Develop a plan of attack
To decide which growth opportunities to move on, you need to first define your field of play. You need to know what it is your company does well, the skills and talents your people bring to the table, what type of resources you are willing to invest in a growth opportunity, and then measure the opportunity against those criteria.
If your company doesn’t measure up, you either need to move on or add the competencies and assets that will allow you to make the new addition to your business a success.
But it all comes back to defining what you do well as a business. It’s the first question you should ask of yourself and your leadership team.
“When we look at new markets or services, whether it’s something we want to build or something we want to buy, we always challenge ourselves by asking, ‘What do we know how to do?’” Holcombe says. “If it’s something we don’t know how to do, generally speaking, we’re not going to get involved in it. You want to be really focused on your strengths, and build and buy based on those strengths.”
You need to match your competencies not just to the product or service you are considering adding to your arsenal but to the entire process of developing, marketing, selling and supporting it.
“You don’t get involved in things you don’t know how to do, and that mentality has to run from the actual product or service, how it is priced, how it is sold, what is the business model for it, what is the sales channel for it, what is the value-added service you’re providing to the customer,” Holcombe says. “When we do that, we kind of check it off against an internal matrix to see if it fits with what we do.”
But the most important question you can ask when deciding whether to move on a growth opportunity is a question of culture. The acquisition, service, process, any new people you might add — does it all fit with the values and mission of your company?
A bad cultural match could have long-term effects for your business, especially if you’re considering a large-scale addition that will significantly alter your company.
“If you’re considering an acquisition, culture is what I would consider the most important thing,” Holcombe says. “Are the two cultures going to work together? If we try to put a culture into our culture and it’s completely disparate, what happens is we lose all the people. So that has to be part of the due-diligence process. You’re trying to find out if these people in the company to be acquired have the same type of approach to customers that you have, do they have the same business model, do they have the same kind of service mentality? If those things fit, that is kind of the key issues for us.”
And you have to be willing to walk away if the pieces don’t fit.
“We’ll walk away from a lot of deals where the business model doesn’t fit, but we’ll also walk away from deals where we could tell the culture just wasn’t going to fit well,” he says. “That is really critical for us as a global company with 1,400 employees and 600 of them outside the U.S. We have to knit not only our culture but also a global culture.”
