Delivering growth in 2025: will you pick tea, pie or honeycomb? (I prefer doughnuts!)

A new UK government, falling inflation and interest rates all help to increase investor confidence, so many business leaders will be thinking about how to drive effective growth in the current climate of disruption and transformation.

In the decade between 2012 and 2022, I created and led a successful, high-growth new ‘business within a business,’ which delivered ￡100M cumulative revenue on a near straight-line annual growth trajectory, so I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.? Here are my five key insights about what it takes to deliver growth.? The common thread is to free up junior talent to unleash their ‘super strengths’, whilst ensuring the operating model doesn’t accidentally hobble your most experienced and capable leaders.

1. Select entrepreneurs for the different types of growth you want to deliver.?

It is seductive to hire ‘high-energy’, entrepreneurial salespeople, but you need to be sure they’re delivering a sustainable return on investment.? My business focused on a small number of key clients delivering large-scale, multi-year programmes with high levels of customer loyalty and repeat business, whereas a colleague’s business required a constant, high-volume and highly entrepreneurial sales effort to deliver many smaller, high-velocity projects.? My first big win had taken two years of prior investment to cultivate the client relationships, navigate public-sector procurement process, and ensure we had the right team to win and deliver.? His were often won on the back of a conversation and a short PowerPoint proposal – but he needed to convert many more of these to deliver equivalent revenues.? He used to gibe that my business was “like shooting fish in a barrel”, but the truth is that neither was ‘easier’… they were both just hard in different ways.?

Insight: Growth businesses need a mix of entrepreneurial styles to deliver sustainable growth through both short-term and longer-term ‘annuity’ revenues.

2. Harness the power of diverse thinking.?

Too often, businesses recruit and promote talent ‘in their own image.’? It’s not unusual to find leadership teams who all share similar personality preferences - it’s comfortable, because everyone gets on well and no one really challenges the ‘received wisdom.’? But many studies have shown that organisations who nurture teams with diverse mindsets deliver better insights and superior performance (even if it feels a bit bumpier along the journey!).? At the height of my business’s successes, I’d assembled a team of five top leaders who each had very different capabilities and areas of expertise.? Each one of us had the space to play to our own ‘super strengths’ and we were all comfortable ceding parts of our client relationships and business focus to those who had the best skills or connection with that client.? We were collectively incentivised to deliver team growth, rather than individual reward, so our shared goal was to deliver a business where the whole was more than the sum of its parts.

Insight: Few of us are true all-rounders, so bending people out of shape to try and do everything well distracts leaders from what they’re naturally great at. So, leaders should understand and focus on their own super strengths, while consciously building a team around them with complementary styles, skills and experience.?

3. Be better known in the market.?

One of the most important brand and marketing goals is to ‘punch above your weight’ in the market.? As we set out to grow our small business we focused relentlessly on market insights, thought leadership and networking – often rolled together into insight-driven networking events with current and prospective clients.? It’s hard to measure the tangible return on investment from these events, but clear that clients prefer working with a company who genuinely understands their business needs and has differentiated insights.? Prospective clients left our events feeling they’d been invested in and were taking away a ‘free gift’.? In return, we were front of mind when they were looking for support.

Insight: There really is such a thing as ‘too much humility!’? Successful businesses need high levels of brand recognition and strong customer relationships built on capability, insights, and a proven track record.

4. Never stop learning and growing.?

One of the most damaging gaps in growing businesses is that they train high-potential individuals to become leaders but stop training them when they get there.? In Matthew Syed Consulting 's work on cultivating a ‘growth mindset’ he highlights the difference between leaders who adopt a ‘know it all’ culture and those who maintain a ‘learn it all’ mindset.? The best leaders are those who retain an intellectual curiosity about their market sector and client’s priorities, and who understand the best application of different business models.? The biggest change in my latter career was the pace at which all staff needed to learn and adapt to new business methodologies.? I first trained as a project manager before learning systems engineering, then agile methodologies, then business strategy, all via a common thread of digital transformation.? But when I was appointed to a top leadership role, I had a strong sense that ‘I’d arrived’, so now I could focus on applying my 30 years of wisdom and experience rather than learning new stuff… Oh, how wrong I was!???

