I believed growth is built. It is. But the environment gets a vote, and it helps to be ready for it.
I started my career believing that businesses grow because people build them. Effort in, growth out. It seemed obvious.
I believed this while standing inside the evidence against it. And I still belive it.
My first employer became a national player in the early 2000s not by baking more bread but by buying bakeries and mills across the country and merging them into one company. I was doing market research at the time, and the company grew faster on paper than any oven could manage. Later, in publishing, the same pattern. Later, in publishing, the same pattern. The group grew by acquiring titles, a sports daily here, a newspaper there, a stack of magazines along the way. The organic work mattered. The real jumps in size happened on signing days.
Then eighteen years in banking, helping build channels from zero. Internet banking when nobody’s mother had heard of it. A contact centre that started as a handful of people explaining it to everyone else. Telesales, partnerships, brokers, direct sales. That work grew, year after year, into a meaningful share of retail banking, and it confirmed my belief. Building is growing.
Except the same years kept filing objections. Expansion in the late 2000s, when everyone expanded. Then 2009, and the freeze, when nobody did. Then sovereign debt crises arriving in waves from abroad, each one shrinking budgets for reasons that had nothing to do with anything anyone built or failed to build. And recently, a merger that moved a bank three positions up the market ranking in a single year. Moving market share organically in that industry takes years. One transaction outran a decade.
The industries themselves told the same story. Publishing moved online and the print business I knew stopped existing in any recognizable form. Bread went from fresh loaves in plastic crates, delivered daily, to long-life products on hypermarket shelves. Retail went from corner shops to hypermarkets and then, in a twist few predicted, partly back to proximity stores. Nobody inside those businesses out-built those shifts. Some adapted. Some were bought. Some ended.
I’m not a strategist by title and certainly not an authority on mergers. I just happened to be standing nearby, several times, when the environment overruled the plan. So take what follows as field notes, not doctrine.
Building is growing. That part I had right. Whatever you build yourself, you understand, you control, and you keep when conditions change. It is the solid ground everything else stands on.
What I understood only later is that building is not the whole story. Past a certain size, the environment votes, and its vote counts more than most plans admit. So the useful conclusion is not “build harder.” It is closer to this.
Be ready to grow when building is not an option. There are periods when you cannot build. Budgets frozen, markets shrinking, everyone’s calendar eaten by something else. Those periods still allow preparation. Capabilities, relationships, and clarity about your next move cost little to maintain and are exactly what you’ll need when the window opens.
Consider moving when others stop. The cheapest moment to prepare growth is when everyone else is retreating. When the whole market froze after 2009, those who kept quietly investing in capabilities came out of it ahead, not because they were bolder, but because they were ready.
Effort in, growth out. It works. Just keep one eye on the room you’re building in, and keep something in reserve for the day the room changes shape.
Further reading:
- Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, on the moments when the environment changes the rules mid-game.
- Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, on choosing where to build before building harder.
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