth and innovation)