Optimizing Growth to Create Wealth

What is your dream? Why did you get into business?

Achieving a sustainable rate of growth is the goal of every business. The businesses profitability allows the owner and employees the opportunity to fulfill their dreams. Isn’t this the reason you got into business in the first place?

The owners’ objective is to build a business by adding value that at some point results in a degree of wealth and prosperity. The simple logic of this is that adding value to the business by optimizing growth over time should be good for owners and employees and customers.

Today the challenges to the CEO of growing a business are completely different from those of running the day to day business. Complexity, economic factors, and competition in business have dramatically increased and are changing at an exponential rate.

In difficult times some companies become inwardly focused. Great companies continue to stay focused outwardly, on their markets and customers. Providing customer value, what the customer is willing to pay for the product or service is where they are looking.

A business creates superior customer value by focusing expertise, processes and capital to deliver value to the customer at a price they are willing to pay while generating profit. By defining real and superior value the company creates a gap between the customer and the supporting infrastructure that must be closed in order to deliver products and services that are perfectly aligned with what the customer is willing to pay for.

This value must be delivered profitably. The capital requirement to define and deliver customer value is not insignificant. If the business could increase its productive output, more effort could be applied to strategic delivery of value to its customer.

There is a powerful connection between delivering superior customer value and the businesses inspired employees. In an environment where it is reported that 82% of workers are disengaged from their work, it is the customer that pays the price.

What can leadership do to increase the output of the resources it is already paying for?

Defining customer value provides the purpose through which the leadership of the business can communicate to its employees what the company is trying to achieve. If leadership can provide a vision and direction and fit talent to required roles, the result will be an inspired and engaged workforce that achieves long term growth and profit.

If the organization continues to do things the same way how can it expect anything to change? So how does the organization do this? Here are five key steps:

1. Develop and communicate a clear vision.

2. Current state- having the courage to honestly assess where the business is and what needs to be fixed.

3. Building a growth strategy by identifying the key leverage points to lift the business forward.

4. Fitting talent to required roles – putting an inspired and engaged workforce in place.

5. Implementation – applying focus and the right amount of pressure to the leverage points until there is change.

Whether a one, one hundred or one thousand person business, this is simply a responsibility that no owner can walk away from. This is what the owner/CEO does.