Insight: The leadership and communication skills required to ‘manage upwards’ to the C-Suite are very different from those needed to manage downwards to the team, and outwards to your customers – and balancing this three-legged stool requires a high-level of emotional intelligence.?

5. Keep leaders visible and accessible but shield them from distractions.?

Businesses that thrive in a disruptive market maintain a low ‘power-distance index’ (PDI) between senior leaders and junior staff – especially in markets where the best insights and technical skills can often reside with the youngest members of the team.? Perhaps the most striking change during my four decades of work, was from an era when leaders were cocooned in private offices by their ‘outer-office’ support staffs – to one where self-sufficient executives ‘hot-desked’ on the floor plate alongside junior staff (and later, the transition to hybrid working). ?The business justification for open plan offices and hot-desking is clear – that mixing up staff breaks down tribal barriers and encourages more ‘water-cooler moments’ when staff from different parts of the business collide and share fresh insights and ideas, driving better team building and innovation.? The COVID-imposed use of video chat apps took this further, by enabling unconstrained regional and international collaboration. ?The challenge here is that whilst a low PDI is enormously beneficial for more junior staff, it also has a very high ‘distraction penalty’ for business leaders.

Insight: Modern businesses need to strike a difficult balance between staff engagement and leadership privacy, especially to protect vital thinking time.? Of course, the onus is on leaders to know when it’s appropriate to hide and focus, and when to socialise on the floor-plate.

Tea, Pie, Honeycomb or Doughnuts?

So, what does this all mean for businesses that are trying to drive business growth and what would I do differently now?? My over-riding insight is that mainstream leadership approaches and business models can unintentionally hobble leaders and suppress both innovation and the entrepreneurial mindset.?

I opened this article with a question about tea, pie, honeycomb and doughnuts, and these relate to four models of skills development and organisational design (okay, so I tweaked them slightly for the food analogy!).? When I first entered the private sector, my company championed a ‘T-shaped’ skills profile, where half our staff were trained to develop a ‘broad-T’ (mile wide, inch deep) focus on an entire client sector like healthcare, whilst the other half developed a ‘deep-T’ (inch-wide, mile deep) focus on a capability specialism, like project management.? With time, there has been a growing recognition that a Pi(π)-shaped model is more valuable, where prospective leaders receive general training in multiple disciplines and grow deeper functional, or hands-on expertise in two core skills areas.? The problem many businesses face is that the demands of the modern business environment mean that too often, this has evolved into a comb-shaped model, in which leaders are urged to become expert in multiple specialisms, without achieving any meaningful depth of expertise in any of them.

The ‘Doughnut Model’ harnesses the power of marginal gains

There is a new organisational design emerging in some high-tech startups – the doughnut model.? This shares a common ethos with the ‘marginal gains’, approach to performance improvement in elite sport, which came to prominence with Team GB Cycling’s 2012 Olympic success. ?Their Performance Director, Dave Brailsford, explained that the support team’s job wasn’t to stand at the track-side shouting at their athletes to ‘pedal faster’, but to identify everything that goes into riding, from bicycle and clothing design to sleep, nutrition, health and well-being - and then improve each by 1%, leading to a significant improvement when you put it all together.? In the doughnut model, a business’s ‘best athletes’ – its most effective innovators, entrepreneurs and sales force - operate in the centre of the doughnut, surrounded by a ring of dedicated support staff, whose sole purpose is to ensure the ‘business winning’ team is unencumbered by corporate distractions, and given the best possible support to be successful in a highly competitive market.? The remainder of the staff operate outside the support ring, with reduced support, but a clear incentive to be successful and enter the inner ring!? The doughnut model is highly competitive and unfashionably elitist, but it incentivises and supports superior market performance, by harnessing the power of marginal gains.

Ironically, this isn’t far removed from the ‘outer office’ environments I worked in during the 1990s, supporting and enabling some of the UK’s top military leaders – and this is how I would organise a modern business to deliver sustainable growth in the current climate.