Strategic Growth Flywheel: A Gateway to an Informed Business Strategy

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Today, we're starting a new series, a series that you're going to want to listen to because I'm going to give you an asset for your business, an asset that will cost you nothing, that you can use to be more strategic about applying tactics for your sales team, your marketing, even your operations, for your HR department when they're trying to really battle these bottlenecks with workforce and retention.

It's something that we actually started using in our business designed to help us create a better strategy to really help us create the tactics and the execution for our clients, the marketing, and the sales side, things that would actually get us more tactile results, results that we can measure and that really got us where we were trying to go in terms of objectives for those owners and the key stakeholder's growth objectives.

We developed what we call a Strategic Growth Wheel and it's super simple. It's three parts and we're going to be going into those parts in detail in upcoming episodes. This episode is going to give you that high-level picture of the wheel and what it can be used for.

But it's not just about developing strategy, because I like to think of it as it really ensures that you have an informed strategy. I always say everybody's out there deploying tactics, but not everybody's out there with strategy that's dictating the tactics that they deploy.

If you want to go one level deeper and be even better, you want to make sure that your strategy is informed. Because you can say you have a strategy but what you might be doing is just following what you saw somebody else do, what you interpret their strategy to be, or what somebody in a parallel industry or in different business is doing, what you are perceiving that they're doing in their strategy.

But what we want to do is we want an informed strategy, and this means that we're gathering primary and secondary data so that we actually have information that's specifically relevant to our business, our assets, our strengths, our weaknesses, our market, our competition, our unique customers and their pain points. All of those things, we want those to inform our strategy.

I really think that a really informed strategy is what takes it to a higher level. This sounds much harder and in fact, everything worth doing that gives us a better output usually is a little bit but the Strategic Growth Wheel actually makes it super easy to think about. It puts it into a three-step process that you can do, you can get great output from, and then you can do it again.

But it's a lot like having a flywheel in your business because once you do this once, because that first big informed strategy that we create, it's always the heaviest lift, but then it's a matter of every single quarter looking at that, continuing to bring in new data that you don't have to bring in quite so much, you're just using that to modify what that output is going to be.

It can become incredibly powerful when you're doing it over and over in your business. Most of our clients do that first big one and it's so amazing that we do one every single quarter in their business where we help guide them and just be a sounding board for them to create it or to keep it going in their business because it needs to be a living, breathing thing.

Informed means that we're continuing to gather data, because our market shifts or competition shifts, maybe the demands and needs of our customers shift. It happened with massive, incredible shifts during COVID that even when we're not going through a scenario like this, our markets, our customers, our products, the demands, and the technology, all the things that influence our businesses are still shifting and adapting and we need to be doing the same thing.

It's really important to have a tool and a framework you can use in your business that allows you to really be flexible and adaptive but really keep top-end strategy in mind. I want to give you what we think of as a heuristic. I talked about this a lot because I love this concept and I'm a little bit of a geek about the way people's brains work and the science behind sales, marketing, and all those things.

Heuristic is a shortcut that our brain uses to help us make decisions, make more better decisions, more informed decisions to help us process really complex things coming in or happening and do it quicker with less calorie burn, with maybe less assets or resources applied to it.

Two things, the Strategic Growth Flywheel in that case actually can be seen as heuristic because it's a framework and a model to help make things simpler in your business when you're trying to really decide how you're going to grow and how you're going to do things. Then also I'm going to give you another heuristic, and it's an analogy.

Here we go. Here's the analogy. Imagine that you walk into your doctor's office and you prescribed to him that you need a certain surgery. This is what is wrong with you and you need the surgery. Let's schedule the surgery and we do it.

If that doctor actually took your advice and scheduled and performed that surgery, that'd be malpractice. I know I have a little bit different approach, but that's how I think of it when we go in when somebody says to me, “I need a website, or I need to hop on social media and do this, this, and that on social media.” I would say, “Okay, well, why do you think you need that? What is the data? What is the information, the inputs that are telling you need that?”

There are a lot of different ways to do that. A website is so dynamic and can do so many different things. Social media is endlessly dynamic and creative. The objectives that you can try to deploy on that are so buried as well. Usually, they don't know. They don't know that because they're going in there and they're self-diagnosing.

We have to start with a diagnosis and you pay for a diagnosis. You pay for the MRIs, you pay for the bloodwork, you pay for the knowledge and the expertise that that doctor has. Sometimes that means he's sending you to a specialist who has a deep background in whatever problem they think that you have because they want to make sure they get it diagnosed correctly.

I know a lot of my clients have said that one of the things they appreciate about our agency is that I'm the chief strategist and I've actually worked in the industry. I've worked in construction. I'm a third-generation contractor. I've actually been certified in traffic control. I've ran traffic control, I’ve ran the street behind the paper, I've ran the rollers. I've been out there with the crews for hours and hours and weeks and months on time.

I've been out there with the customers, a lot of the same customers and partners that they are engaged with every single day in their businesses. I spent over 25 years actually doing that and working in those variety of roles. I could say that I'm a specialist in a very specific, in our analogy, like a medical field. But in this case, I'm a specialist in the asphalt paving industry. That's my specialty.

