Hacking Growth

Here’s a common scenario that any number of entrepreneurs face today: you’re the CEO of a small business, and though you’re making a nice profit, you need to find a way to take it to the next level.

What you need to do is prioritize growth by establishing a growth team. A growth team is made up of members from different departments within your company, and it harnesses the power of collaboration to focus exclusively on finding ways to grow.

Let’s look at a real-world example. Prior to forming a growth team, the software company BitTorrent had 50 employees working in the traditional departments of engineering, marketing and product development. This brought them good results until 2012, when their growth plateaued.

The problem was that too many customers were using the basic, free version of their product. And despite making improvements to the premium, paid version, few people were making the upgrade.

Things changed, however, when an innovative project-marketing manager (PMM) came aboard, created a growth team and sparked the kind of fresh perspective they needed. By looking at engineering issues from a marketing point of view, it became clear that the lack of upgrades wasn’t due to a quality issue. Most customers were simply unaware of the premium version and what it offered.

Armed with this insight, the marketing and engineering teams joined forces to raise awareness by prominently promoting the premium version to users of the free version. As a result, upgrades skyrocketed, and revenue increased by 92 percent.

But in order for your growth team to succeed, it needs to have a strong leader. It needs someone who can unite the interdisciplinary team and keep them on course for improvement.

This leader will identify the target area, set clear goals and establish a time frame for the accomplishment of these goals. For example, he or she may decide it’s best to focus on developing new marketing channels and set a goal for the team to come up with three potential new ones by the end of the month.

The growth leader is also responsible for keeping the team focused on moving forward and steering them clear of distractions. While attractive new ideas can be distracting, the team leader must recognize when these ideas don’t serve the current goal and need to be put on the back burner.