📄 Why and how to avoid screwing things up with the wrong growth ingredients

There's many great things you can create, given the right ingredients.

Whether it's food, or your business, or your social life... provided you put the right things into the mix, you can create awesome things.

Mix them up the wrong way though, and you could end up struggling, in trouble, or things could fail.

For instance:

Electric vehicles are of course an advancement and a novelty... but they've actually been around for over a century.

Problem is, it's not until recently that the battery-problem was solved. Until then, you couldn't get enough mileage, to make it feasible to produce EV's en masse.

So the business of automotive experimented with the ingredient "electricity", but shelved it because it was too early for that.

At the start, Automotive needed a different ingredient: engines.

In your business, the same thing applies:[

Different ingredients are required, for the different stages your business goes through.

If you make the mistake of mixing up the stages and ingredients though, you could have some real problems.

For instance, this leadership team I spoke with yesterday:

They have a great business, with big-name clients behind them - but circumstances have changed, and sales are not as before.

So, they asked my opinion about a fairly radical change they're considering, in terms of the service model of their organisation.

Which could be what's best, but: Is that what they should fix, is that what's broken?

Because if you've had a successful run, something broke and now you need to fix it, your business is essentially back at stage 1: The Setup Stage.

Meaning, you'll have to get back to the fundamentals, get them right, and build out from there.

Because if at that point you decide to do something from the grow-up stage, such as switching into a different delivery model, you have two problems:

1. You're fixing something that used to work, and that currently might not be broken at all. Could well be that something else is broken, something more primary and fundamental
2. You're skipping over the fundamentals of even being able to sell, which means the Setup Stage, which includes your Customer Avatar; your USP; and your best guess at a successful goto-market strategy

If you don't have those three in place, and tested, and proven to be correct, everything else that you do might work...

But it could just as easily fail, simply because you missed out on a few fundamentals.

So I suggested the team that they do the basics first, and research what their USP is - because that's one thing they're not clear on yet.

That's the ingredient they need right now, because if you ain't got a USP, well you're in for a difficult ride.

In total, in my SIBG growth model, there's three stages, each with their respective ingredients.

And, if you want to get a quick, powerful primer on how they all work, and how to use them and not cause problems by using the wrong ingredients, there's a mini-training live in SalesFlow Coach, all nicely linked and ready for you to upgrade your thinking.

Here you go:

Take the Mini-training: 🧑‍🎓 SIBG - The Three Stages and Ingredients of Business Growth