Extreme Revenue Growth

Victor Cheng deconstructs the management practices used by fast growing technology companies and adapts these practices for use in other industries. While most business books tout one new big idea that will magically solve all your problems, Extreme Revenue Growth provides a refreshingly different and practical approach, combining many cross- functional practices to create a blueprint for explosive growth.

Accelerate your company's growth in a disciplined fashion. This book provides leaders of large and small companies a proven comprehensive framework to think systematically about growth options and to yield practical strategies that produce faster growth. Drawing insights from case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies, strategy teacher and venture capitalist Peter Cohan models his systematic approach to brainstorming, evaluating, and implementing growth strategies across five dimensions: Customers, Geography, Products, Capabilities, Culture. He examines each of these five growth dimensions in turn, selecting and organizing his cases to compare the growth strategies deployed successfully and unsuccessfully by large and small companies along the given dimension. In each of his five dimensional chapters, the author derives from his case analyses the key principles and processes for creating and achieving faster growth. Professor Cohan draws on a network of hundreds of founders, CEOs, and investors developed through his decades of consulting, authorship of 11 books, and over five years as a Forbes columnist. He shows through many compelling stories how leaders craft effective growth strategies. Business leaders will learn the following lessons from this book: Achieving rapid but sustainable growth is a business leader’s most important responsibility – and leaders must approach this challenge with a mixture of vision, intellectual humility, and a willingness to experiment and learn from failure. The growth challenges facing companies that are currently growing quickly differ from the ones that stagnating or shrinking companies must overcome. Companies can achieve growth along one or more of the dimensions simultaneously – and they often expand geographically to customers in the same segments. Useful insights can emerge from comparing case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies pursuing similar growth strategies. Companies should select a growth strategy based on three factors: the attractiveness of the growth opportunity, the company’s capabilities to provide superior value to customers in the selected market, and the expected return on investment in the growth vector. Companies should select a growth strategy that best fits their capabilities and culture and they must enhance both to adapt to new growth opportunities. Who This Book Is For The people in companies who are responsible for growth: chief executive officers, chief marketing officers, chief product officers, heads of business development, product managers, sales people, and human resources managers

In this probing study of the growth experience of Fortune 100-sized firms across the past fifty years, authors Olson and van Bever find that great companies stop growing not because of market saturation, government regulation, or other external constraints but rather because of a finite set of common strategy mistakes that appear time after time, across industries, across geography, and across the economic cycle."--Jacket.

What if every successful start-up followed a predictable pattern, and by knowing that pattern ahead of time, you could be more successful? In The Hockey Stick Principles, business consultant Bobby Martin shares his study of more than 100 new businesses, from Lending Tree to Under Armour to iContact, to show that every one of them has had a "hockey stick" growth history, starting with a tinkering period, moving through the daunting "blade years" before finally making it to the crucial inflection point that precedes surging growth. In this simple but incredibly helpful book, Martin takes us through each of those four stages of the hockey stick pattern, giving us a road map that will help any entrepreneur navigate the inevitable ups and downs of their business's early years.

50+ Proven Ways to Scale Your Startup Without a Marketing Budget Marketing is consistently considered one of the main reasons that startups fail, and every year, tens of thousands of businesses close simply because they didn't prioritize marketing early enough. The problem is that many startup founders believe they cannot do any real marketing until they can afford it, and that's simply not true, because Marketing doesn't have to cost a dime! After 15 years handling growth for startups, Andrew Lee Miller, an accomplished, early-stage startup marketing expert, who's taken three young companies to multi-million dollar exits, found that there were tons of valuable growth strategies that could be implemented that don't cost anything. Bootstrapped Marketing, Growth Hacking, Organic Marketing and more, all refer to the lesser known ways of attaining scalable growth for your business without a large "war chest" for paid advertising, and Andrew has spent over a decade developing, testing, and proving out the best of the best strategies that actually work. The Startup Growth Book then is the culmination of Andrew's 15+ years of in-the-trenches startup growth experience and is the only business book out there that actually teaches entrepreneurs and marketers how to build sustainable, scalable growth, channel by channel, with zero advertising budget. Tried and tested by Andrew himself, this book directly draws from Andrew's experiences scaling over 100 startups in over a dozen nations and languages. This book is ideal for young marketers who want to learn cutting-edge tactics from a master, as well as new businesses that want to grow organically and prove traction without spending cash on Paid Advertising. For the first time ever, Andrew will show you how to scale organically using 10 different channels. Learn exactly how to launch and scale these channels without spending money: - Public Relations across all major media channels - Search Engine Optimization so people can discover you organically - Email Marketing to master the most effective means of marketing communication - Social Media Marketing and Influencer Marketing done right ... and more. After reading this book, you will be able to implement these lessons to drive growth in your business without needing to outsource to a Marketing agency, hire a marketing team, or even run any Facebook ads. Dozens of companies have already implemented Andrew's growth hacking tactics, and have scaled to millions of dollars in revenue.

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of "Hooked"

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Cheng, a former McKinsey consultant and marketing expert for the Fox Business Television Network, analyzes 12 U.S. recessions spanning 136 years to uncover why dozens of startup companies thrived during the economic chaos of their day.

A predictable pattern of success Entrepreneurs who have read early drafts of The Start-Up J Curve responded, ''I wish I had this book years ago.'' A start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern; the more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it. Author Howard Love calls this pattern the start-up J Curve: The toughest part of the endeavor is the time between the actual start of a new business and when the product and model are firmly established. The Start-Up J Curve gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to get through the early challenges so they can reach the primary value creation that lies beyond. Love brings thirty-five years of start-up experience to this comprehensive guide to starting a business. He outlines the six predictable stages of start-up growth and details the activities that should be undertaken at each stage to ensure success and to avoid common pitfalls. Instead of feeling lost and confused after a setback, start-up founders and investors can anticipate the challenges, overcome the obstacles, and ride the curve to the top.