Creating a Growth-Oriented Mindset in Business

Any business is going to constantly look to grow, but many lose sight of what growth actually is. Growth is more than the number of employees you have or numbers on a page at the end of the year. It becomes a mindset which needs to be fostered for continued success in the market and as a business.

Growth is about becoming better. It's about adapting to the market and surpassing others trying to do the same. You look for untapped resources and try to make use of them before others can. You don't do for the sake of doing, you do to become better.

A mistake should be a learning experience rather than a failure. Not every decision is the right one, but if you build on a solid enough foundation, you can take risks and gambles that would break a weaker business. That being said, don't take risks that have no real gain for the sake of passing it off as growth.

Unchecked growth can be toxic to a business if people can't adapt. What happens to a tree that keeps adding branches in the same spot? It eventually topples down when a large enough storm kicks up. A top heavy company becomes unstable, and a leaderless company becomes anarchy unless every single person has bought into the same dream.

Growth comes with its own series of growing pains depending on how hard and how fast you grow. Many businesses try to excuse their hiccups in these periods with cliches such as "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette," but that doesn't mean you want to just throw the whole thing of eggs on the ground. Growth creates chaos which leads to change. If you can harness the changes, you get positive growth, if you fail to temper the changes, you end up with toxic growth.

Growth is a mindset and not just a process.

As your company grows, you want the people in it to grow as well. You want to strive for new heights, but not at the expense of everything else. Sometimes to do things right, you need to go back to basics and cut out the sprawl from a previous unchecked expansion. The goal isn't always up, it's maintainable continued expansion and development.

The saying goes that people don't leave companies, they leave bad managers. Your management is your frontline for turning your vision and dream into a reality, but if the correct checks and balances don't exist, you end up running people off. It's critical to have the right people in the right seats, particularly at the leadership level. The wrong person or people, in an obsession to maintain rapid growth, may make bad decisions which costs you the people and technical assets you need to continue growing.

What made you adapt to a specific environment before may not be suitable for what your company has become. The environment continuously changes, but these changes tend to be relatively slow (pieces of the market change rapidly, but the whole moves much slower). There are massive, rapid changes which can occur, but most of them are marked by signs. Cloud computing didn't just pop up one day, the technology required matured at different rates until the whole hit a crossover which made it finally profitable.

What's happening around you that can help or hinder your growth? Is there a way you can expand without having to compete with everyone else in the market?

If your clients are constantly asking for a service, is it profitable? If not, is there a way to solve their solution which they don't know about? When cloud computing first became practical, the average user had no idea what it was or what it meant. They wanted another server, and if you sold it right, you gave them the same server they had before, but with however many VMs were necessary. All they had to do was tell a technician or hit a button. They got what they wanted, and you got to charge for the equipment, the cost to maintain the equipment, and (done right) you had a more fault-resilient solution.

If you got in while the getting was good with earlier cloud solutions, you had a huge advantage. If you kept your eyes on the prize of growth though, you knew this wouldn't last forever. The cloud moved from a server in a closet to a data center because it got cheap enough to do at scale. The process continues even now with the move towards serverless applications and other forms of XaaS.

A growth-oriented mindset is about maintaining positive growth while preventing the sprawl of toxic growth. Identify uncontested segments in the market and grow towards them (if it makes sense). It's a lot easier to find a niche where no one else is than to try and fight over each and every customer. Focus on the future and not the past. Just because it worked before doesn't mean it will work tomorrow. At the same time, don't just grow for the sake of growing. Replacing a good process just for the sake of doing things differently is as bad as refusing to change and grow with the times.

Growth is a mindset, if you focus on long-term, healthy growth, you'll be more likely to throw out dangerous growth which can choke your success down the line. Sometimes the best thing for long-term growth is to sacrifice or limit short-term growth. Growing pains are real, and can quickly get out of hand if the right spots haven't caught up to the rest of the company. Aim for what's healthiest that the company, and its people, can handle.