Chasing Growth and the Next?Frontier

“Success leaves clues.”

This is a quote I have used many times in my personal and professional growth journey. It is a statement I have used in countless work meetings with team members to drive a different thought paradigm and approach to a set of problems facing us.

What does it mean to me??

Putting it simply, it means that we can learn and make decisions by assessing the path and processes that have been used to succeed by individual, companies, and groups of people around us.

There are so many examples of this in front of us in the media and information and data we consume daily.

We ask the high-functioning professional how they to stay in tiptop physical and mental shape, while running a multi-billion, multinational business.?

Or what these successful people do to find enough time to raise their kids or spend time with their spouse and families to create a healthy, balanced relationship between work and life.

We look and highlight those successes because they are much more palatable to put on a podcast episode or an article. They are epitomes of our love for the “success leaves clues”?—?for the story of guile and achievement, and for the consistent pursuit of a new frontier of growth.

But in the same vein, it is important to always balance that mentality and sentiment with the converse: “failures also leave clues.”

After all, survivorship bias runs rampant in our world in all avenues of corporate decision-making and life. People see the success story of the scrappy founders that have dropped out of school and started a billion-dollar business in their basement or parent’s garage, and think that is the norm.

But for that one often-highlighted success story, there are many failures of similar paths and circumstances along the way that did not make it.?

So what can we learn from both the successes and failures? What is the common thread of both? And how can it be made applicable to your personal life and business decisions?

Both the successes and failures are chasing growth. Development. Expansion.?

We are a society and species inherently obsessed with growth. We want the next dollar for ourselves, for our company, for our loved ones, for our country. The next frontier.

It feels like it is in our DNA to be better, want better, improve our circumstances and the circumstances of our surroundings.

So here are some takeaways and ways to challenge your thought-processes in both your work meetings and in your personal lives.

After all, “success AND failures leave clues” right?

Stay Focused on The Balance of ROI / Utility and?Growth

In my experience, the most difficult thing for a company to do is press reset on old habits that have worked to generate growth, and utilize a novel process to think through the next frontier of growth.

After all, staying true to what got you to the road and path you are on is a proven method to continue to succeed.?

But after a certain point, there are limitations that present themselves in trying to only approach a problem with a singular approach due to diminishing returns or utility.?

A common example in business is found in go-to-market organization?—?the dichotomy between new logo / new business acquisition vs. existing business / existing customer growth.

Many operators and investors have a bias towards new customer acquisition?—?after all, total addressable market sizes for many companies can be expansive and untapped, so chasing that next new customer or vertical seems most attractive.?

What they fail to balance in their decision-making is the reset in processes and thoughts that are required to drive a positive ROI in this new subset of customers and verticals.?

This had led to many companies in the past decade chasing “growth at all costs,” all while failing to make the longer-term, longer-horizon, and more inherently difficult decisions, to drive improvements to their product / service innovation and failure to listen to the voice of existing customers.?

You see this manifest in metrics like lack of profitability or poor customer or revenue retention in companies. They could still have persisting growth and scale, but on the margin, are still struggling to drive a sustainable ROI between costs and growth.?

Eventually, this hyper-focus and heavier weight on growth at all costs vs. sustainable growth balanced with ROI catches up to companies in the business world and individuals in their personal lives?—?we burn out and crash; sometimes in a small, controllable manner or sometimes in a big, catastrophic manner.

Making this shift to focus on the balance of growth and ROI (whatever that ROI metric of choice is) helps forge the next frontier. It is a difficult mindset to have and implement, but it is one that drives towards the most long-term success.

So how can we practically go about it to forge this “next frontier?” Let’s dissect that a bit more…

Pick the “Low-Hanging Fruit” First and Do Not Be Afraid to Climb the Tree in the Pursuit of What’s?Next

Over time across industries, we have made many important “low-hanging fruit” discoveries that have driven growth and progress (i.e., computing, health, the industrial revolution, flight, refrigeration, sanitation, land and resource discovery, etc.).?

After we have made these innovations, a stagnancy in true progress and innovation seemingly occurs as we mess around between the balance of growth/monetization and what’s next for true progress and innovation.

