How you can think about growth
Or what we're really talking about when we talk about growth with a better question you can ask instead.
Hello there. I’m trying something new: short-form videos. The videos will be published on the WTP YouTube channel. They’ll also become posts with a transcript for all the readers in the room.
Let’s do this.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and format.
Hello and welcome to the WTP YouTube channel where I'm going to spend some time talking about different questions that I think are better questions to ask if you're really interested in making the most of your time
Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about growth. If you're in business, whether you realize it or not, you are perpetually operating under the assumption that you should always be growing, right? We get this in the questions we're asked. We get this in the marketing that comes to us: help grow your business.
And what we often don't realize is that what's actually being said is one dimensional. What's actually being talked about is scale, which is purely looking at your size, how big are you? Whether that's measured in market size, whether that's measured in the number of team members that you have, or whether it's measured in the number of dollars that you bring in.
That's what's really being talked about and the assumption, the underlying assumption on all those questions is, of course, you're going to have more of one or all of those things every single year. That's what good business is.
The question
I'd like to give you a different question to ask that I think may get you to a better and ultimately more strategic place, which is, “What does growth mean to us as a team and as a business?” and then, “What does growth mean to us right now as far as where we're really putting our focus?”
These questions, I think, allow you to set up more specific framing that allows you to look at the multiple dimensions of growth, right? Yes, sometimes you're thinking about scale, but sometimes you're thinking about other things like, Hey, we need to improve X, Y, Z. Hey, we need to elevate our brand. Hey, we want to develop our team members because that's really what growth is going to look like to us, or we really need to focus on how we can deliver the value that we deliver more deeply. The list goes on depending on how you are really looking to define it, and more importantly on how you're looking to define it [at] this particular moment in time in your business's journey.
How to apply this question to your business
So while this framing may affect how you think about a number of different things, there are three primary things that I think this is going to impact. Number one, your direction. So as you're thinking about where you're going and where you want to be three years from now or 10 years from now, it's definitely going to have an impact on how you describe that and what it really looks like. It's also going to affect the measures that you put in place to assess your progress, and it's going to affect how you understand success. What is a win for us as a business? What is exciting for us as a business and as a team?
There's no one right time to ask these questions. You can ask them at any point if you feel frustrated or feel like you're being pulled in too many directions. One of the times that I always encourage people to think about it is at their annual review as they're taking a look at what they did over the last year and starting to think about where they're going in the next year.
Understanding this question can really open up different ways of thinking and different opportunities and different approaches that maybe you didn't consider as you were thinking about your business.
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What do you think?
I'm curious as to whether or not you thought about this question before. How is your team thinking about growth? Have you run into any challenges or walls in trying to pursue that, particularly in the way that your team has chosen to define it?
Please feel free to pop your answers and any questions in the comments below. I will do my best to answer them.
Thank you so much for joining me today. TTFN, and I will see you soon.
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