I have some other experiences but that's my deepest knowledge right there. Think about your doctor. We're going to continue on with this analogy. You wouldn't walk in and you wouldn't prescribe to them like a major surgery or treatment for something without allowing them to diagnose. I want you to think about that. We start with diagnosis and then after we diagnose, then they prescribe something.

It may be surgery, it may be medication, it may be some kind of therapy, it may be natural alternatives, whatever that doctor that you're going to, their knowledge set and what they've identified, and then you go into more of an implementation or maintenance, you're monitoring something, or you're recovering from surgery, but you might still have to go into physical therapy. There are these three phases that we think about, and the Strategic Growth Wheel is exactly the same.

In the Strategic Growth Wheel, we have Investigate. That's what we're actually collecting data both primary and secondary. That would be actual interviews with your team, with customers, with competitors, even we go out and find opportunities and ways to really dive into them. That's primary because they are very much engaged with you specifically and they can reflect, talk about, and give insights into your very unique business and how they interact with it, how they perceive it, how they feel about it, how they react to it.

You can do this yourself. You can find people in your company to do this. You can set up processes and systems. We always recommend this once we get all the way through the Growth Wheel. But so that you're doing it on an ongoing basis and maybe sales and customer service is collecting information and cycling it back to the owners, the marketing team, anybody that's helping with strategy development and maintenance of that strategy, that can be really powerful.

But the diagnosis is all about gathering facts. If you're looking at secondary data, that's more about market research, what's going on in the market, what are the trends. What are parallel industries and what are the markets that we're seeing there that could dictate maybe early indications of what a progressive company should be thinking about or doing to maybe differentiate themselves where you're at right there?

There are two different types of data that we're focused on. But they take us buckling down and doing the work in that investigation phase just like a doctor would diagnose.

Then the next stage of the Strategic Growth Wheel is Identify. Just like that doctor would look at all of that data, they would send all those reports, the bloodwork back to him. He would sit down with all that data and identify maybe there are multiple things that he's seen there, but which one's the most important that he would need to address first, or is there only one. Or if he could address one, would it maybe solve some of these other ones. Or he may even identify that he needs to call in a different expert or somebody that is going to be part of a team to help with this diagnosis and identifying the problem or prescribing.

That's the next phase of the Growth Wheel. It's identifying. It's figuring out what is that priority bottleneck or opportunity. Sometimes they present as a bottleneck or a negative but I always say every negative, every bottleneck is just an opportunity we need to flip.

When it comes to identifying an implementation, we're always trying to target it as an opportunity, how are we going to use this to our advantage? But if we find a couple of things during the investigation phase, we may actually need to go through some modeling where we filter out which one is the biggest priority, or is there one here that if we address this first, it might actually solve some of these other things that we're seeing or leverage some other opportunities that we see out on the horizon.

That's the first two parts as they align with our doctor analogy. Let's look at the third and final part of the Strategic Growth Wheel and that's Implement. I always love to say that good intentions don't pay for roads. It takes a pre-con, it takes a crew, it takes engineers, it takes material suppliers, it takes pavers, contractors, all of the things coming together. It takes pre-cons and meetings and it takes everybody watching and monitoring the progress, then getting out there, and getting the project done.

There's so much that goes into it. But a lot of times, especially with our business when our business is going through cycles and we get busy and distracted by other things, we can't always or we don't always follow through on implementation. But it's so important if you're going to invest, have the strategy, and really have the opportunities to set yourself apart, you have to implement.

If we want to go back to that doctor's analogy, it would mean that you actually go and get the surgery done. You take the prescribed treatment, but not only that, you go back for your follow-up visits, they monitor your progress. I know I had a bad arm break several years ago and had three years of physical therapy after this and four surgeries on my wrist.

There was a lot that happened in the implementation side. I had to be super committed because they really didn't think I was going to have all the function in my right hand back. I had to really, really commit to the implementation and measuring my progress. It was painful.

I hated spending all that time driving back and forth to PT, going to follow-ups, getting more X-rays, and all the things but I had to do it and I'm so grateful that I did because I have almost like 98% function back in that hand and hardly anybody can even tell.

I’m grateful that I have that team to help support me in implementation and I'm super grateful that I committed to do it because the results on the backside are incredibly great. I've been able to resume so many activities. That's how we can look at this doctor's analogy and take it and translate it into our business.

We need to know what are we going to measure? What does the success for this objective that we've identified look like? What are the key things? Who's going to be involved in our company? How are we going to communicate it to our company, our partners, our customers? Everybody that it impacts, we need to communicate why this is important to them, why we're doing it, because it matters for us to really be successful.

Who's going to be responsible for certain parts of it, and what does it look like as we progress? Are there tools, processes, and systems that we can incorporate into implementation that actually make it super easy and effortless that automate the processes and systems that we're building into our businesses that are growing our businesses? That's what's really important in that implementation stage.

