Growing the Top Line

CHAPTER 7The Process Overview: How to Build a Growth Strategy

Having a repeatable, structured, teachable process and a consistent, well‐understood vocabulary as you talk about planning growth is critical. The best of the best can do this across business units consistently. Process matters.

Process and rigor have quite a bit to do with planning successful growth, especially if you are trying to get beyond being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right offering. There’s always a luck factor that you cannot ignore, but corporations of scale need to be more than lucky; they need to be consistent. Our process leverages internal knowledge and external assessment to drive down risk and improve the likelihood of sustainable repeatable success.

Like a master chef, the ingredients, how they are introduced, and the cooking method combine with timing and temp to create a consistently fantastic dish. Successfully creating sustainable, scalable growth is very similar in its need for consistency of process.

This book presents both a framework and a process. We just did a quick review of the Growth Framework, and it’s what I had the most fun creating. Based on my experience in growth strategy development, it’s one of the most powerful ways to think through the different ways a company can grow. But it’s a tool, and like any tool it needs to be used in a process. When building a home, a contractor always uses a table saw, but only to cut lumber to meet the needs ...