What were believed to be sound business models can expire rapidly in an unpredictable world. Businesses can become obsolete or at least lose their edge seemingly overnight.

In this complex world of business, simply pointing out ‘growth opportunities’ and talking about ‘growth mindsets’ are often divorced from the realities of keeping a business alive, finding and keeping customers and having the time and resources to expand beyond what you believe will work today in terms of marketing.

Just spotting a Growth Opportunity feels like telling an Olympic sprinter to run faster to win more medals. It’s obvious advice but remains naïve to the realities of that sprinter’s life, training, ambitions, mindset and physical attributes. The old adage that it’s easier to point a finger at a problem than it is to offer a reasonable answer to fix it, rings true here. What business leaders don’t need is more pointing fingers, regardless of how well intended they may be, and when it comes from a third-party agency or consultant, then it can be downright unhelpful, unconnected and ignorant.
Running a business and finding sustainable high growth is pretty much as adverse and volatile as it comes but by increasing tolerance you also increase opportunity which, once identified, can be acted upon.

The more tolerance the business and the people within it have, the more resilient they become in respect to their capacity to withstand or recover from difficult conditions and find new opportunities.

If a business is not set up correctly to navigate periods of critical change they experience ‘threat rigidity’, freezing innovation and narrowing their focus to what has worked for them, or used to work for them in the past. It’s when under stress and pressure that we revert to our most basic well-learned instincts, and we narrow our field of vision at the very moment we need to broaden it.
How can you grow tolerance for growth?

When there is no map or set route, or when the internal and external situational circumstances of a business is in constant and unpredictable flux, leaders need a method to follow. One that gives a guiding philosophy that is pragmatically flexible and agile enough to bend, compress and flex based on the day-to-day realities of growing a business. One that prevents the organisation from suffering from threat rigidity.

The answer can lie in setting up a growth continuum. The constantly flowing and tightly coupled loop of Establish, Expand, Explore cultivates and fosters a pragmatic culture and methodology for a business to operate around.

It ensures a balance between optimising and doubling-down on where they know growth is coming from, expanding this core growth engine out in increasingly more tolerant re-investment cycles and, at the same time, embedding a forward looking constant innovation and reinvention culture and workstream that becomes integral to the business and marketing model.

So, let’s break that down.

Establish: For a new business this is all about setting out the stall. It’s about aligning and defining on the business and marketing strategy, creating the GTM strategy and the brand proposition – whether fully fledged or as a minimal viable brand for launch – and putting fit-for-purpose systems and capabilities behind it, including AdTech. Establish, however, remains important as the business grows and diversifies. New products, markets or sub brands all need to ‘establish’ at their appropriate times.

Expand: This ensures that the business is optimising growth opportunities in a manner that is in sync with the functional and emotional realities of the business. Rather than arbitrarily thinking a business is ready (or able to) pour endless resources into marketing for a high growth trajectory, regardless of a positive ROI it’s previously experienced, it grows the functional ‘can we onboard and service this many customers’ to an emotional ‘when am I going to see payback on this investment and what are the risks’ tolerance.

With organisational change management at its core, ‘expand’ drives growth but brings the business along with it, ensuring marketing, product, sales, operations and management (including external stakeholders) are all aligned and pushing together.

Explore: In harmony to expanding the present, ‘explore’ is evaluating and testing the current value proposition, plotting changes in the market or competitors and looking for new areas to prevent a stagnation or irrelevance when the growth starts to plateau or is suddenly reduced by other forces. With ‘explore’ constantly in play the business is looking for, testing and then establishing new opportunities to futureproof the business. Explore is a hard-working part of the growth continuum model that ensures the correct balance of squeezing growth from the present, while constantly making micro or larger pivots ahead of the curve.

The Establish, Expand, Explore model not only builds tolerance, it facilitates change management for businesses that will have to navigate challenges and critical change as they scale. When threats arrive, rather than rigidity kicking in, this process helps drive the fluidity and agility to overcome them.