Top 3 Strategies to Achieve Growth
Leadership
In today’s world, organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change that is occurring in the marketplace. Growth, sustainability, relevance, and future viability discussions have become commonplace in the Board room and amongst Leadership Teams as organizations strive not only to survive, but to thrive.
Many strategic solutions have emerged from discussions and planning, however, the three that we see most frequently discussed as the means of ensuring future viability are:
Get Bigger
Get Niche
Get Integrated
Get Bigger: The pressure to consolidate, merge, affiliate, or partner is being felt by companies across every industry and sector. Increasing size as a growth strategy provides several competitive advantages:
Offer increased salaries in a market where talent acquisition is difficult
Achieve scale to obtain the resources and capacity to innovate, make capital investment, and support further consolidation
Acquire and implement advanced systems that deepen customer engagement and data acquisition and management
Broaden service offerings, becoming a one-stop-shop to increase value to customers
Improve quality and capabilities by acquiring organizations that add value by improving service or quality
Get Niche: For those organizations that lack the desire to increase in size, getting very niche in strategic focus is a necessity. Getting Niche does not mean getting small. Instead it means focusing on your ability to own a market space in a very specific area of service in which you have the ability to:
Own the market for the niche space you are operating in with a competitive advantage that others lack
Design or invest in technology solutions that allow you to improve service and the customer experience
Shift resources, focus, and ability, to differentiate yourself in the market towards the niche area
Design a strategy that will scale and grow your ability to be a leader in the niche area of focus
Get Integrated: Organizations are becoming more reliant on partnerships, collaborations, and shared services in order to survive. However, sometimes the “too big to fail” approach does not work. When this is the case, you need to look at becoming “too integrated to fail”. Getting integrated allows companies the ability to:
Entrench with partners to deepen relationships and share resources that may be too expensive to acquire alone
Bridge relationships to work more effectively for the benefit of the customer
Collaborate with multiple partners, strengthening relationships that could result in mergers or new models for growth
Share data and information to position yourself in the market across multiple companies serving a single market
Regardless of what strategy your company has decided or decides to embark on, each comes with equal benefits and drawbacks. However, there is one core theme that plays across each strategy, which is the utilization of technology. Technology is allowing us to interact, communicate, service, and work together differently. This concept may seem odd to organizations that consider themselves service providers, but we have entered a time of technological advancement that is disrupting the traditional ways we think about conducting business and providing service.
If you are interested in learning more about the planning trends we are seeing or which strategy might be best for you and your organization, please connect with us.