Launch Your Rocket Ship - Find Your Core Offering to Turbocharge Growth
Our past three newsletters focused on planning.
Visualize what your company needs to look like when you exit and when you want that to occur. Then, work backward to establish short-term quarterly goals.
Conduct a premortem. Answer the question: If we get together one year from today and everything has gone wrong, what are the most likely reasons?
Establish your core. First, develop and work from core values to guide the company’s culture and decision-making. Second, use the Hedgehog Concept to map out your primary strategic offering to grow revenue.
Today, we shift into the next critical planning exercise – identify and launch your Rocket Ship Initiative. Build from your core strategic offering to identify a product, service, or marketing initiative that meets a need, differentiates you from competitors, and allows you to grow rapidly for an extended time. Use it to drive focus and energy for the company.
For example, at Entrada, the initial module on our smartphone app was a tool for surgical specialists to dictate narrative sections of a patient encounter. We developed an electronic tagging mechanism that split the dictation into segments and automatically returned it into multiple sections of a client electronic health record. Nobody had ever done this, and our client’s productivity soared.
Because of this, we had exponential growth for years, even while competing with larger companies.
This rocket ship offering can be many things – but it has to be something unique for your market that cannot be replicated quickly by competitors. Once it is identified, plan extensively around launching the initiative and execute quickly with 100% buy-in from the entire company to have a significant first-mover advantage before competitors can react.
Thought for the Day
These past four newsletters have emphasized working from goals to focus energy. Here is where I get a little duplicitous. Use the goals to guide initiatives but do not be addicted to them. Break everything down quarterly and be prepared to pivot or change tactics when something is not working.
Every leader must balance accountability with flexibility when targeting and evaluating growth initiatives. Only you can find that balance for your organization.
In an upcoming newsletter, I will talk about some tools for driving process improvement that help maintain proper perspective and balance in an organization.
We utilize the A2B Playbook, our planning and infrastructure growth tool, to aid companies in the following areas:
Strategic planning engagements – third-party facilitators help immensely
Prepare for transactions - raise growth capital or sell the business
Post-investment planning - clarify short-term priorities and identify execution gaps
Support business turnarounds – overcome slow growth or particular challenges
Let me know of organizations that can use our help.