Growth worth
fighting for.

Healthy growth.

Most companies measure growth on financial indicators alone. Number of employees, annual revenue, and monthly sales goals all tell you if you’re expanding your empire. What they don’t tell you is whether or not your business is actually healthy. That important question requires a multidimensional approach that respects the power of intangible forces right beside the tangible.

Unhealthy growth.

If you can’t seem to get over that next hill, it could be it’s the wrong hill. Or just not the next one. Stalled and stuck organizations tend to look at the numbers and…try to fix the numbers. But most sales and financial numbers are lagging indicators, not leading ones. Looking deeper at the internal, cultural, or strategic challenges is the place to start. If you have both an internal problem and a financial one, it can be tempting to try to fix the financial challenge first—but it’s almost a certainty that the monetary problems are downstream of the internal challenges. Healthy growth demands a healthy foundation.

Our 5-minute diagnostic can start to identify what’s hindering your growth.

All of life is about relationships.

Therefore, so is growth.

If you can find the sweet spot where your customer, brand, and market incentives align, you can find growth.

Customer Realities

We’ve all heard platitudes about putting your customer first, but this means more than data on how your Instagram ads perform among female millennials in zip code 75033. A real relationship with your audience requires more, and can deliver more powerful results.

For decades, the taxi business was built for the taxi business. Razor-thin margins, hefty regulations, sky-high costs, and challenging labor markets all dictated the model. When somebody finally got in the back of the cab and asked how to rebuild the entire thing around the customer’s needs, Uber – and a revolution – was the result.

It might seem intuitive, but when was the last time you really looked at your business through the eyes of your customer? They have fears, needs, hopes, and challenges—and they’re different from yours. But you can’t understand your business without really understanding your customer.

Brand Realities

No two companies are alike. But that’s not always apparent to the customer.

Have you ever wondered why every plumber uses the same white vans and blue uniforms, why every car dealership talks about the lowest prices and how they’re open Sunday, and why every funeral home uses a script font, a dove in the logo, and a sepia-toned photo of the founder on its website?

Whatever your business, you face the same black holes. Understanding your category is different from understanding your business. Something makes you unique and, by definition, it’s something the other folks can’t offer. Knowing exactly what that is, distilling it, and communicating it clearly inside and outside your walls is vital to building meaningful, compelling relationships with your employees and your customers.

Market Realities

What’s going on in your market? This is bigger than knowing what your competitors’ prices are so you can edge them out. Where is new R&D needed? Where will the next disruption come from? What old assumptions are phasing out, and what new dynamics are flowing in? What aspects of your business model need to change, and how are your customers changing?

A brand is defined by its relationship with its market as much as it is by its relationship with its employees and its customers. Understanding the dynamics impacting your competitors – and how you’ll be different – is key to a successful growth strategy.

We’ve all heard platitudes about putting your customer first, but this means more than data on how your Instagram ads perform among female millennials in zip code 75033. A real relationship with your audience requires more, and can deliver more powerful results.

For decades, the taxi business was built for the taxi business. Razor-thin margins, hefty regulations, sky-high costs, and challenging labor markets all dictated the model. When somebody finally got in the back of the cab and asked how to rebuild the entire thing around the customer’s needs, Uber – and a revolution – was the result.

It might seem intuitive, but when was the last time you really looked at your business through the eyes of your customer? They have fears, needs, hopes, and challenges—and they’re different from yours. But you can’t understand your business without really understanding your customer.

How’s your relationship with yourself?

It might not be easy to grapple with the realities of organizational health, but it’s fairly straightforward to start understanding them. We’ve studied thousands of executives to understand the factors most closely associated with healthy growth.

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