Keep Your Company Growing Like A Founder; Build A Master PlanOnly 9% of profitable companies keep growing at a better-than-average rate for more than a decade. What's the secret of growing companies? The post Keep Your Company Growing Like A Founder; Build A Master Plan appeared first on Investor's Business Daily.

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Only 9% of profitable companies keep growing at a better-than-average rate for more than a decade. What's the secret of growing companies?

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Finding out why some companies can get bigger is imperative since so few do. "That's the lowest (repeatable growth) since we have been tracking this for 25 years," said Chris Zook, who with James Allen wrote "The Founder's Mentality: How To Overcome The Predictable Crises Of Growth."

Both authors are partners with Bain & Company, the management consultancy giant.

Tips on keeping a company's momentum going:

Growing Companies Practice Business Insurgency

Successful founders say they started their businesses to do something unique. This often means "declaring war against their industry's norms," Zook said.

"Insurgency means a bold mission, a long-term perspective, and set of capabilities with true uniqueness or excellence in one area," he said.

He points to Nike (NKE), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Ikea. Companies focused on uniqueness accounted for about two-thirds of the new value created in the stock market in the past 10 to 15 years, he says.

Most markets have over six relevant competitors and usually only about two companies capture over 80% of the economic profits, he adds. "Most of these are 'scale insurgent' companies."

Define The Objective

If you don't have a clear, targeted endgame goal, you won't know how to map or plan your efforts and first steps.

That's from Judge Graham, author of "Scale With Speed: The #1 Formula For Massive Success In Today's Marketplace."

"Having an end game will allow you to adjust your level of expectation and ways to measure your successes," he said. "Most of us walk around life saying maybe next year, but that doesn't get you anywhere."

Growing Companies Stay Customer-Centric

Founders are usually on the front line when a company starts. They're that first salesperson and wear other hats, Zook says.

Over time, though, layers form between founders and their customers as growth and bureaucracy sets in.

"Make the people at the front line — in factories, service people, salespeople — the heroes of the organization, not the people in the corporate office," Zook said. "The best companies have executives who are out in the field and in the front lines, not in (office) meetings."

In addition, Zook says over 90% of innovative ideas come from front line employees and their customers.

Constantly Simplify

Do periodic and thorough attacks on complexity at all levels — excess departments, excess projects, noncore businesses and product lines, Zook says.

He's found the most common element of company renewal was a "reduction of complexity" and the most common element in excessive bureaucratization was "complexity out of control."

He cites the comeback of building toys maker, Lego, from "near bankruptcy 15 years ago" as an example. The company's comeback began with a "massive complexity reduction from every level to the business portfolio to the brick selection in each Lego set."

Growing Companies Execute With Speed

Human beings are faced with over 35,000 decisions a day, Graham says.

In business decisions you have to execute things quicker so that you are so much further ahead than your competition. Even when you're wrong, you can course correct quicker.

When you're always "sprinting, no one can catch up on your company's innovation, sales or customer service; you're just moving too fast," he said.

Make Big Bets

Be attuned to opportunities and then pounce on them, says Rob LoCascio. He's CEO and founder of LivePerson (LPSN), an artificial intelligence company that connects brands and consumers.

LivePerson started out facilitating webchats between companies and their customers. But six years ago, LoCascio made a big bet: to put artificial intelligence (AI), bots and automation at the heart of customer conversations.

"We decided to pivot the company, build a whole new platform, and launch it so every brand could take advantage of conversational AI," he said. "It's no secret that change scares people. We lost customers who didn't want to migrate, our stock price took a huge hit, and we looked like we were in trouble."

But LoCascio knows growth takes embracing risk. "We believed AI-powered conversations were the future, we stuck with it. And the bet paid off," he said. "Now, over 50% of our business relies on automation, and the number continues to grow."

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