Lessons from a Business Growth Strategist

An experienced advisor will define a calculated approach to achieving the company's growth objective. That means a data-driven and measurable approach to grow revenue or market share at the least cost and in the shortest time.

An advisor should capitalize on your company's core competencies, design competitive advantages that create or extend differentiation, show exactly how the company will win customers, position the brand relative to competitors, and quantify the investment needed to achieve the growth goal.

The best business professionals are those who obsess over the creation of customer and business value.

Experienced professionals avoid loosely defined goals and ambitious statements. They instead compare alternate approaches and engineer your company growth to achieve the most important goals.

They also create roadmaps that show how and when the company will achieve those goals. That path must sequence needed actions that drive predictable and measured execution to a defined destination.

Strategy is a precursor to everything that comes after. Great execution won't get you very far if your strategy is wrong.

It's also your best tool to optimally allocate scarce resources in a way that realizes the greatest revenue, profits and market share.

A growth strategy defines the pathway to achieve targeted financial results in the shortest time and least cost. It designs and communicates the company goal, identifies the actions to achieve it, mobilizes resources to execute those actions, and measures results in real-time.

Good business strategies are built on core competencies and define routes to create or extend differentiation. It's important to define competitive advantage in specific and measurable terms, to know why customers will choose your products, and to position the brand as unique relative to competitors. Business guru Michael Porter advises, "Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value."

Good business strategies demonstrate clear purpose, priorities and intent. They make it clear what staff need to start doing, stop doing or do differently.

Strategies are needed to achieve business outcomes that matter or outcomes that have been elusive.

A successful strategy engineers customer and business outcomes to maximize growth. It defines the path to achieve targeted revenue results in the least time, cost and risk. It focuses on the tactics, processes and technologies that produce the outcomes that most matter and avoids wasting time with activities that don't.

It shows what's vital to achieve targeted outcomes. It's more important to do the right things than do things right. That's because doing low value, mediocre or non-essential things right delivers no growth.

Equally important, it will identify what not to do. If you're incurring time or expense on efforts not directly supporting your strategy, you are off course and delaying achievement of the most important goals.

It's a tenuous exercise to determine how to best focus the company's limited resources on the biggest opportunities. It requires tough tradeoffs and ceasing comfortable but lower priority programs. In the wise words of Michael Porter, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do."

The best company strategies are grounded in buyer insights, solve for the customer, identify the most lucrative customer and market opportunities, and stay laser focused on the methods that drive the most revenue contribution. They enable you to scale growth without scaling the resources needed to achieve that growth.

A recurring pattern among lower growth companies is not knowing what methods deliver the biggest revenue uplift and financial returns. This results in staff pursuing what they know instead of what is most effective. This arbitrary execution normally results in a best-case scenario of low, incremental and often temporary growth, or a more likely scenario of preserving the status quo.

Research published in The Business Growth Report found that the highest growth companies do not enhance the status quo. They disrupt it. Their pursuit of growth is intentional, holistic, data-driven and measured pursuant to a documented strategy.

The research also found that most lower growth companies operated with shallow or arbitrary strategies. This made their methods suspect, their execution aimless, and their measure of success unclear.

In contrast, the growth leaders used a calculated combination of business development methods, evidence-based best practices, and platform technologies to achieve extraordinary results.

Without a clear plan, the company is navigating without a map. Instead of taking the express lane, execution looks more like aimless wandering. Goals will be delayed, degraded or not achieved.

One more thing. It's important to first focus on doing the right things and then doing those things right. The order here is important. Doing the right things drives effectiveness. Doing them right creates efficiency. Being efficient without being effective is a losing proposition. As said by the legendary Peter Drucker, "Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right."

The top three criteria to consider when selecting an advisor are consulting experience, industry knowledge and technical skills.

Professionals with experience and industry knowledge will be able to show strategic methodologies, execution roadmaps, industry insights and best practices. They won't answer your time and cost questions with "it depends." Instead, they will state defined outcomes, prescribe a repeatable process, state assumptions, and answer time and cost questions with specifics.

The best candidates will demonstrate impressive technical skills such as enterprise program management, agile execution certifications, and relevant technology certifications. Technology is often under-assessed. But recognize it's a critical enabler to bringing data management, process automation and information reporting to your growth programs.

Consulting fees vary based on the market served and the experience of the professional. Experienced advisors serving large companies charge an average of $300 to $475 per hour. Professionals serving smaller companies generally charge less.

Johnny Grow strategic consultants serve midmarket companies and have significant experience (more than 26 years' experience on average.) They charge an average of $200 to $260 per hour depending on industry experience and technical skills needed for a specific engagement.