Where to Find Breakthrough Growth

If it's breakthrough growth you are looking for, you'll need to take aggressive measures. Here are tactics used by the best to build substantial value, and fast.

Build a Brand: Brand is your company's personality, or your product's. It's who you are and what you stand for. Just as people remember and want to associate with people who have real personality, customers patronize companies that have style and stand for something. They like the comfort of knowing what to expect. Companies with a strong, unique brand get noticed, attract new and loyal customers, and get more traction for each marketing dollar.

Innovate, Don't Emulate: "Me too" never gets you much. Nobody's willing to pay a premium for commodity products or services. But develop new products, services, and solutions, and introduce them with excitement and you'll enjoy the spoils that only leaders and innovators get.

Penetrate New Markets: You've built a business serving a niche market. The easiest way to supercharge revenue is to take those same products and adapt them for a new, larger market.

You'll have to work hard on devising a smart marketing plan, and might have to make changes to tailor them for the new audience, but most of your development costs will already have been covered, so when sales start to take off, the lion's share of gross profit will fall to the bottom line.

Invest: Growing rapidly soaks up cash. In fact, growth is impossible without either re-investing profits or obtaining capital from other sources. If you're not prepared to take the risk of doubling down on your investment, you're not ready for breakthrough growth.

Experiment: Andy Grove, founder of Intel,says, "Business is just one great big experiment." Great new discoveries aren't found by playing it safe. The only way to find new, superior methods is by trying new things and being willing to fail. And as Roger Von Oech says in Whack on the Side of the Head, the best way to get a great idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Learn from Others: The world is full of examples of breakthrough success. Spend your time learning about what others have done to achieve it, and consider how those ideas might be applied in your business. Attending your industry trade show is a must, but innovations that sweep through one industry might take a while to jump to others. Why not periodically go to lunch with a leader in another industry and pick his or her brain about innovations? You could even attend the trade conference of another industry.

Hire Thinkers, Visionaries, Dreamers: Some people are born with a mind for innovation. Some are born with a need to put the pedal to the metal. Hire these people. Listen to their ideas and give them opportunities to explore and experiment. Develop a culture of innovation, risk tolerance and rejection of the status quo.

Quality Control: Customers must know what they're going to get from you. And as you know, disgruntled customers talk and tell with much greater verve than happy ones. That is why great companies work hard to standardize and control the customer experience. Look at Starbucks. Every store looks the same. A cup in Chicago tastes the same as a cup in London.

Focus: Determine what you do best and stick to it. Don't create confusion among your customers and employees by offering products or services not in your core area of expertise. Domino's Pizza is a great example. They deliver fast. They don't sell quality or price but "deliver in 30 minutes or less." Home Depot is another great example. They could sell just about anything in their huge, well-located warehouses. But they sell only home and garden supplies. When you need home and garden supplies, you know exactly where to go.

On the other hand, Sears tries to be everything to everybody, an approach that simply does not work today. Stake your claim on a niche, stick to it and focus on getting better at it every day.

Go After Large Groups of Customers: If you're going for breakthrough growth, go after a large target group of customers. It's just common sense.

Go Where There Is Less Price Sensitivity: Less price sensitivity means higher margins and in most cases faster sales cycles. You can achieve this by developing products that are unique and that deliver value well in excess of the price, or by going after customer groups more interested in values such as convenience, safety, or status, than in price.

Scalability: When your sales start taking off, will you be able to deliver the goods in a timely manner? The ultimate in scalability is software delivered by Internet. So long as you have a server that can handle high volumes of orders and downloads, volume can explode and nearly all the profit will fall to the bottom line. This is what you want. Hourly consulting by a respected expert is not very scalable. Put the expertise in a book or software package and now the expertise of the consultant is scalable. The ultimate example of lack of scalability comes from my uncle. During the crazy dotcom days he excitedly shared that he had worked out a deal to sell via Amazon the hand-crafted duck calls of a renowned duck-call whittler. My uncle would pocket about $20 each. After a moment I asked my uncle, "How fast can this guy whittle?"

Master the Art of Alternative Marketing: Few small businesses can afford to drive growth using traditional marketing such as television, radio and print ads. The good news is that there are, and always have been, alternatives. At least for those that can think out of the box. And today there are more alternatives than ever with the rise of the multitude of new forms of electronic communication. Yes, small companies seeking high growth can find it, and in most cases have no choice but to find it, through smart and savvy forms of alternative, bootstrapped, niche marketing that can produce great bang for the buck.

For example, many companies are finding success in direct-response type advertising using Google or Yahoo, which can be very cost-effective because one pays only for action (i.e. per 'click'). As Neil Schaffer explains, demonstrations and free tasting -- in stores or at trade shows -- can also be a good way to showcase a new product or even a prototype. If one can couple the demo with press coverage, testimonials, focus group type feedback, coupons or even purchase orders, then by killing more than one bird with one stone can make the 'free' activity very cost-effective. Finally, legendary liquor entrepreneur Sidney Frank built both Jägermeister and then Grey Goose into billion dollar brands by shunning traditional marketing and going directly to the college campus (Jägermeister) and high-end bars and fashionable parties (Grey Goose) and "demonstrating" the product to consumers and bartenders.

To achieve radical growth, you have to try many of the above ideas, but the main thing is to be innovative, imaginative and different. And when you think you have it, back it with enthusiasm, energy, a great catchy marketing plan, and a good bit of capital. It's done every day in the world. You might as well do it, too.