How Growth-Hungry Companies Get and Stay on Top

I have always been fascinated about what makes certain leaders and their companies get and stay on top. Why are some businesses wildly successful and stable, while others in the same industry, with the same opportunities, who fight the same battles day after day, level out in their growth and never reach their full potential? What, exactly, do successful companies and their leaders do and focus on that’s different?

After helping build a business to $1 billion, selling and subsequently interviewing and coaching over 2,000 executives in growth-hungry companies, I have been very surprised by the answers I’ve found. I thought I would find very complex and difficult-to-implement strategies; but I discovered just the opposite. It’s all about predicting and preparing for what turn out to be overly obvious and embarrassingly simple root cause problems (see The Top 12 Warning Signs of Success™). I have come to recognize significant, predictable patterns that are true for every business. Although the way your business grows is unique to your situation, the challenges that growth itself presents are common to all.

Experience has taught me that by focusing on the right things, depending where your company is on The Business Lifecycle™, you will be able to stop “growing” your business through trial and error and start building a business that can “scale” — and there is a difference!  The subtle but real difference is how normal growing pains are approached. Growing a business uses “see & solve” strategies; building a business that can scale uses “predict & prepare” strategies. Growing a business gets you on top; building a business that can scale gets you on top and keeps you there. The problem is, normal growing pains are often masked as successes, so they are invisible to the naked eye. This is what sets up The Top 12 Warning Signs of Success™.

Do you recognize any of these problems in your company:Right Idea, Wrong Person; Nothing Kills Faster Than Success; Open Door, Closed Mind; Us vs. Them; Lots of Communication, NO Communicating; Sporadic Accountability; Hope Is Not a Strategy; Unrewarding Rewards; Incomplete Analysis Breeds Complete Chaos; A Rake Organization; Forced Choice Management; The Road to Hell Is Paved with 'Good' Systems.

If you do, you're not alone. Most companies encounter them at some point. It's how you deal with them that makes the difference.

Making the shift from being a problem-solver to a problem-predictor ultimately leaves every visionary leader feeling energized, inspired and hopeful that they have what it takes to scale their business to a size and complexity far beyond anything they have ever been a part of before. 

Although I cannot condense every possible solution and strategy for a growth-hungry company into one article, I’ve provided a simple guide that explains what visionary business leaders should be focusing on, depending at which level their company is performing.

Click to read the guide: Growth Strategies for Companies at Levels I, II and III