How Do You Know if You’re Ready for Growth?

You feel that your company is ready to make changes in order to aggressively grow. You even have some ideas about where to start. Now, there is a big decision ahead of you:

• Do you move forward on your own, or even hire an internal team? Or,
• Do you join forces with a strategic growth partner like GEM?

In working with midsize to enterprise brands, we have both provided clients with an external marketing team and acted as a consultant to the internal team that’s already in place. Our nine departments give clients the flexibility of using one or all of them for any given initiative. For clients who are launching a new product or service, opening a new market or looking to rebrand and relaunch with aggressive growth, we recommend considering the following pre-growth steps:

1. Ensure that your entire executive team is ready for change and growth. Our work at GEM changes entire organizations — not just their communications strategies. Once we begin to achieve aggressive growth, we work with clients to revise product and service offerings, reassess operational changes and refine growth goals as time goes on. However, we can only do our brand-changing work if the entire executive team is ready for change. Even one key executive who is attached to “the way things were” will put a major roadblock in place that is often insurmountable. However, if you feel that this is a problem you may encounter at your organization, know that we have worked with boardrooms in the past to get everyone aligned to the same growth vision. By helping executives align, we can prepare your organization to work with GEM and ensure that when you do, our work is fulfilling and successful for all involved.
2. Examine your timeline for achieving your desired results, and make sure it is realistic. At GEM, we move as quickly as our clients do — within reason. Television campaigns can’t be launched in 15 days, and websites can’t be built in 30. However, we typically find that we’re one of the fastest-working agencies we come across, according to the clients that come from other agencies and tell us as much. In fact, what we typically find is that we move more quickly than our clients do. What we’ve learned is how we can better help clients meet and exceed their own timelines by preparing clear milestones and being aggressive in our follow-ups to keep projects moving. If you feel as though your company may be a procrastinator, we can help you overcome this obstacle.
3. Before you start hunting for marketing solutions, closely examine your budget. For better or worse, achieving aggressive growth (double- or triple-digit revenue growth) requires money. The process is, after all, an investment. This is not to say that just throwing funds into a marketing budget guarantees success; in fact, we often come in to save large marketing budgets that have been spent on unscrupulous vendors that promise results but fail to deliver on-time, on-brand and on-budget. But when the proper dollars are allocated to well-designed marketing strategies, you are sure to get impressive ROIs.

Unfortunately, a budgetary restriction is the one piece of this pre-growth checklist that GEM can’t help you solve. However, if you are looking for a growth partner nonetheless, we would be happy to recommend a few agencies that specialize in small business. Just reach out and we’ll be happy to help!

Do you have what it takes to join forces with GEM? If you think you’re ready for the kind of growth we create, we would love to hear from you. And, congratulations on being ready to create more jobs, delight more customers and be a leader in your industry!

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