The Growth Imperative - 3 Tips to take Your Business to the Next Level

Whether a resourceful start-up owner or a savvy corporate executive, growth is foremost in every business leader’s thoughts. For entrepreneurial companies, growth especially helps to manoeuvre market fluctuations and competition, improve attractiveness to customers and employees and boost operational efficiencies. Ultimately, it drives the overall sustainability of the business.

However, navigating growth is no easy feat. Republic Bank’s Entrepreneurs Business Builder (EBB) Ambassadors, Davitri Doerga and Conchita Alfaisi-Clarke, are examples of two Caribbean entrepreneurs getting the growth imperative right. Conchita is a co-partner and the Managing Director of Mokisa Busidataa Osu, a traditional Maroon wellness clinic, in Suriname. Davitri is a serial entrepreneur from Guyana who, in addition to owning businesses in sales and distribution, serves as Chief Executive Officer of ActionINVEST Guyana Inc. and Chairwoman of NSB Omega Guyana Inc. Their experience demonstrates that in order to grow successfully, entrepreneurs need to focus on:

• gaining customer insights;
• selecting a growth strategy; and
• sourcing financing and business support.

1. Customer Insight:
   

   Understanding customers’ needs can provide powerful insight into how to grow. After all, entrepreneurs launch to address a specific customer desire, so it is only logical that they look to customers to discern how to scale.

   Out of a positive personal experience, Conchita Alfaisi-Clarke and her husband Steven Alfaisi felt compelled to share the benefits of traditional Maroon healing with others. Together with their business partner, John Bisoina, they founded Mokisa Busidataa Osu to provide alternative health services through a combination of traditional Maroon techniques as well as more conventional deep tissue and relaxation massages. The Paramaribo-based clinic has been an enormous success as it brought the alternative healing techniques of Suriname’s interior to the city. While many clients left the clinic reinvigorated, Conchita observed that for some, improving wellness required a retreat from life’s distractions. Moreover, there was a great public demand for the clinic’s services. This insight has inspired the next step for the company’s growth. She and her business partners are now planning a wellness centre that combines the benefits of a guesthouse with their clinic. Conchita envisages “that when you leave there, you will feel like a totally new human being.”

   For Davitiri Doerga and her husband, Dr. Vishnu Doerga, customer insight for growth came from their experience leading prosperous distribution and sales companies. They understood that a business leader must overcome considerable personal and professional challenges to successfully manage organisations. This insight motivated the serial entrepreneurs to diversify through two additional companies, ActionINVEST Caribbean Inc. and NSB Omega Guyana Inc. ActionINVEST offers coaching, consulting, human resource and marketing services to entrepreneurs and other executives. NSB Omega Guyana provides project personnel and software solutions to Guyana’s burgeoning oil and gas industry. Both companies solve their customers’ pain of needing targeted business development expertise.

   For both Davitri and Conchita, a more profound understanding of the customer mapped the way in which their enterprises could scale.

2. Selecting a Growth Strategy:
   

   Choosing the right growth strategy is individual to each business and its context. However, strategies commonly used by companies include:

   • market penetration – increasing market share in an established market using existing products/services;
   • market development – increasing sales of existing products/services in new markets;
   • product development – creating new products and services for an existing market;
   • diversification – developing new products/services for new markets;
   • alternative channels – diversifying the channels to reach existing or new customers; and
   • partnerships - creating alliances, merging or acquiring companies to access markets or to acquire resources.

   Conchita and her team opted to pursue a product development growth strategy by planning a holistic wellness centre. The centre also creates the opportunity to grow through diversification and with health products, as it has the potential to be marketed to health tourists in the future.

   Alternatively, Davitri has adopted diversification and partnership strategies to scale her overall enterprise. Her business support companies are franchisees of ActionCoach International and NSB Omega. Through these partnerships, Davitri couples internationally recognised products and services with her business acumen and extensive knowledge of the local environment to ably support Guyanese and regional companies.

3. Sourcing Financing and Business Support
   

   Growth usually necessitates getting additional financing. Aside from their own contributions, entrepreneurs typically look to friends and family, investors or loans to raise the capital to expand operations. Davitri shares that a close family member invested in the business at a critical time for scaling up. She has also enjoyed the longstanding support of Republic Bank as her business grew. She boasts “I am an advocate for Republic Bank. Once you have the required information or assets Republic Bank is always willing to help.”

   While money funds growth, business development support can help sustain it. Entrepreneurs personify the old saying ‘jack of all trades’ having to learn about a variety of business functions quickly. To acquire this knowledge, entrepreneurs can look to research, professional services or business development programmes to assist. The Republic Bank Entrepreneurs Business Builder (EBB) is one such programme for female entrepreneurs especially. Participants learn about strategy, marketing and technology to take their companies to the next level. As EBB Ambassadors, both Davitri and Conchita strongly recommend that women entrepreneurs capitalise on the programme’s promise to help develop growth-oriented businesses.

Pursuing growth is a challenge. However, through understanding the customers’ needs, choosing the right growth strategy, getting financing and joining business development initiatives such as the EBB, entrepreneurs are better positioned for success.

While scaling may seem daunting, Conchita encourages entrepreneurs to go for it. She advises “Ask for help if you need it, but if you don’t stand up for yourself… you will stay at the same point you started.” Davitri concurs by sharing “Once the opportunity is there and it fits into our business, we never stop moving forward.”