Why Efficiency is Essential for Growth

Efficiency: A Critical Step to Assure Successful Execution of Your Growth Strategy

There are two essentials for successful business growth:

A sustainable market opportunity
The ability to execute

Some years ago, a strategic planning guru asserted, “Too many growth strategies are based on wishful thinking.” Sometimes that wishful thinking is a function of an opportunity that is akin to having eyes bigger than your stomach. “We can grow by 100% as soon as we build AI into our product – even though we don’t have the capability or skills to make that a reality.” You are too smart to make that mistake.

It is more common for smart and successful business leaders to stumble when their company tries to execute a realistic growth strategy. This is because:

1) It is very challenging to continue to meet all your current obligations while simultaneously bringing aboard the new people and new technologies necessary to either enter a new market or to satisfy a larger share of your current market; and

2) When you grow, operational flaws –inefficiencies– that your experienced team knows how to work around today become costly bottlenecks under the strain of increased demand.

As my colleague, Bob Boehringer, likes to say, “When you open up the walls during a home renovation, you find the solutions to yesterday’s problems.” Those “solutions” are today’s problems because they cannot handle your emerging needs. (Click here for video.)

Another metaphor from Bob: Imagine you have a balloon with a pinhole leak. You can seal it with a piece of tape or a Band-Aid and live with that solution… until you need to grow. Growing your business is like putting more air in the balloon. The balloon will expand but the Band-Aid won’t. Eventually, the balloon – or your growth plan – will rupture.

Pole vault with inefficiency ball and chain Therefore, a precursor to executing your growth strategy –or implementing an innovative new technology– should be cleaning up the inefficiencies in your current processes.

Smart Growth: Before You Scale Up…

Your company has achieved its current levels of success due to years of delivering quality products/services and earning strong customer relationships. To ensure your company maintains those relationships and creates new, high-quality relationships, you must:

Document and standardize your operations so that your “one true process” is accessible by all… rather than residing only in the gray matter of your long-service employees.
Streamline and automate workflows to make it easier to handle more volume.
Only apply new IT investments to processes that have been cleaned up. You don’t want to automate non-value-added steps or keep in place workarounds that will undermine implementation.
Teach new employees how work should be done so, there is no drop off in quality as you grow.
Consistently measure the performance of your larger enterprise.

Your current success is the result of hard work, strong customer relationships, and consistent delivery. But to scale and sustain that success, your processes must evolve. Growth isn’t just about doing more; it’s about doing better.

With more than 30 years of experience helping organizations across all industries and sectors, Orion has the expertise to provide your leadership team with the targeted support needed to achieve sustainable growth and ongoing business success. Let us help you scale and sustain your success via Smart Growth.

–Paul King