Growth Acceleration

  AAB’s Growth Acceleration service provides strategic and financial advisory support for growth businesses from start-up to exit. Starting The first stage of business growth involves building a profitable business around a product or service that meets a customer need –…

Blog15th Aug 2018

By Brian Mooney

 

AAB’s Growth Acceleration service provides strategic and financial advisory support for growth businesses from start-up to exit.

Starting

The first stage of business growth involves building a profitable business around a product or service that meets a customer need – known as establishing ‘product-market fit’.

Challenges at this stage are ensuring the business has enough capital to develop the product, investing in marketing and distribution channel, managing cash and margins and building reliable supplier relationships.

Growth Acceleration helps start up business build strong strategic and financial foundations for growth by focusing on the right market segments, fine-tuning the business model and discovering core product value for customers, leading to an increase in real growth and readiness for scale.

Scaling

Scaling up is about taking the business to the next level of sales and profit. It can be daunting and is the stage at which most businesses fail.

The challenge at this stage is to target investment on the key value drivers of the business to build profitable growth, not only size.

Scaling introduces people, process, funding and systems challenges – a bigger business needs different management skills, increased operational capacity and more attention to culture and communications – which implies investment in new process, facilities and skilled people

Growth Acceleration helps scaling companies plan and fund their pathway to the next level, restructure the organisation to handle increased volume and put in place the processes and governance for a bigger business.

Staying

Scaled businesses often reach a growth and profitability plateau. This may be because the market for the product is saturated; or a competitor has entered with a better proposition; or simply the owners are not willing to risk any more personal capital to grow the business further.

In these circumstances, unless the business accepts decline, the challenge is to reinvigorate growth – which is a strategy challenge rather than a financial one.

Growth Acceleration helps established businesses get back onto a growth trajectory by identifying the inhibitors to growth then developing a refreshed growth strategy that increases growth rate through a prioritised set of growth initiatives. For example, entering adjacent markets, changing the pricing model, exporting or developing a better digital experience that increases online conversion rates.

The process resembles the way a private equity fund manage a new investment, by examining the main growth levers – strategy, sales & marketing, and pricing – and creating urgency in the management team to execute a growth plan

Selling

A good exit is based on a well-executed growth strategy.

Using Growth Accelerator through each stage of business growth results in a higher value business – one that can demonstrate consistent growth in sales and profit, a strong order book, further growth potential and a skilled management team who know how to manage growth.

AAB challenge the business from a buyer’s perspective when thinking about an exit:

  • Does this business have a healthy portfolio of products – cash generators, emerging products and high potential new products in the pipeline?
  • Does this business have good quality customers in attractive sectors that have further potential for growth?
  • Does this business have good margins and channel position (and is not strategically dependent for growth on another business or platform)?
  • Is this business run by a management team who know how to grow profitably whilst continuing to deliver excellent value for customers?

AAB Plus Factor

Growth is a good problem to have.

Growth Acceleration helps growth businesses navigate the financial and strategic challenges at each stage of the growth cycle.

AAB assists with all the implications of growth including taxation, regulation, contracts, systems, policies and data so that the business can focus on the fundamentals of growth – being in present growth markets, delighting customers and selling effectively.

 

For more information please contact Brian Mooney (brian.mooney@aabconsulting.uk) or your usual AAB contact.

 

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