Built to Grow

How to deliver accelerated, sustained and profitable business growth

Royston Guest

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119318095
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119318156
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

'This book is straightforward, factual and to the point. Any Leader responsible for business growth should read it! A blueprint full of practical ideas and tools to inspire you into action'—Craig Donaldson - Chief Executive Officer, Metro Bank (RANKED NUMBER ONE IN GLASSDOOR'S HIGHEST RATED CEO 2016)

If you asked a cross-section of business leaders, business owners and entrepreneurs what their biggest business challenge is, you would probably hear the same recurring thought: growing their business in a sustainable, predictable, yet profitable way – quickly.

It's a reality that most businesses and individuals never reach their full potential, always yearning for the 'thing' that will catapult them into significance, but never really finding it.

Whether you're an entrepreneur starting out, or a director, executive or business leader climbing the corporate ladder, the building blocks of Built to Grow are universally applicable.

Developed in the real world laboratory of thousands of businesses in twenty-seven countries spanning over two decades, Built to Grow is a proven, time-tested model to unlock the real potential in your business.

Avoid the common pitfalls of a trial and error approach to business growth. Built to Grow is full of practical strategies, tools and ideas, backed up with real world case studies to illustrate what can be achieved - leaving you equipped to transform your businesses performance and drive tangible results.

Built to Grow is destined to become your handbook, your 'go to' guide, your roadmap to accelerated, sustained and profitable business growth.

Chapter 1
The Fundamentals of Business Growth: Your AMR Strategy

Strategically, the primary purpose of a business is to Acquire, Maximize, and Retain the right customers. Everything that contributes to this is an investment; anything which doesn't, is a cost!

Because Built to Grow is focused on how to deliver accelerated, sustained, and profitable growth in your business, it makes perfect sense to launch straight into the fundamentals of business growth . . . and your AMR strategy. In this chapter, we're going to peel back the layers of the onion, get to the root of business growth and, using simple, practical ideas, give you insight into how you can deliver consistent, repeatable, predictable results in your business.

The First BIG Idea

Strategically, the primary purpose of a business is to Acquire, Maximize, and Retain the right customers. Everything that contributes to this is an investment; anything which doesn't, is a cost. Which activities in your business are an investment, and which are a cost?

Without customers, businesses don't exist. That's a simple fact which no business owner can dispute. The challenge is that most business owners, business leaders, and entrepreneurs over-engineer their business growth model, making it more complex than it needs to be. They introduce layers of management that stifle and delay decision-making. They create unnecessary systems, processes, and procedures that dilute the focus of their people from doing what they do best: Acquiring, Maximizing, and Retaining customers. Then they wonder why they're not delivering market or industry leading performance and growth!

You see, regardless of your industry, sector, business type, or whether you're in a B2B or B2C environment, there is a formula for success in delivering accelerated, sustained and profitable business growth. However, most business leaders, business owners, and entrepreneurs are either not aware of the success formula and its fundamental principles, or are simply not following it. I'm going to walk you through the success formula and detail the precise steps to personalize and apply it to your business.

Remember our first BIG idea:

Strategically, the primary purpose of a business is to Acquire, Maximize, and Retain the right customers. Everything that contributes to this is an investment; anything which doesn't, is a cost.

Let me break this into a couple of component parts:

1. ‘Strategically, the primary purpose of a business ...’
   Note the key word here is strategically. Over the years, customers and delegates have challenged me by saying ‘Royston, isn't the primary purpose of a business to fulfil a customer need?' My answer to this question is always: ‘Yes, you are 100% right'. However, in the context of your business growth formula, this is a given. Here we are focused on your business growth not your business essence.
   My focus is to help you build a business with the potential to deliver sustained growth, and therefore it is important to deepen your understanding of the fundamental principles of business growth and the levers you can pull in your business to achieve it.
2. ‘... Acquire, Maximize, and Retain the right customers’
   This statement contains the core principles, the hub of your business growth formula. Attract, Maximize, and Retain are three key words, which together form your AMR strategy. Lock those three letters firmly in your mind, as they are going to be a thread that runs throughout this book.

Your AMR Strategy

During good economic times, new business was probably easier to come by, and it didn't really matter if you lost a customer, because there was always another waiting in the wings. However, in a competitive market where multiple providers are chasing the same customers, and those customers are more demanding than ever, a structured, systematic, and sustainable business growth strategy is more important than ever.

Now, you may say ‘but what about reducing costs, surely that will increase my profits and therefore help me grow my business?' Again, this is true, but what I want you to focus on is unlocking the untapped potential of unlimited growth. Reducing costs is finite; you can only ever cut back so far before arriving at a base cost to serve and deliver your customer proposition. It's never a long-term strategy for sustained growth.

Buying other businesses can be another way of driving growth, but with that comes additional cost and usually a significant amount of change to manage.

What I'm focused on is accelerated, sustained and profitable organic, year-on-year growth underpinned by your AMR strategy and the answers to the Four BIG questions. All of which add breadth and depth to the business growth formula.

The Four BIG questions:

1. How do you increase the number of customers?
2. How do you increase the average order value?
3. How do you increase the average order frequency?
4. How do you increase the retention of customers?

The first question addresses the ‘A' of your AMR strategy, questions two and three the ‘M', and finally question four the ‘R'. Which question do you think most businesses focus their time, effort and resources on? It's the first – increasing the number of customers.

While this is certainly key for business growth, the amount of time you should focus on new customer acquisitions isn't the same for all businesses. The maturity of your business and the size of your existing customer base, when aligned to your growth ambition, will determine how much focus you need to place on the ‘A' part of AMR.

Having worked with tens of thousands of businesses of all different shapes and sizes, experience tells me that most businesses spend too much time on this question altogether. Only a select few businesses have a business growth strategy that integrates all four questions aligned to an overarching AMR strategy and a deep-rooted understanding of the customer lifecycle.

I always remember reading this headline in a UK business newspaper:

‘A million customers come back to energy provider.'

Now, the challenge I have with this headline is: why did they lose a million customers in the first place?

Let me share a compelling story that may suggest they lost those customers because they were looking in all the wro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Fundamentals of Business Growth: Your AMR Strategy
• Chapter 2: Your Business Growth Transformation Framework® (BGTF)
• Chapter 3: Inspirational Leadership
• Chapter 4: Building a High Performing Organization
• Chapter 5: Business Purpose, Aspirational Goals, and Growth Strategy
• Chapter 6: Market Potential Strategy
• Chapter 7: Compelling Value Proposition Strategy
• Chapter 8: Customer Strategy
• Chapter 9: Marketing and Communications Strategy
• Chapter 10: Business Development and Sales Strategy
• Chapter 11: People Strategy
• Chapter 12: Operational Excellence Strategy
• Chapter 13: Finance and Governance
• Chapter 14: Control the Controllable
• Chapter 15: Your Journey to Mastery
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement