Everybody promises growth and not many deliver. Here’s what we know will guarantee 2x growth YoY in your company.
The thing that matters the most in a company is growth. If a company doesn’t grow it will not attract investors, employees and eventually competitors will outgrow it and steal its clients. If a company doesn’t grow it will not be able to generate impact, period. I’ve been researching hyper growth in companies for the past 10 years, I also work with companies like Rappi, a billion dollar company and one of Y-Combinator's most successful startups ever that grows at 2x YoY, as well as companies like AB Inbev and Kia. But not only that, I have applied the same tactics to my own company achieving a 2X growth YoY. At the end of my research I concluded that the main and most important influencer for growth is Collaboration. Here’s why:
1. Team work:
The key for the success of any company is its talent, but most importantly, making that talent work together. But most times working under the same roof won't make it. Working with a team of talented people is bringing those people together to create ideas and solutions to common problems. If a company creates a culture of teamwork, a culture were discussions can happen without the risk of ridicule, then that’s the starting point of growth. Ray Dalio talks in his book about Radical Transparency, and how sharing and being transparent on what you are working and acknowledging that you can learn from others boosts growth. This sounds obvious and trivial but radical transparency is being able for example, to be ok if others put you as an example of a mistake you just did in order for others to learn from that. That takes not only a different mentality but a whole different culture. Here's his book: https://bit.ly/32nDcPO
2. Way of work:
companies and people started to explore real collaboration in the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. We are still learning how to do it and most people fear collaborating with others thinking “would that person steal my idea? If I collaborate with them, would they need me in the team?”. Fear of collaboration is one of the main problems in organizations and is more deeply covered in this Harvard article by Lisa Kwan (https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-collaboration-blind-spot). When fear settles, silos are more evident, causing organizations to break. We need companies to organize by goals instead of departments with multiple different profiles within their teams. For example, an organization might name a growth lead for a specific business unit, and he might bring people from engineering, sales, BI, Marketing, advertising agency, among others to serve the team. A multidisciplinary team that can solve problems and discuss different point of views and approaches to a specific problem is gold. Most technology companies are using growth hackers and building multidisciplinary teams. For example, Google was one on the first companies that tried this approach (no wonder why the 5 most valued companies in the world according to Forbes are tech companies).
3. Technological environment:
Companies install more than 1,000 different cloud services ranging from productivity software, HR, sales and Marketing. Although many of them promise easy integrations, how many times do we see someone in marketing having to look at analytics software used by BI? At the end, BI ends up sending an email to marketing and marketing to their agencies regarding a specific metric or graph. Or how many times have we seen someone in finance digging into a Marketing Software? Real technology integration means environments where people can collaborate in real time, where knowledge can be transferred in real time. Let me give you an example within our own company. One of the most important decisions we had to take was how were we going to measure every aspect of our business to be able to understand it. The traditional solution was to use Segment to centralize our data, then connecting Amplitude to our S3, then connecting ClearBrain to our S3 for predictions, then Heap to the S3 and then connecting Segment to optimization tools like Optimizely.
Although the setup took about 3 months, we still had to do a ton of manual work and it was a nightmare. If I wanted to check out business data I would have to go to Amplitude, but what about campaigns? What about specific web data? What about predictions? I felt disconnected from all these tools, but not only that, from my team. What if we wanted to talk about a specific metric right away? Or make it actionable? When we were building Datagran, I always thought of Slack. When I heard about Slack, I never thought how it was about to dramatically change the way our teams worked. That’s why we wanted to build a data workspace, were teams could easily share, communicate and manage data, changing our way of work completely and boosting growth.
Rappi's hyper growth was not coincidental. Within Rappi, teams are talented. They work together and like philosophers, they share their arguments until their ideas and thoughts are so strong that they feel confident enough to expose them to the whole world (radical transparency). But not only that, they have the technology that allows collaboration and teamwork. With one single environment, teams can transfer knowledge immediately to different areas ranging from Bi, Growth, CRM and sales to make it actionable, fast and effective.
Hyper growth is about the right team, way of work and the right environment, instead of individuals, areas and software.
If you happen to be Interested in understanding how to grow your business, our team of consultants have developed a free audit to understand its readiness for 2x growth. Schedule a call with us here and get it for free.
What's Datagran?
Datagran is a system of record that allows companies to integrate data and analyze, predict and take action in a single pipeline to solve specific business problems like churn, increased inventory value, customer acquisition cost, and more. For more information visit www.datagran.io
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