Status quo will never achieve your company’s potential.
As business growth rates continue to stall or decline, companies must be weary on how they set their own growth expectations. There is a huge difference between the status quo and an organization’s potential.
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Looking across industry sectors, we continue to see some frightening statistics as it relates to growth - if you could even call it growth. Retail is only growing at 2%; Financial services at 1.1%; Apparel at 0.3% and Auto at 0.2% to name a few industries.
It’s not a good situation in most sectors. But that’s not the scariest part. The ugly fact with these abysmal growth rates is that they are quickly becoming status quo. Furthermore, many organizations base their own growth targets on these industry / status quo trends. That is a recipe for long term disaster.
We believe that companies have more opportunity in front of and within them than the stagnant status quo.
“40% percent of survey respondents blamed ‘day-to-day decisions’ that essentially pay the bill, but undermine our stated strategy to change.”
By operating at a mindset of industry status quo, we keep our organizations out of the realm of creativity and possibility. We get caught up in the idea of legacy, “we’ve always done it this way” mindsets and paralysis of short term versus long term thinking. By changing perspectives, targets and strategies, companies can not only define what their potential could be, but to chart a course to realize it.
Define the “Potential”
When we work with our clients on their business growth challenges, we start with defining the potential the company has in the marketplace, both today and tomorrow. We do this by getting to the core essence of an organization’s value proposition, offering and reason to believe. We then extract that into the opportunities in the marketplace today and the trends facing tomorrow.
Strategy development
The next step is to develop strategies that fully operationalize the organization connecting the core to the potential. This manifests in many different ways depending on the organization, but will ultimately result in refreshed value propositions, audience definitions, business models, implementation roadmaps and operational plans. All of which are strategically implemented to start taking action on achieving an organization’s potential.
Implementation roadmap
Finally, we work with them to develop an implementation roadmap to ensure we hit short term targets while working towards the long term potential. The idea with the implementation roadmap is to get quick wins to kickstart movement while strategically planning events to expand the momentum until the potential is realized.
Is your company living its full potential? Probably not.