Achieve more by doing less

Every entrepreneur and active business owner that I know dreams of building a business capable of achieving sustained profitable growth over time. However, maintaining continuous profitable growth is hard, and there seems to be a wide gulf between the dream and the reality. Just ten per cent of companies manage to do it over a continuous ten year period. I haven't found any research that explains why companies experience such difficulty achieving sustained growth, although one research report I read recently suggested those companies that do achieve it appear to have three characteristics in common:

• They reduce the scope of their business
  
• They look for profitable opportunities within their existing core business boundaries
• They set high performance targets

Interestingly, these three characteristics are increasingly being associated with effective governance: the determination of strategy and the setting of performance targets. While not mentioned in the report, the boards presumably implemented a structured monitoring regime as well. 

These characteristics challenge conventional wisdom that you have to do more (diversify the product mix and/or enter new markets) to get more. They also enhance the credibility of the proposition that the board’s active involvement in strategy development and performance monitoring is crucial to a company achieving and sustaining profitable growth over time.