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Running a business is a dance full of paradoxes

IDEA

In the era of blitz scaling and 10X growth strategies, is there still room for firms to adopt good, old fashioned, incremental growth? Would companies such as Manji, or Chandaria, or Davis and Shirtliff grow to their current level if they were founded today rather than decades ago?

Would their founders, beginning today, focus on rapid, push-based expansion, or would they refine their service proposition and solidify their customer base then manage the resulting pull-based growth? These questions give me pause.

I am no detractor of technology or scale. I champion business growth. What I struggle with is committing to arbitrary expansion plans. Granted, growth is good, but should it be pursued purely for its own sake? Shouldn’t growth be at the service of the company’s mission and vision?

Even with their seemingly ostentatious plans to hit ever growing turnovers and reach ever growing customer numbers, I think business owners are more in danger of limiting themselves than of dreaming big.

It seems to me that it is more popular to take the shinier, more pompous route of quick growth rather than the arduous and boring yet more solid, purpose-driven way.

We like to throw in buzzwords such as “blockchain” to our business ideas to make them seem cleverer, or we frantically monitor our digital footprint to see how it is spreading. These are good things, but only when subject to a compelling mission.

Even for successful technology companies that achieved massive scale, they took time to properly develop their products before they begun to gain traction.

Running a business is a dance full of paradoxes: moving fast and moving slow; doing unscalable things while hacking the formula to scale; creating a market product and then tearing it apart to figure what elements make up its core; and so on.

Running a business is about balance and timing. Putting out a product prematurely, or taking on growth before the firm has the structures to absorb it is a fatal mistake.

As obvious as this seems, the most successful businesses are those that solve a market problem. Although this truism has been belaboured, perhaps the saying has not properly sunk in yet.

Market problems do not have to be unusually novel and out of this world; in fact, the simplest solutions are often the best ones.

Find out what makes your target clients tick before you ramp up your sales efforts. To do anything else would be to work in reverse. Slow and steady wins the race. Take your time to build a service proposition that customers will find irresistible.