3 Strategies to Grow Your Business 3X Faster
The Aston Martin Valkyrie goes 250 miles per hour.
The Bugatti Chiron Sport 261 MPH.
And the Hennessey Venom F5 301 MPH.
Fast is good. Fast is cool. Fast is AWESOME!
Want to turn your marketing into the Venom F5 and grow your business faster? 2X faster? Even 3X faster? There are various things that you can do to grow your business. To grow even faster, though, there are several key strategies you should execute that powerfully accelerate and amplify results.
If you’re aiming for 5% or 10% growth, then this post doesn’t really apply to you. But if you’re looking to scale substantially, then read on.
What you’ll find are three strategies to grow your business 3X faster. These are the fulcrums that give your growth a shot in the arm. They are your accelerants. Start implementing them, and grow faster.
1. Focus on Results
Too many companies focus on what they do.
Having great products or services is critical. But to focus on your products or services is not a growth strategy. It’s a product strategy. (Or, of course, a service strategy.)
Want to transform your growth?
Focus on client results instead.
Help them achieve goals and solve problems better than competitors. Enable them to see tangible results. Show them a better future.
Prove the results you deliver for them. Case studies. Client features. Testimonials. Client interviews. Client references. Before/after examples. Etc.
Look at the Stratabeat website as an example. We have 16 client success stories along with 25 client testimonials.
The office space consulting firm Officeworks includes 35 portfolios in its website.
The collaboration and project management software company Wrike includes more than 50 case studies in its website.
Create a methodology and prove the reliability of the results. Show that you get results repeatedly.
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2. Up the Ante and Make Big, Bold Bets
As your business grows, you’ll need to increase the pile of chips you push into the center of the table. That is, if you want transformative change and 3X revenue.
Little bets may give the illusion of being safer, but actually they give you far less advantage and make it much more likely that no one will even notice.
Making big, bold, decisive bets is one of your most reliable ways to break through all the noise, gain attention and get word of mouth flowing.
Go big. Go bold. Be decisive.
As my book Rethink Your Marketing proved, tinkering around the edges doesn’t get results. Big, bold, decisive action does. The book includes more than 50 examples of companies and brands that thought big, but more importantly then acted big. It was only through big, bold, decisive marketing that growth was unleashed.
One of the boldest things we did at a previous company was to fire half the clients and focus exclusively on software companies as our target audience segment. This forced everyone at the company to be hyper focused, galvanizing the value that we brought to software companies. Revenue INCREASED by 250% and the company was sold for a multiple of annual revenue.
3. Always Be Building Two Businesses, Not One
Build your business of today, while building your business of tomorrow in parallel.
If you are not innovating and creating your business of tomorrow as a core focal point, you will greatly limit your growth.
Expanding into complementary sectors is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. Bain & Company conducted a five-year study of specific growth-driving moves by 1,850 companies to determine how successful companies achieve sustainable, profitable growth. The research revealed that companies realize their most ongoing, profitable growth when they push out the boundaries of their core business into an adjacent space. The study also found that successful growth companies consistently develop a formula for expanding those boundaries in predictable, repeatable ways.
Another strategy for building your business of tomorrow is to disrupt your own current business, getting ahead of competitors or potential future competitors.
Look at Salesforce, and how they built their core CRM software but then also built the Salesforce AppExchange to 10X impact.
Look at Mailchimp, first focused on email marketing, and now a platform including a marketing CRM, landing pages, social media and even postcards.
Look at Amazon, first a seller of books online and now a seller of just about anything you can imagine. Today, the company’s cloud computing platform alone generates more than $25.7 billion yearly.
Basecamp reinvented itself when it went from being a web design agency to selling the project management software it had built to manage its design projects. The software company now has more than 3.3 million customers.
Wipro started out by selling vegetable oil. Today, it’s a $8 billion+ IT consulting firm.
If you ain’t building for tomorrow, you ain’t gonna grow tomorrow.
Bonus Strategy: A Better Goals Achievement Framework
I promised three strategies to grow your business 3X faster. And I’m confident that if you execute on the three strategies presented above, you’ll accelerate your growth.
There’s one more ingredient that I’ll add here as a bonus.
Many companies establish goals. But many of them do it the wrong way, hindering growth. When defining goals, the vast majority of companies focus on lag goals, which are goals that you can only achieve after the fact, in the rear-view mirror. For example, increase annual revenue by 20%, etc. You can achieve this only at the very end of the timeframe, at which point, it’s far too late to take any action or to make any changes for the sake of the goal.
If you want to grow faster, build process goals and adhere to them like a hawk.
Goals based on lag measures are important to establish direction. However, process goals are what’s needed to ensure you’re on track, meeting weekly, monthly and quarterly milestones for ultimate goal achievement.
It’s through an obsessive focus on process goals that you’ll get stuff done. And when you get stuff done, you’ll move the needle. And when you track and analyze your process goals, you’ll be able to optimize your plans and activities in a way that further accelerates your goals achievement.
Prioritizing process goals over lag-measured outcome goals is the entire premise of the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling. Furthermore, all of this focus on the process is backed up by Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy. The biggest mistake that people make in setting goals, Cuddy says, is that they focus only on the outcome, not the process. A better approach is to embrace the process, and focus on each of the steps in the process that will ultimately lead to achievement of the goal.
And this is where many marketing teams get tripped up. They have too many lag goals and few, if any, process goals. Instead, establish as many process goals as are necessary to ensure the achievement of your ambitious end goals.
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