Unobvious Growth, and where to find it.
Most businesses look for growth in the same obvious places. The most interesting growth hides where conventional strategy doesn't look.
Nick Parminter
Founder, Nordant
Every business I've worked with wants growth, even when times are tough, and almost all of them look for it in the same places: new markets, new segments, new products, and a close eye on the competition. There's nothing wrong with that “MBA school” of growth strategy, and it sometimes throws up initiatives worth pursuing. The problem is that those initiatives are obvious, and obvious means contested, expensive and modest.
The growth I find most interesting is what I call Unobvious Growth. It doesn't follow the standard frameworks and quite often seems to defy logic. It hides inside things that look like success and sits in problems customers have stopped complaining about, or don't yet know they have. It gets overlooked because it's hard to explain. It doesn't leap off the page of the management accounts, it doesn't come up in customer research, and it isn't found in the gap between you and your competitors.
Finding it and acting on it is hard. You have to be inventive about which methods to reach for and when. You also have to build a team that rewards risk-taking, challenges accepted facts, and is comfortable holding competing ideas in mind and letting them run in parallel. It's gruelling, uncertain work, but it's also very good fun.
It's the work I founded Class35 to do in 2018, and it's the work I'm focusing on again with Nordant. This time, though, the world has moved on. Opportunities are scarcer, and the bar for placing a digital bet is higher because doing nothing has started to look like the safer option. AI has changed what's possible and will soon start to reshape whole markets.
But the approach works. Over the last 15 years I've been involved in some remarkable projects. Between them they've created significant new enterprise value, helped clients raise substantial investment, reached millions of new customers and led to several exits.
Put simply, Unobvious Growth is growth a business could already have but overlooks, because it sits where conventional strategy doesn't look. It's found in less comfortable places: in customers who rely on you but barely use you, and in things customers would trust you to do that you've never offered. It's lost to alternatives like spreadsheets, internal teams and doing nothing, rather than to your best-known competitors. It depends on problems people will actually pay to fix, not ones they merely complain about in focus groups. And it's often held back by an organisation too stuck to act on what it already knows.
What these have in common is that the opportunity is usually already there, in the customer relationships, data, reputation and know-how the business has built up. Most organisations just aren't set up to see it. Counterintuitively, some of the best opportunities sit in the businesses and products that look most mature on paper, with low churn, strong brand recognition and customers who say they couldn't do without you.
I've written a ten-part series on where Unobvious Growth hides and how to go after it. Each article introduces one idea we use at Nordant, illustrated with stories from the last 15 years in payments, banking, fintech and beyond.
- 02The Spreadsheet Is a Cry for HelpOn the growth hiding inside your existing products and the data they generate.
- 03Nobody Asked for the Wheelie SuitcaseOn the problems customers don't know they have.
- 04Trust Travels Further Than ProductsOn what customers would let you do for them.
- 05Doing Nothing Has Excellent DistributionOn the alternatives that threaten adoption.
- 06Sympathy Doesn't Sign Purchase OrdersSeparating a problem worth solving from one worth paying for.
- 07Customers Are Terrible WitnessesOn why research sessions miss what people actually do.
- 08Proof Arrives After the DecisionOn building board conviction behind bets you can't prove in advance.
- 09Growth by SubtractionOn the ideas worth killing and the growth a clear no can unlock.
- 10Horsepower for a Parked CarOn why piling more onto a stuck organisation gets you nowhere.
- 11AI Makes Trying Cheap and Trust ExpensiveOn why AI makes the hard-to-copy parts of your business more valuable.