Among India’s swelling tide of startups riding high on entrepreneurial ambition, founders should know that strategies for the business are unique for each business. Growth is something all businesses strive for. The quest for growth contains no formulas – only discovering the potential value addition to the customer that your solution offers and ease of use. Sustainable ventures blend versatility, vision, and virtue and remixes conventional wisdom to modernize their unique framework for the world ahead.
Achieving maintainable, long-term growth often proves challenging. The issue frequently comes down to assumptions such as growth models that work for some companies will automatically work across industries and business models. The reality is that growth isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. What moves the revenue hook for the retail industry likely won’t pack the same punch for the manufacturing industries.
Growth needs to be strategic and tailored to each business’ unique situation across factors like industry dynamics, customer demographic, and economics. While high-level strategies like improving product-market fit, spending on marketing channels with the highest ROI and moderate customer acquisition cost, or better monetizing existing customers do apply broadly, the specifics of implementing those strategies require customization.
Different models work for different businesses, zones, and industries. For example, a movie rental subscription service that worked very well in India due to 1.4 billion strong population with a young, upper middle-class hunger for entertainment, failed in Europe due to varying consumer habits and limited population converted to subscribers.
Leaders need to critically assess factors truly driving their business’ growth before blindly copying patterns across industries. The key is not reinventing the wheel but rather understanding limitations of adopting generalized best practices, tailor made for their organization’s distinct situation.
Leave the rigidity to the vertebrates. It’s a world of agility now. For certain businesses that have all functional aspects covered as a unique selling proposition but do not have a flexible user interface needs to heavily invest in Product and User Experience designing rather than overspending on branding or project management. Locating the core problems of each business and darting the solution at the right problem would be a fruitful investment for any business.
Only with rigorously customized, analytics-driven approaches can companies unlock sustainable, strategic growth in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape, rather than one-size approaches that provide an illusion of progress but fail to move core levers.
There is no elixir for all corporate ills and no shortcut to robust growth. Companies willing to do the smart work of understanding, adapting, and optimizing drivers for their specific business hold the best chance for success.