What I have noticed in my time routinely looking at many different industries and companies is that we find many copycats and replicas after the novel technology / approach becomes validated by consumers.

This competition and “copycatting” can be inherently healthy for people and businesses?—?it creates optionality and then the eventual need for peers / competition to continually progress and develop improvements to chase growth and innovation.

But many times, it also just leads to an influx of the same / similar derivative of a product or service that already exists in droves with no utility or enhancements.

For example, just randomly pick a product or service you are aware of through your journey.

If you look up PPM (“project and portfolio management”) software or business analytics software, you’ll find a never-ending list of fragmented names and competitors doing materially the same thing.?

Why do and should so many of these companies exist and persist? The market is certainly big enough, so it makes sense to have healthy competition, but are they really that much different or driving that much more growth, progress, and innovation vs. their next peer?

In my personal and professional assessment, absolutely not.?

For starters, the availability of what has seemed to be limitless (and historically cheap) capital exists in our market reinforces this copycat, lack of innovation model of business creation and stewardship.?

Even more importantly, I believe this occurs because we all have a natural bias to focus on finding and picking the “low-hanging” fruit because it feels easier vs. climbing up the proverbial tree to find and extract fruit that is more difficult.

Two of the most common examples I see repeatedly in companies that reinforces this constant bias towards “low-hanging fruit” approaches to growth:

1. the nature of lead generation and sales personnel?—?they always want the new, shiny, qualified lead vs. thoroughly work their existing clients or existing pipeline opportunities with a consultative approach to find what they can deliver to them growth / progress-wise
2. the chase of product and engineering teams to develop that “whiz-bang” new feature or suite offering vs. focus on improving product through the existing customer voice and journey

In both of these cases and others like this, we fail to focus on the longer-term picture because it’s hard to have a prescient view. We are a performance-based species with a bias towards the short-term and easier path.

But we must challenge ourselves and instead focus on the next frontier of growth that balances ROI metrics with scale and acceleration.?

We need to do that, all while performing incremental discovery that goes beyond just repeating what we have always done because it got us here (remember “success leaves clues?”) or chasing that next new shiny object.

In sum, do not settle only for the low-hanging fruit and the oft-taken path as the only way to succeed and drive towards the next frontier of growth.?

Combine that focus on mining through the low-hanging fruit with long-term oriented, thoughtful and thorough approaches.?

And do not be afraid of the difficulty in climbing the tree and find what’s up there in your personal and professional journey.

Chasing Growth and The Next Frontier by Focusing?Inward

We are at another massively interesting inflection point in our personal and professional lives?—?the influx of AI innovation and its potential ramifications on every part of our lives.

Whatever may come with this novel class of innovation and technology?—?whether it be truly groundbreaking and differentiated or like we have seen time and again through copycats?—?we can control our approach to chase growth and the next frontier through a focus inward.

From a personal standpoint, this can be as simple as doing as much as we can to be as aware in our mental state of mind and resiliency. Lots of people call this self-awareness and mindfulness; I just call it being alive and interested.

We should seek personal development through the constant pursuit of knowledge, up-leveling our relationships and connections to people, community, and things that give us that healthy balance of growth and ROI in whatever metric we aspire to monitor and improve.

We should chase and replicate success from stories we hear and exchange, while being as cognizant and putting focus on the failures and mistakes we and others have made and learned from.?

Similarly from a professional standpoint, consistently assess and seek improvements in every part of your organization with an aggressive focus inward.?

Your competition is important and having healthy relationships, knowledge, and dialogue with them can pay dividends as you progress in your business lifecycle and growth.

But that inward focus on growth and ROI to your employees, your customers, and other stakeholders is the most important over the intermediate and long-term

After all, when you have a board member or investor tell you that you need to generate “20% growth” and your Excel operating model spits out “19%” after you do multiple business planning scenarios across your organization, you’ll have to justify it in some believable manner.?

Better to know and focus on the internal growth and ROI levers as an operator in these circumstances because they are more attainable and achievable, even if they prove to be difficult along the way.

If you all need help untangling complex webs in your business’ growth lifecycle, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] . Always happy to work alongside and help share thoughts and approaches.