Growth Navigation

We define growth navigation as 'the science of determining the position and course of a business investment, through a structured decision-making process to achieve investor value."

Growth Navigation is about changing the behaviours of your decision-making team. It's about lifting your perspectives higher so that you can look down on your business as part of a wider business ecosystem and identify how best to navigate it as an investment. 

When it comes to growth, there are 4 stages that you should consider.

  • Thesis- The idea

  • Strategy - The details

  • Case - The roadmap

  • Transact - The resources

At D/srupt we have developed services that help you progress through each stage, but if you’re keen to understand the process of growth you can discover more about these below.

The Routines of Growth

There are four core routines that once embedded will drastically change your perspective and effectiveness as a business owner.

  1. Thesis

This first step is to convert the ‘business idea’ into an objective assessment of the opportunity by:

  • Review: a thorough investigation of the current situation to assess the current Market Attractiveness of the idea and your business’s ability to execute on the opportunity. Critical to this assessment is ensuring there is alignment amongst your team, to ensure the market intelligence that each party has, is brought into the mix.

  • Insights: next is to translate the review information into an agreed set of Internal Strengths & weaknesses- es and External Opportunities and Threats. This requires you to synthesize the review data into key themes that underpin your Investment Thesis.

An excellent Investment Thesis has a clear definition of the market problem you are trying to solve and then a statement of why your business is uniquely positioned to capture it.

Our Growth Strategy Service can help you build a Thesis, or contact us for more information.

2. Strategy

These routines are about rigorously and continually reviewing the underlying assumptions of the Investment Thesis.

  • ​Design: there are sixteen key business decisions that must be thought through and carefully combined to design your business. Each decision has a significant impact on the design of your business and its ability to succeed, so testing and validating these assumptions is vital for accelerated business success.

  • ​Quantity: each business design decision has financial ramifications. Translating those decisions into a financial model that quantifies the scale of investment and the potential outcome that it could deliver downstream is core to rational investment decisions.

A great Investment Strategy has had significant time invested in thinking through the details, making very clear decisions and meticulous attention to validating those assumptions. This will provide confidence that your investments will yield results.

Our Deal Readiness is the easy way to build out your Strategy, we can help you to validate every part of you growth plan to ensure it meets your ambitions and expectation, it’s also a great way to attract the resources you may need.

3. Case

Whether you are just investing your time, your money or someone else's money, careful allocation of the capital ensures that it doesn’t seep away into your day-to-day cash flow and actually lands on the activities that will move your business forward.

  • ​Allocate: to select and prioritise the business initiatives that will be undertaken every 90 days. By stage-gating the investment you are narrowing your focus on the most important things to do right now, whilst being cognizant of those things that you might do next.

  • ​Track: once invested and the task is undertaken it is critical to review the outcome of the investment and whether it increased the confidence around the financial forecast. The outcome of this review is to continually reflect on whether you keep making additional investments. At some point, some businesses can be overcapitalized and should have been shut down a long time ago.

A great Investment Management function makes sure that all the money invested is spent on what was intended and has a clear line of sight to returns.

4. Transact

These routines are about a continual rigorous review of the underlying assumptions of the Investment Thesis.

  • ​Monitor: continually scanning the market to identify other liquidity events that are being undertaken in your industry or aligned industries. Keeping up to date with mergers and acquisitions locally and internationally as well as emerging companies being listed on the stock exchange all indicates how other founders are realising asset value.

  • ​Valuation—regularly recalculating your business value, is not dissimilar to checking the value of your house online. It doesn’t mean you are going to sell right now, but it does mean you are fully informed of the scale of the asset you are creating and reflecting on the right time to make that happen.

​​For business owners to be successful investors in their business they need to be more clinical and objective about their investments.

By putting these routines into your business, you not only actively manage your investment but you align the business development activity to the ultimate goal.

If you would like to find out more about our Growth Service, we’d love to talk