Getting To Scale
Sizing Up Your Business Requires a New Kind of Core Strength
We all know that guy.
He's got a 26" waist and quads so quaint you could wrap them in toilet paper and never crack a perforation. But on top, six glowing spheres: two shoulders, two pecs, and two biceps screaming through lycra spandex for all the world to notice.
He never saw a squat rack that didn't give him the yuck-no-thank-yous.
Many years ago, when I played football, bicep curls were never on the workout regimen. We'd have to sneak them in on our own free time when the rest of the workouts were done. "Curls are for girls," my coach used to say. In truth, I don't know how many young ladies were out on the quad waiting for nice biceps to walk by. Probably not many.
But his point was well taken.
The real work was in the deadlift, the squats, the hang cleans, the workouts that gave you power from the core down, boosting your strength and speed for whatever was to come.
I learned something in those summer sweat boxes that I never forgot:
What gives you power is not the same as what gives you attention.
Bigger That Business
Coming out of a year of quarantine, we're all ready to grow forward. There are mergers to make, products to spin up, revenue to reach. The businesses, as Dr. Suess would say, need "biggering", and now the question remains: how to do it?
Feeling the pressure to produce something substantial for the watchful consumer's eyes, many businesses are reaching for the bicep bar.
We need to buy some ads.
Hire some star sales talent.
Spin up a sexy new product.
Buy a competitor or three.
To be clear, none of these things on their own are bad. But as a steady diet, they make a business top-heavy, bursting at the seams with a heft that looks good and feels good, especially to consumers. But eventually, all this extra weight collapses the business internally like a toothpick trying to hold up a cinder block.
When a business scales for attention first, the core features that justify that attention are often left out. That leaves a business exposed to everything from embarrassment to obscurity. That new account exec may get you a dozen meetings with enterprises in his Rolodex. But if your business isn't ready for those meetings, if your BRAND isn't ready, then disappointment is not only possible but imminent.
A pumped-up brand inflates customer expectations, assuming it can make good on them. But when it can't, and when the customer's expectations are failed, the brand fails with them.
Scale the Brand First
The brand, your actionable reputation, has to scale first. That means you've got to invest in the unglamorous things like client experience, company culture, customer onboarding, category differentiation, message clarity, and value proposition. If your desire is to be something substantive, rather than just eye candy, then you don't get to skip leg day.
You've got to deadlift.
Scaling the brand first means three interrelated factors:
Expanding and refining the definition of your business and its value to meet the CURRENT MOMENT and the opportunities therein. This is about defining your brand in the context of the present, rather than hoping consumers, the market and other brands haven't changed in the last 1, 2, 5, or 10 years.
Investing in the positive experiences of your most valued constituents: Customers who are onboarding, loyal existing clients, and committed team members. Your brand is 10x more about what you do than what you say.
Slaughter sacred cows. Brands set for mediocrity tend to take things like products, campaigns, advertising, and other actions that lead to past successes and treat them as a model for future growth. The opposite is actually true. The work that got you here is least likely to get you to the next place.
The driving force through these three actions is self-awareness. Brands that wish to grow can't start by wanting to "look better." They need to start by actually being better, and that takes a good long look in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Don't just zoom in on the muscles that got you turned heads in the past. Take a full 360-degree view.
In today's environment of increasingly sophisticated customers, only those brands that know themselves (and their flaws) well will earn the attention of the customers they seek.
Why It Matters
Getting the core of your business: brand, self-awareness, customer and employee experience, dialed in before you set out to grow is the difference between success and failure. And the benefits of doing so are deep and long-lasting.
Your actions create reputation. You can plan for that reputation (build the brand first) or suffer that reputation (grab attention before you're ready for it). Which would you prefer?
You're gonna need a salesforce. The best ones are a whole lot easier to attract when you've got a brand that inspires and empowers them internally and not just in front of people.
The hardest work you'll ever do is trying to insert a cohesive brand into a transactional organization. Grabbing attention, pushing for short-term sales results, hiring fast will all solve short-term pain. But the long-term dysmorphia they create is backbreaking to resolve.
We all scale to sell. Your most significant effect on multipliers (whenever you want out) is your brand. But it takes years to build well because it's powered by credibility. If you could double your sales or double your multiplier, which would you choose?
Moving from an "all things to all people" culture to a laser-focused brand culture has the power to break your company literally in half. So maybe don't set yourself up for that. I know it feels like the opportunity to landgrab some market share right now is a good one. But without the culture, you're creating top-heavy growth, which can eventually force an organization to its knees.
Exercising for Power
Today's marketplace moves hella fast. Customers have higher expectations than ever, and their options are more transparent than they've ever been. B2B buyers want all the ease of access of the B2C marketplace with the same professional flair they used to get at steak dinners. Technology has accelerated the innovation cycle and undermined it, as consumers are more and more interested in the human touch of a brand than ever.
All this quick movement leads companies to try and build more agility: flashier and more gimmicky marketing ideas, hollow new products, mile-a-minute mergers, and so forth.
But what this current moment actually calls for is companies to have a low center of gravity, an ability to pivot quickly and yet remain grounded. The power to face a crashing wave of opportunity and be floating on high tide by the end.
The brand, with a well-crafted core of credibility, experience, and community, is the central column of power that makes that coveted agility possible.
The self-awareness and investment in brand integrity required to make that happen are not for everyone. Many businesses will hope their well-toned biceps will be enough to snare the attention they desire. But for those who wish to do more than buy a moment's agile glance from fickle suitors… the powerful brand is the way.
Let's get to work.
