Is Growth Committee a solution to scale up?

Maintaining the status quo is no longer enough if you want to develop your company - or even protect your current market position. Whether you are a traditional enterprise or a scale-up startup willing to expand, you want your company to remain ahead of the competition. All companies like that are not accessible if your governance structure and model don’t help. Growth is a concerted endeavor that will need the participation of every member of your company, starting from the Board of Directors.

I’ve been talking to many boards and c-level executives lately, and they all tell me their most significant concerns are:

1. To be able to recover from the pandemic and adapt to the new market realities.
2. To innovate and position the company to stay ahead.
3. To have a growth mindset in place so that they can be sure they will not only survive but thrive.

The latter is undoubtedly a hot topic on the boardroom agenda for 2022. How can the company accelerate the growth curve? How can it constantly innovate, trying new things to address the market? Should they create a growth task force? A new governance model? Maybe a dedicated Growth Committee at the board level?

Although it may seem an exaggeration, creating a Growth Committee might be the correct answer for many companies. You may have reacted with suspicion. I invite you to give it a thought on the growth committee idea. Of course, the last thing your staff wants is another round of ineffective internal meetings clogging up their schedules. Growth committees (and their meetings) should, on the other hand, be very productive in terms of finding and developing possibilities for growth and advancing strategic objectives.

The committee could be related to the Strategy Committee if you have one or a stand-alone group of essential cross-functional team members who meet in an organized and regular way. One of the key benefits of this setup is that it brings your cross-functional teams out of isolation as they consider growth opportunities. Each of your functional teams is most likely in charge of its own yearly revenue development goal. At most, this implies that your business is missing out on synergistic efficiencies that may be gained by bringing diverse strategies into sync. And at worst, your teams may be running in such different directions that they ultimately undercut their efforts and hamper your firm’s growth trajectory.

Establishing a growth committee could remove the silos within your organization. Simultaneously, growth committees provide real cross-functional engagement on strategic growth. What you can expect from a Growth Committee:

●???Growth development concepts.

●???Pursue expansion aggressively in a structured, agile, and fast way.

●???Identify and innovate on a company-wide growth plan.

●???Allocate resources wisely.

●???Bring your whole business together behind a shared vision.

●???Fast adaptation to market and competitive variables

●???Integrate firm objectives and efforts

●???Cut down on ineffective meetings across multiple departments.

●???Have a closer relationship with the Board

●???Shorten your time to market.

Implement your company expansion plan with strict control and responsibility. A growth committee may help any business looking to expand if it has the right people and good governance to operate.

Growth Committee for Maximum Efficiency

Your strategy will most likely be influenced by your company's distinct culture and internal structure. However, the following suggestions should assist you in determining how to exploit this group for optimum performance.

●???Choose a strong leader (or two) to take charge of your growth committee. Your committee's chairperson may be a chief transformation officer, a marketing executive, a sales leader, or even the CEO. Regardless of rank, your development committee leader (or leaders) should have a strong interest in developing your firm and an awareness of your organization's long-term strategy.

●???Building up a top performance group. Your committee chairman should assemble a team comprised of members from each of the functional areas involved in the growth of your organization. Marketing, sales, product, customer service, and financing are all included. Titles may be less significant when choosing committee members than a desire to put forward fresh ideas and an ambition to seek change aggressively.

●???Establish agile governance with the Board and executive committee. Set a cadence for your growth committee that fits with your company's current internal meeting arrangement. A succession of weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings, on the other hand, is even better. Quarterly meetings are employed in this scheme for collaborative brainstorming to define or modify your overall business development plan. Monthly meetings may be utilized to give updates and work out any problems from weekly meetings. Weekly meetings are also quick check-ins to monitor progress on to-do lists and escalate concerns as they emerge. Each meeting, regardless of how it is conducted, should have a distinct structure and purpose.

●???Measure success, ownership, and accountability. The growth committee may or may not decide on your organization's growth objectives. In any case, it is the role of the growth committee to break those efforts down into more miniature stages, assign ownership for each of those subtasks, and assess the effectiveness of all growth-related activities against the more significant growth initiatives.

●???Bring in outside expertise. Your growth committee's goal is to seek out the most acceptable, most inventive growth methods. It may be necessary to rely on consultants' outside knowledge and perspectives or other industry experts at times.