Think about this now. You have kind of an overview of the Strategic Growth Flywheel. If we aren't using something like this in our business, this is what I see a lot. I see people that every single year, they say, “I need to fix this disconnect between marketing and sales. My marketing team, I’m spending money, they're spending time, they're doing this but I don't really know what the results are,” and sales is over here and they wish marketing was supporting them this way.

Marketing wishes that sales understood this about what they're doing, and there's a total disconnect. But you don't really have a process to help you solve or address that problem.

Maybe another example is the workforce issue. In the last several years, it's just gotten worse and worse. Every single year when the season starts to pick up and it's time to start bringing people on again, you realize we've thought about ideas, we've looked at what other people are doing, we've read some articles about it but we don't actually know what we're going to do to solve this problem.

We haven't figured out what are the unique opportunities that we have that could set us apart, because you're not the only one having these problems, but the companies that solve these problems that are strategic and use data and they have informed strategy and then they identify the best opportunities, put focused effort into those specific things, and then follow through on implementation are the ones that are going to win.

Those are the companies that are going to be able to capture the workforce they need to take advantage of all the opportunities in front of them. They're the ones that are going to be able to position a new product so that it really captures the market and is completely differentiated and nothing can touch it.

They're the ones that are going to be able to take their 18-month sale cycles, shorten those down to 16 months, and then be able to project and forecast a completely different outlook for their business based on that incredible shrinkage and increased revenue.

Those are the possible benefits and everybody else that doesn't do this is going to be the ones that are struggling that are left in the dust. We have more and more companies coming into our industry but yet profits and revenue are getting tighter. We're actually seeing those decrease.

Here are a couple of statistics for you: 45% of leaders report strategic planning failure due to a lack of being able to track execution. That's a strong indicator about that implementation side. 45% of the leaders say, “Well, we kind of have a strategic plan, but it always fails. Nothing ever comes out of it because we don't really know how to track execution when it comes to the individual level.”

That's where we're talking about who's responsible for it. Is your team bought in on it? Do they understand the objectives and why it matters? Do they understand how each one of them impacts that and how they need to measure success on a daily basis? Do they have a system for reporting that back?

Here's another statistic for you: 77% of most successful companies have managed to translate strategy into execution. 77% of the successful companies, the companies that last and the companies that are seeing year after year growth are the ones that have successfully tackled the art of developing the strategy but not only that, moving it through all the way into implementation.

That's why leveraging a tool with the Strategic Growth Wheel can be incredibly powerful in your business. Those are the kinds of statistics that you want in your company. You want those positive ones. You want to be the ones that are rising to the surface and coming above the competition, differentiating yourself, making sure that you're staying relevant in the industry in a world that is constantly changing, and reacting to demands, needs, problems, technology, and all the things that impact us.

Make sure that you visit the links in the show notes because they are going to have links so you can visually actually see what this Strategic Growth Wheel looks like. Make sure you're subscribed because we are going to be diving deeper into investigation, what does that look like, what are the tools that you can use, and what kind of problems or red flags might you see in your business that indicate you really are falling short on the investigation side.

Then we're going to do the exact same thing and identify what are the tools, what are the things that we use in our business with our clients to help them do that. Again, what are some red flags in your business that may indicate that you're not identifying things correctly? Maybe you're focusing on the wrong things, spending time, money resources, on the right problems or bottlenecks and they're not getting you the big results that you really want and the momentum that you need.

Then we're also going to talk about the implementation side, all the things there. There, we're going to talk about how do you really put things into overdrive? Processes, systems, automations, KPIs, all of the things that can really make your business start running like a smooth machine, and help you stay focused on what comes next for your business, whether that's succession planning, whether that's looking at a new product developing, buying out other opportunities, whatever it is for you, it'd be really great if you were freed up and your company was giving you the opportunity to take those next steps.

Make sure you subscribe for those episodes. In the meantime, if you actually want to talk a little bit more about the Strategic Growth Wheel, what it could look like in your business, feel free to make sure that you grab the link to schedule a time with us now. We actually have tons of market data, because we're always doing research on behalf of our clients, and we have an incredible executive brief that we've created.

You want to schedule a call with us and ask to get access to that. As the chief growth strategist, I'm actually giving that presentation to a few folks who have a little bit of time blocked out of the calendar. If you want to get deeper into what are some of the market indicators, some of that secondary data that might dictate your strategy, that's a great opportunity.

We are sharing that brief with members of the industry as a way to just give back because we have all this knowledge sitting here, we’re gaining more and more all the time, we're constantly updating it so we have incredible brief that our design team has really narrowed down to about a 22-minute bulleted, really intense, deep data research that can really help you identify what can I expect from our marketplace moving forward, the biggest challenges that we're facing, and what are some of the most successful companies doing to get around those things.

Make sure that you hit that schedule now button and you guys can get some time in my calendar and we will share that executive brief with you. You want to make sure that you get some time on that before the heavy conference season begins because I know I and my team are going to be busy, busy out there networking with all of you guys, being at conferences, and also keeping up with the work for our clients. Make sure you get time on our calendar really soon.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.