or The Innovator’s Dilemma books to guide us. No class on growth strategy was offered at B‐School. We learned through trial and error by working with clients to help them scale, codifying the growth lessons we learned along the way, and by repeating them with other client teams.
Originally written as a training tool for our employees, this book began as a tool to teach consistency, a metric of quality in the services world. There are plenty of one‐hit wonders in the business world, but we’ve always been focused on how the best of the best think about growth. Consistency was our goal and, in 2010, we began using our model to show clients how we developed our growth strategies. This model has been accepted as a standard with leading c‐level strategy practitioners at Beacon’s clients. This book contains interviews from current and prior leaders at major corporations, including Intel, Medtronic, CDW, Johnson & Johnson, Juniper Networks, Nike, Pratt & Whitney, Eaton, Motorola, SAP, Chase, Raytheon, the U.S. Army, Corning, EDS, Oracle, Crate & Barrel, Texas Instruments, The World Health Organization, General Electric, and Cisco, among others. You’ll also see learnings from successful entrepreneurs and operators of nonprofit organizations. Our model applies to every form of business.
This book serves two target audiences, although I think all growth strategists will find it valuable. Audience one is a first‐time growth strategist. This is anyone new to planning the top line, or revenue growth, of a business. Perhaps they’re an entrepreneur at a start‐up or a freshly promoted employee in a Fortune 100 enterprise. If you fall into this category, this book was designed to teach you how to think about the development of a growth strategy and to give you the tools to build your own.
The second audience is the seasoned growth‐strategy practitioner, whether you’ve been elevated to run strategy across your organization or you are looking to standardize a stale or scattered planning process. It is amazing how many companies follow a patchwork approach to strategy development and struggle to maintain quality of thought and consistency of information as they consolidate plan across their multiple business units around the world.
The past 30 years have been a wonderful journey, and I’m grateful to have had opportunities to serve clients around the world as they built and executed their growth strategies. This book shares what I’ve learned throughout my career, but especially what we’ve learned at Beacon, completing over 1,500 projects in the past 20 years for our global client base.
Please read this book more than once. I’ve tried to keep the tone conversational, but the message is layered and takes some consideration to fully absorb. The stories, the process, the method are all things that, as you gain experience, you’ll find you can revisit to find learnings that you missed when you read it the first time.
Growth Strategy: What It Is and Why Companies Fail at It
Harrison sat in front of his computer, looking at but not seeing the monitor. His brain was racing, and he hadn’t slept well in over a week. A former engineer, Harrison had been put on a management development rotation. So far, he’d worked in product development, manufacturing, sales, and now was in a product marketing role. Always a producer for his team, this was an entirely new environment for him. He had done some training on marketing, but it was mid‐January, and he had been given the charter to lead the development of the strategy for his product line with a briefing due in 8 weeks for review with the business unit leadership.
It was overwhelming – where to begin? He had last year’s plan, and a template to fill out, but it felt wrong – formulaic, stale, checking the box. Who cared about market segment share, or average sales price, or all the other tables that he had to fill out? He knew what it meant to design a product and manufacture it and knew that both departments were stretched thin. He felt the challenge of selling something new as the company had a retiring sales force and a new requirement for a new “solution” sale. In his gut, he felt that the reality of feet on the street didn’t line up with these forms that the company had used for the past decade. His boss told him to just update for this year’s plan, but rather than mailing it in, he felt the awesome responsibility of doing a good job.
If you work in the corporate world, at some point you will be or have been Harrison. And you were right to feel the disconnect between what you knew the real challenges of the job to be and the traditional annual planning document you were given.
When you mention growth strategy, a few different reactions occur. If you are telling your friends what you do, their eyes glaze over. If you are being told you have a new role, you may panic a bit. If you are the one letting people know they are now responsible for developing it, you may be a bit concerned about what you will get back from them.
Growth strategy development is the application of strategic thought to the challenge of growth. In its best form, it clearly articulates how you are going to achieve an objective. What you will do, who will do it, when it will occur, and why it is necessary to reach your goal. It reflects the strengths and weaknesses of your organization, the market landscape you will compete in, the adversaries you face, and the resources you have.
In the past 30 years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with the best of the best at Fortune 200 clients in healthcare, defense, financial services, software, hardware, professional services, industrials, pharma, consumer goods, technology, energy, education, and retail.
There are several key learnings that emerge when I look back on their growth strategy practices.
1 Everyone has a slightly different approach, although the very best have a structured, teachable, repeatable methodology.
2 If you “know,” you know that it’s all about the team that is executing.
3 There are core market elements universally assessed by the best of the best.
4 New business models have become recognized as disruptive and powerful tools.
5 Where you play geographically matters.
6 Timing is everything.
Our process and framework incorporates these concepts in this book.
Successful growth strategists are clearly not dreamers. They recognize the challenge of implementation and are able to harness the knowledge and experience in an organization to mitigate risk. In fact, successful growth strategists are risk mitigators, not risk takers. They are pragmatic and know that successful growth is measured not by what you promise, but by what you deliver. And delivery is extremely easy to measure for most clients by answering a single question: Did you hit the top line revenues associated with the plan when you were supposed to?
If it were just about sales, this would be a relatively easy exercise, but sustainable growth has to also be about return on investment (ROI) and profitability. If I gave you an unlimited budget, then inorganic growth, or growth through acquisition, would let you easily hit any revenue target. You would just buy companies until their combined revenue hit the goal you had. Problem solved, right?
While for some companies acquisition is a core weapon in their arsenal, generally the mixed bag of acquired company profitability and the ongoing challenges of integration of the different companies would likely fail on sustainability and ROI. A reality of business, especially large enterprise, is the sensitivity to a predictable, defined return on investment, so we will consider that in our process. Cost matters, and as you think about a successful growth plan, it has to include the level of expenditure required to achieve that growth.
Simply put, growth strategy is a plan to drive revenue growth. More practically, it’s a way that leaders of businesses think about how they will align resourcing with opportunity to achieve a goal. As an optimist coming through the ranks in the consulting industry, I’ve always
