I shrug to write this post, but I feel compelled to do it. My stomach has been in knots and my mind in torment for days. Really it’s sad to think such a superficial and monetary concern could impact me as it has. But why lie, it has, and I’m sick with anger and grief. I have no control and little ability to affect the outcome of a huge opportunity lost. In my heart I believe a difference could have been made; but complacency and satisfaction bent me and I hate it. I want to jump out of my seat and charm it into existence and I believe I could, but it is too late.
I rarely pat myself on the back. I’d say I’m self deprecating really, but certainly not typical. My approach isn’t written in a book, but my experience is that victory is rarely written, it’s conjured, it just happens. The magic is in carrying more than your own weight.
You can easily see how not having enough resources can stall growth; but I’ve noticed a phenomenon whereby your growth potential is actually limited by the resources of your organization. While it may be obvious that you can’t grow if you don’t have enough sales people or spend enough on marketing, what I mean is that the actual ceiling, the maximum growth that is even visible to you is limited. This occurrence not unlike the human subconscious; it’s there, it has an impact on you, but you can’t really see it or control it. It is the obscure wedge that blocks your organization from growing; the mere fact that you are resource limited drives opportunities elsewhere and you don’t even know it. You are essentially blind to what you could have gotten.
It’s not as if you have deals that you turn away or that choose to go with a competitor, it’s that these opportunities don’t even present themselves to you. You want to grow, and you might even add resources to take on a big new deal, but you miss out on the full potential of your organization. You don’t even have the opportunity to add resources because you don’t know you even need them. It’s what you don’t know, you don’t know, that you’re really missing, and that’s where the magic occurs in my experience. To access that growth opportunity you need to be a step ahead of it. Herein lies the balancing act. How do you balance adding resources for what you “might” have an opportunity to get, but you don’t know what those opportunities are, without overburdening your organization. How do you stay just slightly over-resourced? How do you have one too many staff? How do you set yourself up to be at the right place at the right time with the right resources? I’m trying to figure that out without either banging my head one too many times or worse, clubbing the heads of my current resources because they aren’t enough; sadly, I do both sometimes.
Many hours have been spent in board rooms strategizing over how to grow a business. Certainly America’s widely different companies and entrepreneurs have shown that there continue to be new ways to accomplish this. But I suspect a commonly debated growth strategy is whether or not to grow through iteration of the core, or through expansion outside of the box.
Iteration of the core means continuing to do what the company has proven it can do, what it does best, and typically what many on the team enjoys doing most. It doesn’t mean that you remain static. It doesn’t mean there is no innovation, quite the contrary. ITC is about finding new products, services, methods and systems to maximize what you already do. It means sticking to a proven business model and not introducing a massive disruption through the implementation of a new operational complexity. It means selling more to your current customers and finding new, bigger customers to sell what you’ve got. It means finding new ways to market your business and by adding staff and resource to “hit the gas”. Iteration of the core may be less risky than expanding outside the box. It may also be less likely to lead to an exponential jump in growth. But, if the market exists, it can provide a way for consistent, real growth and it creates story of repeatability and scalability. It may not be as sexy as inventing something revolutionary, but sexy doesn’t always sell so well. And, if you asked me, sexy is in the eye of the beholder.
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