There’s a potentially hazardous trap for business leaders trying to grow their business. As a business moves beyond the start-up phase, and the business is forced to mature, costs increase and complexity multiplies, tempting a dangerous fixation on short-term gain.
This short-term focus can kill long term growth, the former defined by a series of actions and decisions the business starts taking to deliver growth today, rather than bigger, more sustainable growth tomorrow.
If you’re working towards a Series A or B investment or potential sale, this is a red flag to any would-be investor too.
Are you fixated on short term gains?
Common examples might be delaying website migrations, for fear of the impact to short term revenue, despite the knowledge that your existing technology is creaking under the strain and can’t support the growth you seek. Or, sticking with the manual processes that litter your CRM management, rather than invest in the proper software you know the business needs because of its impact on your next quarter’s bottom line.
Most common of all is the orchestration gap; the name given to the growth ambitions of your business having outgrown your ability to deliver it. Whether it’s a lack of the right growth leadership, marketing capability or the whole system simply not able to scale and meet the challenges for the size of business you have now become. If you find yourself here, it will be impacting your ability to grow, it will be killing your valuation and it’s an open door to your competitors to catch up or steal a march.
You’re likely here when your costs are rising without the expected return in sales or revenue. You might be working with great marketing agencies but lack the central coordination to get the most from them, or you might have an internal team who are all flat-out delivering activity that isn’t adding much value, or you’re allocating a budget without a lot of certainty of where to best place it. There are plenty of others.
Once inside the orchestration gap, there are lots of confusing signals obfuscating the exit. Your marketing pace slows, experimentation drops, your risk appetite shrinks and your sales and marketing funnel becomes full of holes. You may start to question more fundamental aspects of what the business is doing. In part (at least), you’re likely to be paying the cost of poor decisions you made 6 to 12 months ago, as the lack of strategic decision making fuelling your growth engine begins to bite.
You may well be burning yourself and your team out too.
At OV, we’re approached by a lot of businesses who find themselves in the orchestration gap. We often hear similar stories – what starts off as dwindling returns on marketing spend ultimately becomes everyone’s problem around the board table, making strategic direction and focus on other priorities far more difficult.
Part of the distinction between the companies that escape, survive and find renewed growth, and those that flounder, is the speed with which the root causes are properly understood and addressed. External marketing consultants like us are, of course, one way to help with this diagnosis but experienced founders will often recognise the signs quicker second or third time around. Fresh marketing and/or strategic thinking, in the form of new hires, in the senior team can also help. As can support from investors. Whatever the catalyst for building the growth engine, the speed and efficacy of response is often what’s important.
How to close the orchestration gap?
1. Ownership.
Whether you’ve reached this point with an agency partner(s), an internal team, or a mix of both, you may need to rethink the role of growth, and who owns it. In the early stages, it’s often the CEO / founder, but this inevitably and quickly shifts as the business scales. And this might mean finding the right external hire who’s been there and navigated these growth problems before. In some cases, it’s about hitting the reset button with someone already in the business and/or unburdening them with a more tightly defined growth agenda. Either way, as a longer-term growth agenda evolves you will need a dedicated owner, someone who can coordinate activity, direct focus, set priorities and be accountable.
2. Balancing short- and long-term growth, with a unified view.
This starts with setting the right goals and objectives and cascading them through the business, complemented with KPIs that genuinely inform your on-going performance towards those goals. A unified view comes from synthesising all the disparate channels and activities, strategic levers (resources, budget, etc) and insights (competitors, buyer behaviour, etc), to understand with clarity where you are right now, where you need to get to, and what it’s going to take to make it happen. This is why you need a growth owner – see point 1)
Only by balancing board-level conversations between short term opportunity and longer-term sustainable growth, can you stave off the threat of re-entering the orchestration gap in future. Bear in mind, the complexity of operation is only likely to further increase. It’s a businesses’ priority to proactively manage that complexity and build a growth engine that scales.
3. With 1) and 2) in place, you’ll now be in a better position to inform investment.
And investing now for growth tomorrow should only be viewed as investment. An investment that should return and fund scaling operations, growing teams, and a greater capacity to deliver to more customers, more profitably. Part of this will be finding and reaching more customers and converting them more effectively when you do.
A growth engine is working well when short-term opportunities can be seized alongside longer term decisions that support and build your growth tomorrow, be that through distinctiveness in-market, increasing your competitive advantage or your value to customers / buyers.
A final word if you’re seeking investment… this scalable orchestration is exactly what investors seek, giving them confidence that their capital will ignite the burners on a well-built growth engine.
If you’ve read this and are wondering whether the orchestration gap might be impacting your growth (or valuation), we offer a free 30-minute Growth Clinic session every Friday with our senior team. It’s a non-salesy conversation to see if the chemistry’s right and whether we might be able to help you and your business. Find out more or book a slot here.
Some Definitions
Unified view of marketing: the ability to build an accurate narrative of what activity you’re doing to drive growth, the context in which it’s happening, and its impact on your target audience or buyer. It should be clear as to what’s working, what isn’t, and why.
Orchestration gap: the space between the marketing machine a business thinks it’s built and the messy reality of how work, data and decisions actually flow day to day. It shows up as disconnected channels, duplicated work, inefficiencies and a lack of capacity to seize on new opportunities. Businesses add more into the system but fail to see expected returns delivered.
