The Double-Win: Six Factors For Achieving Sustained Growth in the Top-line and Profitability

Achieving and then sustaining top-line growth requires sound strategy and a lot of hard work.  Quarter-over-quarter revenue growth is strong evidence of an organization with a well-conceived strategy that has achieved operational excellence in areas like new customer acquisition, existing customer retention and innovation in product / service value creation.  But what about achieving sustained profitability when growing the top line?  That can be more challenging.  This article explores six important factors needed for positioning your organization for the double-win of sustained growth and profitability.

Prioritizing Organizational Wants Versus Needs - How To Tell The Difference

...and make the right decisions

In strategic planning, we must learn to separate wants from actual needs.  We are forced to make tough decisions that open one door and close another.  Weighty strategic decisions can be made easier if we apply a decision “triage” to help structure the cognitive process we must complete.  But how do we separate requirements from “desirements” in the business world fairly and consistently?  Sometimes budgetary constraints drive us to adopt a strategy of eliminating options that are not actually requirements for our business, at least not at this time.   For that first round of elimination, we need a litmus test of sorts.  More to the point, what we need is a decision process to help us filter the wants from the needs.  This article provides a system for making such an evaluation within our strategic planning process.