Four Ways to Grow Your Company

Companies often confuse building a new business with repositioning one. A new company usually starts with a core competence that takes advantage of a weakness in the marketplace by calling attention to what it can do better. Adding new markets by offering new products is a great way to grow a company, but if the strategy requires the physics of organic growth—which is the most difficult to kick start and usually takes the longest to achieve strong growth—the results can be disappointing.

Another growth strategy is through acquisitions. They typically produce better returns than organic growth, but they also usually require a serious amount of time and development to meld the two cultures into one productive organization. Also, new companies bring new challenges that weren’t necessarily anticipated adding further time constraints to the newly formed company.

For most companies, there are four ways to grow using its own resources that are more easily controlled:

1. Going lean and mean—getting rid of everything that is not a "Core" aspect of the business including payroll, accounting, reception, manufacturing, etc.
2. Using advanced technology—deploying end-to-end supply chain management to bring products to bear just in time to eliminate costs.
3. Rapid prototyping—designing and introducing new products into the market faster than all other competitors.
4. Jet-Stream Internet Channels—leveraging the fastest Internet services available and linking all customers with the best solutions available.

Having a clear vision of what you want your company to achieve and how it is going to exploit its plan is the last major key to growing a company successfully. Incremental changes are safer to make, of course, but will rarely produce the rapid growth that a daring strategy can. And equally important is to have everyone on your management team believe in the new strategy and program. Without their full support, success is significantly more difficult to achieve.

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