{"id":1433,"date":"2015-04-21T22:56:16","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T03:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2015-04-04T23:06:44","modified_gmt":"2015-04-05T04:06:44","slug":"high-business-growth-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/high-business-growth-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow\/","title":{"rendered":"High Business Growth: Gold at the end of the Rainbow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gold__corridor\"In 1980 and 2008, the US Government\u2019s Small Business Administration (SBA) found that\u00a0high growth companies–so-called “gazelles”–were just 4% of total firms. In 2010, the US-based Blueprint Growth Institute determined that only 387 (3.5%) of 11,000 companies going public since 1980 had achieved over $1 billion (UK\u00a3620 million, \u20ac790 million) in sales. Whilst that sounds a big number to European ears, it’s much less so in the vast US market.<\/p>\n

In 2007, McKinsey discovered that\u00a0just 0.8% of firms outperformed competitors in revenue and profit growth for 10 years or more, and just 9.2% on profit alone. By contrast, Harvard Business Review found that\u00a090% of business strategies failed to meet their objectives and $9 billion of $10 billion spent on developing strategy was wasted, a shocking indictment.<\/p>\n

Let’s not kid ourselves. Creating a business from scratch is risky. Growing a business is usually hard, evolutionary graft and takes a long time with bumps, some of them major, along the road. So how can you both reduce risk AND accelerate growth, and is that just pie in the sky?!<\/p>\n

First of all you, have to accept a critical, brutal, and unpalatable lesson.<\/p>\n

In my experience over 30 years in Europe and the US most of the serious, often\u00a0fatal, ‘injuries’ suffered by ambitious, high growth businesses are\u00a0self-inflicted\u00a0and\u00a0entirely avoidable!<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen it all at first-hand:<\/p>\n