Strategies For Driving Transformative Growth in Your Business by Michael-Bryant Hicks
Business growth means different things to different businesses. For some, it means increasing revenues or expanding their customer base; for others, it could mean optimizing systems and processes to enhance performance.
No matter the strategy used, effective growth transformation requires persistence and agility in execution. Here are a few strategies to assist:
1. Take a Long-Term View
As you devise strategies to propel transformative growth in your business, it is crucial to remember that transformation takes time and commitment. Rushing the process may result in change for its own sake without realizing real results. Clearly communicate your vision while linking all change efforts to build organizational momentum effectively.
Michael-Bryant Hicks, a juris doctor from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, highlights that setting ambitious goals for your business and setting out a plan that helps ensure customer acquisition are key components in creating momentum to take bolder steps as your organization expands.
Implementing large-scale business growth initiatives can be challenging because leaders are unwilling or unable to change themselves or their teams and processes. Therefore, the most successful companies prioritize leadership development programs as a central element of change management strategies, making change management an integral component of all business operations and prioritizing it as part of core priorities.
Success criteria should also be established, tracked, and measured during business growth initiatives. Their leadership team should establish them early to ensure the organization is progressing toward meeting those objectives.
Michael-Bryant Hicks, who is also a legal and business executive with more than twenty years of experience guiding public companies, believes that consumer goods brands might choose to develop their product offering to set themselves apart from competition while home goods startups might create unique experiences for customers to stand out. Both strategies aim to attract new customers while capitalizing on their companies' existing capabilities and resources.
2. Take an Exploratory Approach
As per Michael-Bryant Hicks, the former Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary at Indianapolis-based Apria, Inc., when considering transformative growth strategies for your business, it is wise to adopt an exploratory approach. This allows you to test various ideas and identify those most suited to the culture and capabilities of your company. Your company should also be equipped to implement any necessary changes for success. Ensure your change champions have access to training and support needed to identify operational inefficiencies and determine whether your leadership teams have enough capacity for transformation projects. Project tracking tools and scorecards are great ways to monitor these metrics so you know when it's time for a change or when your organization might not be prepared to undertake new initiatives.
Small business growth strategies should be explored, and other forms of expansion should also be explored. Mergers, partnerships, and acquisitions may offer high returns in terms of increased revenue and customer reach; however, these expansion methods involve higher levels of risk and require substantial planning time and preparation.
Diversification is another strategy to increase your company's revenues, such as expanding into unchartered markets or offering products or services not targeted in the past. While this growth strategy may require your investment of time and resources, it has the potential for the highest total shareholder returns.
Flexibility in business growth strategies is paramount, so always watching the big picture should always be on your mind. Be ready to adjust and reevaluate them based on the market traction they generate. For instance, if a new geographical focus doesn't produce the desired result, you should be ready to move away from that location.
Overall, it is key to remember that transformative growth requires a shift in culture rather than simply new technologies or processes. Successful transformations involve creating a vision of where you want to go with behaviors that support it from the beginning - this makes developing both your strategic direction and organizational culture in an integrated manner paramount.
3. Invest in Your Ongoing Transformation Capabilities
As any business leader knows, transformation needs can come from various sources. They could include new competitors, technological disruptions, shifts in customer behavior, or simply the desire to foster innovation or revitalize a failing enterprise. Whatever their cause, successful transformation must balance maintaining performance while investing in skills, technologies, and resources required for rapid growth and seizing new opportunities.
As per Michael-Bryant Hicks, business transformation should be seen as an ongoing capability rather than as an isolated project. Our research indicates that companies that incorporate transformation as a journey into their culture are more likely to find success with it than those who treat transformation like an isolated endeavor. A continuous mindset allows businesses to react faster by quickly assessing emerging threats or opportunities.
An agile and adaptable organizational framework and a solid grasp of managing business change effectively are required. A company must be able to systematically measure progress during transformation projects, with key metrics aligned to growth strategies being tracked by appropriate personnel. Leaders should have a plan if the transformation process encounters unexpected difficulties threatening its progress.
Success at business transformation requires discipline to unlock rapid efficiencies quickly (for instance, by cutting failing media or low-ROI trade shows) and generate short-term revenue gains (e.g., price adjustments). They must also identify comprehensive growth opportunities, including quick wins, midterm operational improvements, and long-term strategic advantages - these must then be continuously evaluated, prioritized, and refreshed into their pipeline to remain full of expansion opportunities.
4. Break Down the Opportunity
Whether it is growing a specific line of business, expanding to new territories, or investing in innovative customer acquisition strategies, your leadership team should have clear metrics for success. While specific KPIs will differ between businesses, if they are communicated early, they will help ensure your organization moves purposefully towards them and keep employees engaged, as it's easier for them to understand how their efforts contribute towards the overall goal.
As you implement your growth strategy, it is key that you remain flexible to make adjustments that will enable you to achieve the desired results. For instance, you might discover that one geographic expansion strategy isn't producing as anticipated in terms of market traction; should this happen, try shifting focus onto another location or altering it altogether.
Michael-Bryant Hicks, with experience in large-scale deal-making making in the healthcare and life sciences space as the lead lawyer in consummating some of the largest deals of the last decade, suggests that your marketing initiative might not be performing as anticipated; in such instances, try testing different approaches or tweaking messaging to better connect with customers. Successful implementation requires patience and flexibility as business environments constantly shift and change.
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