You Can't Shrink Your Way to Success

Growth IQ - Tiffani Bova - (Portfolio)

I remember it clearly...the first time I told a CEO "you can't shrink your way to success. The. Line seemed to hit him like a sledgehammer, jarring him from another cloudy discussion about layoffs, cost cutting, and delaying facility repairs. This was not the first discussion of this type; and while similar cost cutting had resulted in short lived bumps, this was not going to work much longer.

The fact that the concept of growth seemed somehow shocking spoke volumes about this particular executives mindset. I laid out a growth strategy and once the ball got rolling my line about shrinking to success moved from me being credited to the CEO assuming credit for it in a very short term when it started to work. I love it when a plan comes together. Growth can comes in many forms, in fact business growth strategist Tiffani Bova clearly defines ten growth strategies in her excellent new book, Growth IQ.

Ten Growth Paths

This really isn't brain surgery and Bova boils it down to ten pretty clear paths to growth:

1. Customer Experience - Inspire additional purchases and customer advocacy 
2. Customer Base Penetration - Sell more existing products to existing           customers
3. Market Acceleration - Expand into new markets with existing products
4. Product Expansion - Sell new products to existing customers
5. Customer and Product Diversification - Sell new products to new customers 
6. Optimize Sales- Streamline the sales process to increase productivity
7. Churn - Retain more customers
8. Partnerships - Leverage third-party alliances and channels
9. Co-optition - Cooperate with market or industry competitor 
10. Unconventional Strategies - Disruption of current thinking/process

Bova does a nice job of illustrating and detailing each of these growth paths with real world examples that are specific, without becoming esoteric or overly white-papery. The examples add substance to the action steps that you can put into play to get the ball rolling quickly. While each of these growth paths can be stand alone, she also makes the case that you can run on more than one of these paths at a time with the proper synchronization, so they don't bump not each other during execution. Timing is everything.

While I am not sure that Bova put the growth paths in any particular order, I am a big fan customer experience being great path to growth. Customer experience can be a huge differentiator and engendering loyalty can result in dynamic growth; with a great reduction in customer acquisition cost. The basic rule of business is it's cheaper to sell something to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer.

Bova also spells out the factors you should weigh when determining which growth path(s) you should choose. This is critical information because making the wrong choice can cause more damage to your business than a lack of growth. Growth IQ offers a phenomenal knowledge base from which to work on your growth evolution.