Growth Has To Earn It

Five good opportunities. One company. Which one deserves it?

A profitable opportunity can still be the wrong use of a company.

Growing businesses rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. The harder problem begins when several attractive opportunities compete for the same cash, management attention, technical capacity, borrowing power, and ability to execute.

A new location may be profitable. So may a major customer, an acquisition, a new product, or expansion within the existing customer base. But a company cannot pursue every good opportunity at once.

Growth Has to Earn It gives owners and executives a practical framework for deciding which opportunities deserve the company's scarce resources-and which should be redesigned, delayed, bounded, piloted, or rejected.

Through the continuing case of Northline Specialty Services, Seve Cuison shows how to identify the resource that actually constrains growth, price the full burden of an opportunity, compare projects by what they displace, evaluate concentration and downside risk, and redesign opportunities before ranking them. The book also shows how pilots, staged commitments, pricing, customer funding, and sequencing can turn an unattractive proposal into one worth pursuing.

The objective is not cautious growth. It is disciplined growth.

Some large, complicated opportunities deserve a yes. Some safe, profitable projects deserve a no. The difference is whether the opportunity creates enough value to justify the capital, capacity, attention, and alternatives the company must give up to pursue it.

Growth has to do more than make money. It has to earn the company.