In survey after survey, growth is a top priority of most CEOs, and nearly all companies pursue organic growth. However, achieving dramatic growth from organic approaches often proves too slow, difficult, costly, and fraught with high failure rates.
Why?
The job of organic growth often falls to operating managers with day-to-day responsibilities. These managers focus on incremental strategies such as line extensions, new channels, and new markets, rather than on larger initiatives that meet new customer needs or materially expand their organization’s capabilities or strategic partnerships.
It is challenging to find the right talent to develop and execute aggressive new business initiatives within a company.
Seasoned executives with operational or P&L responsibility rarely step out of their roles to take on new business development, and junior staff often lack the broad cross-functional experience and executive skills required to develop a successful business model, and generate engagement and support from key stakeholders.
Teams often get stuck early in the development process dealing with potential technical, operational, and other obstacles. Even worse, some get too far down a path before truly understanding customer pain points and articulating a compelling value proposition.
In addition to analyzing an ecosystem and identifying the best option(s) for developing a new business, there are also several critical requirements to successfully develop businesses within established companies:
- Leaders with organizational and political agility
- Strategic partnership capabilities to develop and negotiate large—and often complex—partnerships
- An external network of potential strategic partners and potential employees that meets the functional, process and technical requirements of the new business
- A Lean startup and sequencing approach to limit initial capital requirements
- A differentiated or disruptive customer value proposition
- The capability to build and modify a comprehensive business model
While outsourcing business development is not a good fit for all situations, for the right initiative it can bring in seasoned professionals with the track record to hit the ground running, getting to revenue faster, while likely reducing your development costs and risk.