Discipline of Making Investments For Growth

Your Business Transformation in 2021: The Discipline of Making Investments to Re-Imagine Your Business

We’re Not Placing Bets, We’re Making Investments

Like you, I am hungry for big, transformational growth this year and in the years ahead. But, if our goal is sizable and sustainable long-term growth, we can’t be focused on small ideas or placing intuitive bets. It is about investing in the big opportunities for growth with thoughtfulness and discipline to catapult our organizations to a leadership position.

Investing in long-term, transformational growth is both an art and a science – in reality, it is both a mindset and a discipline.

We first consider our consumers, customers and employees’ needs and behaviors. From there, we identify as many new and diverse ways as possible to meet those needs. There are no bad ideas to start. Then the great ideas filter out through a process that includes evaluating options, considering risks and scanning the competition. We recommend estimating pros and cons and the investment each option requires. The final step is taking a look at the size of the prize, and how each option will position us for long-term, transformational growth.

Re-Imagining Your Business: Transformational Growth Opportunities

Below is an expanded version of what we introduced in our last blog post. If you did a good job in identifying (1) new preferences and behaviors, and (2) imagining new opportunities, then you and your team are ready to move into the next phase of work. You can now begin developing and selecting options for transformative, long-term investments. But first, let’s double check our work, to make double sure it can’t be improved.

Download this complementary PDF for free. My team and I are are always happy to hop on a call to review with you and share some helpful tips and recommendations.

Steps to Identifying and Selecting Options for Transformative and Long-Term Investments

The Transformational Growth Opportunities exercise includes the following steps.

Double Check Your Work: Preferences and Behaviors
Before moving much further, can this work be refined? Is there anything else to add in terms of preferences and behaviors for customers, consumers or employees?
Double Check Your Work: Imagine Opportunities
Any other options you want to identify? What other ideas do you have to grow your business?
Identify New Revenue Streams & Cost Efficiencies (Estimate Size of Prize)
For each of the possible investments, which ones have the biggest impact on revenue and/or on cost reductions? Make sure to spend a good amount of time here really doing the numbers and listing these out. This exercise will help you begin to size the prize and will surface whether you are identifying truly big and transformational investment options.
Segment Your Investment Options (Estimate Size of Prize)
Now that you have listed out and analyzed each investment option, it’s time to apply a filter and segment your ideas and options into buckets.

- First, is the risk (time and money) commensurate with the reward? Eliminate options where the risk outweighs the reward (growth and return).
- Then, place each option in one of three buckets of return – Low, Medium or High Growth & Return.

After the segmenting process, options will surface that can, when executed together in a cadence, change your leadership position and result in transformative growth.

The Discipline of Transformation Series – What’s Next?

Thank you for reading and engaging with the third of a five-part series for leaders hunting for transformational growth. Now that you have begun to develop and select options for transformative and long-term investments, stay tuned for our next post where we will lay out the precise tools for:

The Discipline of Defining Scenarios for Deploying Strategic Investments:
“It’s time to step back with your team and look at your work so far together. It’s time to imagine and envision the new business scenarios that will emerge when you actually pull the trigger, invest, execute and place investments. This is a fun part, as you get to give these scenarios names which will help you spark imagination and begin to communicate investments and plans to others in the organization.”

Please Share & We Are Here To Help You Succeed

In closing, big results do not come from small ideas and intuitive bet making. To make the truly transformational, long-term leaps forward we need to approach things with a rigorous mindset. But how can we do that? As we’ve shared here, it is both and art, a science – and most importantly a mindset and a discipline!

Thank you for reading and we encourage you to share these tools with your leadership team and your peers. We also encourage you to share your work back to us for feedback and guidance.

Talk to you in a few weeks with more goodies, tools and insights from our library of transformation, all with the singular goal of helping you orchestrate transformational levels of growth and impact. Get ready, because the upcoming topics are two of our favorites – The Scenario Approach to Deploying Strategic Investments as well as our Impact Lab: Making Your Big Ideas a Reality.

All my best,

Julie LaNasa

Founder – Collaborative Consulting

Other posts in the Business Transformation series: