Reinventing the wheel for business growth

As various trend hoppers jump from one shiny object to the next, crossing their fingers for a portrait in some glossy business magazine, real winners work hard in silence until success catches them by surprise.

Overnight success is largely a myth and doesn’t always end well IF it does happen. There’s an endless list of entertainers and athletes who lose their marbles a year into their “lucky break.” The real lucky ones break through when they’re ready to handle success.

In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins coined the Flywheel principle.

Picture a massive, heavy flywheel. Your task is to rotate the wheel until it spins mainly from its own momentum. Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. After some hefty pushing the flywheel completes its first turn. Giving the wheel no rest, you complete the next turn in less time and with greater speed and ease. And another turn. And another… After continuous effort, you no longer use your hands to get the wheel moving but to simply add speed.

Now imagine newspapers praising you as the prodigy who invented the self-spinning wheel. Not a single column is devoted to the chronic back pain and calluses on your hands because readers want to believe in unicorns.

I’ve seen many comparison based businesses frequently launching new programs with the intent of out-innovating the competition, only to fail, change course, and fail again. After years of lurching back and forth, ”not so great” companies never build that sustained momentum and fall into a doom loop.

“Great” companies are not born from a single initiative but from a compounding of small wins accumulated over years of continuous effort. By the time momentum propels your business to a breakthrough, you make it look easy.

Although Newton’s laws apply to us all, every business has a unique engine with its own nuts, bolts, conveyors and coupling rods that propel the flywheel. Before users needed Facebook, Facebook needed users. As the app grew a customer base through painstaking work, it also had to improve and update a quality service to keep its users on site. Facebook blew up when satisfied users started inviting their friends, and suddenly — not being on Facebook amounted to being a village outcast. A flywheel in action!

Here are some tips to get that flywheel spinning (adapted off Jim Collins’ Turning the Flywheel – A Monograph and accompaniment to Good to Great. :

List your significant replicable successes achieved
List your failures and disappointments
Compare these to identify potential components of your flywheel
Brainstorm 4 – 6 flywheel components
Sketch your first flywheel (maximum 6 components)
Test your flywheel. A) do your achievements and disappointments relate to the flywheel you just built? For each component, can you say, that the success of that component “can’t help but lead to the next component?
Compare against your Hedgehog Strategy (if you have developed one)
Use it

Once you’ve created your Flywheel, use it each quarter to assess how your business is performing in each of the 4-6 components. For practicality, have each team member individually assess each component using a traffic light system (green, amber, red), and be prepared to discuss why they have assessed it this way. Well facilitated discussions using this approach will always lead to key inputs into your annual or quarterly business planning activities, and prime your business for “flywheel type growth”.

Grow your business without the pain!!

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Reinventing the wheel for business growth

Reinventing the wheel for business growth

As various trend hoppers jump from one shiny object to the next, crossing their fingers for a portrait in some glossy business magazine, real winners work hard in silence until success catches them by surprise.

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