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Business Growth Stage 4: Sustainable Growth

DESCRIPTION

If attaining growth is hard, then sustaining it is even harder. After successfully scaling the company, your organization must make sure that it is able to sustain its growth over the long term.

As a much larger and more complex organization, your company will face new challenges that will test its ability to sustain an upward trajectory. One of the biggest is ensuring that the complexities of running a bigger and bigger business do not distract people from the fundamental tasks that determine long-term success.

Long-term sustainable growth requires continuous change and reinvention. You must constantly look for signs your existing business model needs changing, by understanding shifting market conditions, competitive threats, customers’ ever-changing needs, new technologies, and so on.

TRANSCRIPT

If attaining growth is hard, then sustaining it is even harder. After successfully scaling the company, the organization must make sure that it is able to sustain its growth over the long-term.

As a much larger and more complex organization, the company will face new challenges that will test its ability to continue its upward climb. One of the biggest is ensuring that the complexities of running a bigger and bigger business don’t distract people from the fundamental tasks that determine long-term success.

Although the company is succeeding on a large scale and either has become or has the potential to become a market leader…continued growth is not guaranteed.

For sustainable growth, you need to develop and implement a strategic plan for locating new growth opportunities while the existing business is still growing. This means transforming existing markets, expanding to new markets, developing new products, creating new businesses, making acquisitions, launching an IPO, and so on.

Of course, this in turn creates the need to make the organizational and operational changes necessary to meet the requirements of higher levels of growth and success.

Long-term sustainable growth requires continuous change and reinvention. You have to constantly look for signs your business model needs changing.

The senior management team has to emerge as both operational leaders of their functional areas and strategic leaders of the company.

And you have to be able to amplify the entrepreneurial qualities of innovation; flexibility, risk-taking, and initiative that made the company successful in the first place and make sure they’re not drowned out by the increasing noise associated with size, scale, and scope.

Sustainable growth companies are continually questioning their assumptions, continually strengthening and improving their organizations, and continually finding new and better ways to meet customer needs so that the cycle of growth continues.