The 3 Keys to Achieving Growth

I basically believe growth is never about you trying to worry about the outcome. It’s more about worrying about every variable and how you basically put them into place. So think of it like if you start up a company and you say, we want to grow by 20%, in my head, 20% means nothing. The idea is, how do I get my people to go to the customers and sell 20 more products?
But if you worry too much about the outcome of wanting 20, instead of worrying about how many salespeople you need, how many customers you need to reach, how many people do you need to educate to be able to adopt your product that much. So growth for me is about the little details.

The first question about growth is understanding. It’s always going to be about: do you know what you’re selling really? And to you understand, it’s almost about breaking everything down into little variables and how you can facilitate each variable to improve to the point you need. Some variables you’re not going to change: the population of the world.
Basically, if you need to sell to people, you need the number of people that to buy, it’s not going to change. If population is a factor, it is not going to grow by much. At the same time, you’re not going to change the number of hours in a day. If you produce something every five minutes, you’re not going to sell more than the required time you could use to produce it.

So those are things you need to first of all understand. And then when you put everything together, it becomes: okay, here’s a bottleneck, and how do we improve the bottleneck? For growth to happen, you need to understand how to stay where you are and make the best of it. Then you say, okay, this is how we scale up.
When you want to grow something, what you’re growing actually needs to be able to deliver value to somebody else. So beyond the idea of okay, I make money from these things as little as milk, how do you get it to the people? How do people trust it? How do they know that it’s going to give them the right nutrients? And those are the little variables that matter.

In order to be a leader, you actually need to lead people. So you need to show to your shareholders, to everybody: we’ve been able to grow by this. But, you know, I always say that every dream you have now is only a dream because somebody messed it up, technically. If you say, oh, now we went from growing 2.5% to growing 50% it’s because somebody was going 2.5%.
So it’s important to understand that in the next five years or ten years, there’s going to be another you sitting in that chair, saying we’re going from 2% to 25%, because what you think you’re enjoying now will basically become a scenario where somebody’s saying, oh, that wasn’t good enough there is now something better. Leaders need to have the mindset of understanding that their job is more about creating a template. There will be days of going down. There’ll be days of growth. There’ll be days of, you know, drought. Whatever we call growth now might not necessarily be as consistent as you think. If you own a football club, you want to say, we’re winning every day. But the point is, how many clubs have ever succeeded in
winning every game of the season. It’s impossible.

So everybody needs to understand that there would always be a time when things are good and then they go down. Then you go back up, basically telling everyone that no matter what opportunities, it always has an end. And when it ends, it might just be somebody else’s dream to take you back up.

If you’re not able to create a psychologically safe environment for people to come up with things to you, to the leader, I think it’s impossible to ensure a growth mindset. You grow more what you think you own. So the moment people feel like “I own and it’s mine,” it changes the game significantly.

And it’s something companies like Google did well where they have very small teams of very independent people work on different projects, and then they say, this is what we’ve come up with. So it helps a lot if you can create that sort of system where everyone believes what I’m working on is mine. I make the decision about this.

So micromanaging is the first thing leaders need to run away from. To say, I don’t want to get involved in this as much as possible. Let them own it. People, they’re willing to take more risks. But the moment you get involved in everything, you force in return and upward delegation, people don’t make a lot of decisions because they know you’re going to do it for them.
They come to you: “what do you think?” You don’t want that as a leader, you need people to be able to take decisions, you know, fail.