You Can’t Shrink Your Way into Greatness - by Dave Anderson

At this week's meeting talk about your overall business strategy and where its focus has been. Have you devoted more time and energy to bottom-line growth: through trimming expenses, scaling back operations and reducing services to customers and employees. Or has your focus been on top line growth: increasing productivity, expanding operations and creating new profit centers and jobs? Bottom line growth certainly has its place in business. But you can't shrink your way into greatness. Bottom line growth won't deliver the competitive advantage you need in the long term, because most everyone has gotten better at cutting costs the past few years. Cutting jobs is hard work, creating them is genius. Where are you spending your time and how will it eventually affect your competitive advantage in the marketplace? Consider the following points to stimulate thinking on growing your business: not just cutting it or maintaining it:

1. Many times businesses have to seek bottom line growth to grow company profits because they've spent insufficient time bringing about new innovations. When businesses spend too much time trying to incrementally grow their operations, they aren't spending enough time reinventing it, blowing it up and creating new opportunities for endeavor. Incrementalism kills innovation. It creates myopic thinking. Think big. Think outside the box. Think top-line growth.
2. Sometimes companies level off and stop growing because they fail to mix learning with forgetting. Learning is important, but forgetting may even be more so. Forgetting how you've 'always done things', forgetting what the 'rules' are supposed to be that dictate what makes good sense in your business and what doesn't, forgetting old world methods for recruiting, hiring, motivating and keeping good people, forgetting everything that made you successful at one time and realizing that might not be the ticket in today's world. You cannot grow your company on the top line without an eraser. As crazy as it may sound, you must forget much of what you know if you're to grow your company to its fullest potential: and that means from the top line as well as the bottom.
3. Are you a talent-based enterprise? Do you put a premium on attracting, developing and keeping superbly talented people in your organization? Do you pay the price for the best and the brightest-or is one of your company strategies to "hire cheap". Hiring "cheap" may bring bottom line growth but it's a recipe for destruction. "Cheap" people rarely have the energy, drive, desire and innovative spirit to grow your company from the top line. "Cheap" people are nice folks who just want to get by. They want a "job." You must seek people who think like owners, not employees, who can think and create and will add real value to your organization.

Look over these three points and talk about them. Have you fallen prey to any of these short-term, shortsighted strategies? Most companies do from time to time and then can't figure out why they've leveled off. Talk about what you can do to position your firm for vibrant, meaningful, top line growth. You can't shrink your way into greatness. And if you're goal in business is not to be truly great, why bother doing business at all? There are enough average, also-rans around today. There's little market for any more.