An Overview on Growth Platforms

A corporate organisation’s growth platforms are specific activities chosen to increase turnover and earnings growth. Strategic and tactical growth platforms are the two types of growth platforms. Strategic growth platforms are long-term programmes that take 3 to 6 years to implement and yield the intended results. Tactical growth platforms, on the other hand, take less time to deploy because they are shorter-term projects with both the initiative and the results based on the current budget year of the company.

For businesses to continue growing, they need to adopt a strategy. This is the platform growth strategy for a business.

Growth Strategy: 5 Stages

A growth strategy is part of strategic planning, which lays out the road map for the company’s future expansion. In other words, it is a strategy used by businesses to ensure that their brand is recognised by a growing number of people and that their businesses succeed. The growth strategies can be internal or external.

There are three basic steps for developing growth strategies for a business. The first is understanding how to break into the market. Then, having the ability to influence market developments for the better. Last is to have a plan in place to keep your customers engaged. Different firms will have different growth strategies. To thrive in business, however, one must first understand how to build these.

The enterprise life cycle (ELC) is referred to as this. Start-up, Growth, Expansion, Maturity, and Decline are the five stages of the enterprise life cycle. Although there is no need to follow this specific path in every case, most businesses reach the same point in their growth stage after passing through similar phases.

As enterprises evolve and grow over time, each stage has distinct characteristics. The strategies needed to manage each stage also differ successfully. Therefore, to adopt the right platform growth strategy, entrepreneurs must have a detailed understanding of each stage.

Introduction Stage

Creating new growth platforms begins with the introduction stage. As a result, it is also known as the ‘start-up stage.’ Introducing the latest product takes time; products may be limited in scale, and the sale of the product is likely to be slow and limited.

Growth Stage 

Following the successful launch of the new product, the company enters the second stage of its lifecycle, the ‘growth stage.’ In this stage, the enterprise is known and accepted by the market. Prospective buyers follow the lead of the early adopters if they hear word-of-mouth about the product’s success from existing users.

Expansion Stage

Entrepreneurs expand their businesses by opening new offices and creating new growth platforms at this stage. From a single-line enterprise operating in a limited market, the company becomes a multi-line enterprise offering new products and services in new markets. Innovation and development lead to a broader range of products and services.

Maturity Stage

The product’s sale slows down near the end of its life cycle, mainly due to increased competition. This results in a drop in profits. The maturity stage lasts longer than other stages, and high enterprise rates characterise this stage.

Decline Stage

An enterprise has reached the end of the product life cycle. Due to the gradual replacement of enterprise products or to some innovations brought about by changes in customer behaviour, companies find it difficult at this point to survive. As a result, platform growth strategies find it increasingly difficult to survive.

About New Platform for Growth

Organising events using a platform-based business model has several advantages over operating from a more traditional model and structure. As a result, products are developed faster since building on top of shared platform services speeds up implementation cycles and the speed with which new services and features are released based on real customer feedback and evidence.

An organisation that uses a platform growth strategy approach usually makes decisions more quickly than one that follows a traditional, hierarchical structure. Continuous improvement is central: faster, more accurate decision making is enabled by real-time data on customer insights, which results in better products that more closely meet customer needs, generating more data and experience for further development.

As revenue grows, it is possible to reinvest more aggressively in platform growth strategy capabilities, strengthening the inherent advantage of the positive platform feedback loop. As their platform-enabled feedback processes improve, organisations that optimise and build on them become increasingly competitive.

Conclusion

Several studies have shown that 90% of the companies have difficulty finding new growth results. When these difficulties are understood, it becomes easier to solve the problem. This high failure rate is attributed to poor skills and the process. In other words, the important advice given to all the organisations is to take many risks and create a pipeline of new businesses based on techniques used in the capital of the venture industry. 

There has been an observation that the growth of companies can be traced back to areas where existing mindsets match the success of critical factors a business requires. Failure occurs when the organisation is involved in main factors that do not match the company’s growth in different areas. A lack of opportunities theory suggests another way to explain the less success rate of growth for finding a new platform growth strategy. 

In this theory, exploratory efforts and experimenting with a good resume for new ventures will likely be fruitless. However, entrepreneurship failure also can be attributed to fewer risk problems and more open-mindedness. This issue can be resolved if corporate mindsets are changed or investments are made in cases with a great chance of success.