The 7 Fundamentals of Sustainable Growth

When it comes to business, most of us are focused on growth. We read books, watch webinars, attend meetings, and more to get tips and tricks for more growth. However, there’s a huge piece of the growth puzzle that many of us are overlooking: making sure our business can sustain growth. I’ve seen dozens of businesses collapse due to overlooking this. It’s like building a skyscraper with no foundation. So, before you jump on that next “shiny object” promising you the secrets to amazing growth, do a check-in with your business and make sure it has the 7 fundamentals for sustainable growth in place.

1. Authentic Purpose

Every company needs to decide why it is doing whatever it does. That is the company’s leading light, guiding every aspect from product development, sales, customer management, and recruitment. A strong purpose drives growth and profitability in the right direction, by informing almost every decision and action taken by the owner and employees.

Companies must reexamine their sense of purpose repeatedly, and ensure that the company serves it well to achieve sustainable success. An inspiring and authentic purpose allows:

• A consistent, constant sense of force
• Pragmatic and continuous innovation
• A powerful emotional engagement with its partners and customers and within the company too

The authentic purpose of a company makes it easier to create services and products of value when a business has a clear vision. For example, Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, always said that he sold hope rather than makeup.

2. A Powerful Brand

You need to understand how vital it is to build emotional connections and brand equity with your customers if you want to create a scalable business. Those attachments connect clients with your products and will keep them returning to you. Sustaining and developing those relationships over time is responsible for building a brand.

Here are some fundamental rules to influence, shape, connect, and lead with your brand and products.

1. Choose your appropriate audience: Trying to be all things to all individuals is the surest road to product failure.
2. Connect with the people: Ensure that your audience are emotionally attached to yor brand, which is grounded in your confidence in your products.
3. Inspire your customers: An inspirational message influences more than one, which tries to showcase lots of product ideas, functions, and features.

A brand identity that is not fully formed cannot be rescued by any marketing plan. If you lack marketing budget, begin generating awareness amongst target customer bases, by creating compelling content for social media and publisher sites.

3. Partnership and Collaboration

You might be tempted to do everything yourself in the beginning when ambitions are high and funds are few. While there is no harm with such an approach at first, attempting more than you can handle can be damaging, especially in areas where you lack experience or skill. In this modern era, finding talented expertise is easy, so there’s no reason to go it alone for long.

Numerous marketplaces and websites provide specialized resources such as banking, legal services, finance, sales, and development to design. You can try small projects even on a budget. You need to know exactly what you want done & putting resources to achieve tangible goals.

4. Customer Retention

An organization can easily spend one fifth the cost of acquiring new customers compared to retaining current ones. A 2% increase in customer retention may decrease the company’s expenses by 10%. Depending on the industry, reducing customer defection rates by five percent increases profitability by 25% to 130%.

Not only this, but if you have noticed a high customer turnover, that’s a red flag that there is something wrong in the customer experience and/or relations pipeline, and this MUST be fixed before you start pumping more customers into it. Take a good, honest look at how satisfied your current clients or customers are before you set your sights on acquiring more.

5. Community

The ecosystem of a business is an economic community of individuals and organizations that interact in countless ways, and encourages companies to competitively evolve their capabilities.

On certain occasions can grow around a product, such as headphones and other mobile equipment gear. Ecosystem thinking too has become a foundation stone of web publishing. Many unpaid contributors create content for popular outlets for developing personal brands and increasing their own readerships.

As ecosystems provide the supporting structure for the business within them, they are vital for sustainable growth. They spread “stakeholdership” from the business into the society.

6. Repeatable Sales

Creating a unique brand or product is not enough. Creating a scalable business requires a repeatable sales process. Signing up a few customers is different from designing and implementing sales processes, which can be deployed repeatedly at a higher scale.

• You have created a scaleable sales model when:
• You are able to add new hires at the same productivity level as the sales leader or entrepreneur.
• You can consistently increase sources of your customer leads.
• You have a consistently forecastable revenue and conversion rate.
• It costs you less to acquire new customers than the amount you’ll earn from them in the future.
• Customers consistently get the right products at the right time and place.

A repeatable sales model builds the platform to scale, but requires some research and experimentation to find one that is actually sustainable in your business.

7. Flexible, Adaptive Leadership

Business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs must become the leader the business requires in each growth stage to continue growing. This requires a keen sense of strategy, self-awareness, and introspection in both short and long terms.

Flexible and adaptive leadership style comes from being mindful, through which we understand the relationships of interconnection, and how to use them to innovate, create, and lead. This allows us to set up our organizations and lives in a way leading to long-term value creation. Continually investing in our capabilities, both as organizations and individuals, is the most sustainable way to create value.

Again, having these fundamentals in place in your business is essential for sustainable growth. However, it’s often easier said than done to juggle them all. Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. Come join us in the Facebook Group to discuss business tips and strategies, ask questions, and provide answers to other business owners – all for free.