Customer expectations, experiences, and relationships are changing dramatically for businesses right across the construction industry supply chain. Traditional go-to-market capabilities that once guaranteed success are now just table stakes in a rapidly evolving competitive environment.
Whilst we’re seeing high levels of confidence in the sector it’s still vital that each business is ready to take advantage of this time to transform. Non-traditional competitors, with new business models powered by disruptive technologies, are still a threat and this combined with C-19 enforced changes are making reinvention and re-energising a vital priority.
So, how can your organisation and brand transform in way that re-energises the business post C-19, drives change with certainty – and speed? How can it develop its potential for growth, innovation, and thrive in the future? And how can it strike the balance between short-term deliverables and long-term investment? Experience shows that transforming a business has financial, organisational, and cultural benefits that support each other.
Energy: the force behind successful transformations
Sustained value creation demands growth. In the short run, you can create value by optimising costs or products/services. But in the long run, value creation derives mainly from top-line growth, which accounts for over two-thirds of total shareholder return in FTSE100 companies over a 10-year period.
In today’s uncertain business climate, sustainable growth is looking less likely for traditional/non-tech businesses such as those in the built environment. Of course, what makes one company thrive tomorrow is different from what made it succeed yesterday. Relying too much on rear-view data can be deceptive; current performance isn’t predictive, and many established businesses remain vulnerable today despite their strength and length of past performance. Sudden collapses happen, and now more likely than ever.
To survive, and ultimately thrive, businesses need to nurture, develop and build on their potential for reinvention and growth. They need to transform – with energy. There are three key building blocks to achieve this:
- Focus your energy on future ways to grow. Even if you believe you are on a future focused path, a clear brand strategy is still essential to ensure you transform to meet future needs. You need to constantly review, renew and revitalise your brand plan, encouraging an entrepreneurial attitude that leads to constant exploration – even while you’re capitalising on the benefits of a previous exploration.
- Rethinking your strategy. Instead of focusing too narrowly on maximising short-term gain, successful transformations focus on exploring longer-term goals. Future-focused strategic thinking has been proven time and again to lead to better growth over time.
- Committing to building the right capabilities. Successfully energised organisations stay up-to-date with relevant emerging technologies. They also choose transformative, rather than scale or cost-driven, mergers and acquisitions when necessary. By absorbing smaller, faster-growing companies they stimulate growth and inject new capabilities into their brand.
Reinventing your business while running it
Energy alone isn’t enough for organisations to sustainably thrive and grow. You need to optimise current performance while building the potential for long-term growth. In other words, reinvent your business while you’re running it.
It’s not easy. Especially for large or mature organisations where the current business model dominates mindset, resources and talent. As organisations age, successful behaviours from the past tend to fossilise into fixed processes and rigid thinking. Decision-making can slow, aversion to risk can grow, and it can become difficult to attract and retain entrepreneurial talent.
Three steps to transform your brand and transform your business
Transforming your brand, and the business behind it, is essential for established organisations that want to survive and thrive. Even when assessing short-term health, energised brands lead the way. Pre C-19, the top 10% most brand focused organisations in the FTSE100 outperformed their peers by 5% per year in growth and 10% per year in investor return.To transform your brand, company leaders need to follow three steps:
1. Assess the current focus of your business
- Start with a clear understanding of how your organisation is doing today as it navigates through C-19, looking from the outside in as well as the inside out.
- Ask: does our strategy include exploration of long-term ideas? What is the growth potential of those future ideas? Are we developing leading capabilities in our industry? Are we prepared to challenge the beliefs and methodologies that made us successful in the past? Are we brave enough to hire new talent that makes our organisation more cognitively diverse?
2. Strengthen or renew your growth options
- Create a range of growth options for the short, medium and long-term. Be prepared for some of these to fail; people need to feel inspired and confident to explore these options.
- Build and adapt your organisation’s capabilities. Companies are often good at dealing with traditional strategy and execution, which are still needed. But the uncertain of today’s business environment demands a more adaptive approach. You need a system that lets you seed, test, and scale new ideas quickly and iteratively.
- Invest in technology. If you haven’t already, what are you waiting for!
- Maintain diversity. The diverse way your organisation is organised isn’t enough. And diversity of people’s backgrounds doesn’t guarantee innovation. It’s also necessary to encourage diversity of thought and open sharing of ideas.
- Disrupt yourself before it happens. Research shows that only one third of organisations survive and thrive in the face of disruption. Survival depends on pre-empting the inevitable by creating a sense of urgency and a determination to self-disrupt before disruption occurs.
3. Reinvent while running your business
- Choose the right strategic approach for each part of your organisation. Mature businesses need to take a very different approach than emerging ones. Yours need to be built based on the specific business environment that each part of the organisation faces.
- Allow for several strategic approaches. Be prepared to try different approaches to strategy and execution at the same time, in each part of your organisation. This way, you can continue to run your business well while simultaneously re-energising it.
- Manage investor, member or stakeholder expectations. In response to pressure on the business towards short-term gain, the leadership team needs to prove how current performance is on track and the business case for future investment is sound. This buys time and permission to pursue transformational strategies.
With so much uncertainty in the market, the need for greater brand focus is more critical than ever. By balancing efforts between current performance and future re-energising, built environment organisations can do better than survive in the next 12-18 months – they can thrive and grow sustainably.
To transform your brand and the business behind it, talk to the established brand agency that specialises in your sector. Ask about CMDi’s Brand Builder programme >
