Sustainable Growth

Sustainable Growth



Good growth continues over time. It has a sustainable trajectory. You are NOT looking for a quick spike upward in revenues, caused by cutting prices or by throwing substantial resources against a one-shot opportunity. The goal is to have the growth continue year after year.



For example, the growth of Southwest Airlines has been based on a consitent set of actions. New routes are carefully vetted - the goal is to have them be profitable in less than a year - and turnaround times (the period from when a plane pulls into a gate until it pushes back on another flight) are substantially faster than the industry average, allowing Southwest planes to fly more trips a day than its competitors.



If you look at one of the suppliers to the airline industry, you can see another example of sustainable growth. In this case, the move toward sustainability was prompted out of necessity.



When the airline industry declined in the early 1990s, it led to a decerease in the revenues of firms that sold aircraft engines. GE Aircraft Engines redefined the needs of its airline customers to include not just the engines themselves but also servicing them on a regular basis. Up to that point, a major airline would use the service shop of one company in, say, Chicago and that of completely different companies in its other locations around the world. Some also did the service themselves in their own shops.



GE's new value proposition was to provide total service around the globe. Through innovation, use of information technology, and managerial ability to provide better maintenance, the result would be less downtime for the airlines and lower costs.



For example, doing a major overhaul on its own might have required an airline to fly its plane back empty to its service facility. With service operations around the world, GE can do the work wherever a plane is, which gets the plane back in the air, generating revenues sooner. And because it specialises, GE can do the necessary service work faster, increasing productivity for the airlines once again. Scores of airlines took advantage of the chance to outsource the maintenance part of their business to a single supplier.



Before its chief competitor, Pratt & Whitney, woke up, GE Aircraft Engines captured 70% of the airplane-service market. And, of course, the service contracts tied customers more closely to GE, giving it a leg up in selling the core product -engines - and developing a sustained trajectory of growth by having a built-in-revenue stream, the money that comes in month in and month out from the service contracts.



In this case, the "single" and "double" of adding a service coponent to a product created a platform that is a home run in terms of a sustained, decades-long trajectory of growth. The recurring revenues from the service work are extremely reliable. Not only has GE Aircraft Engines otgrown the competition - its model of adding service to products became a best practice for other GE businesses, which are now adding high-margin service work into their product mix.



It is also an example of building both scale and scope and then learning how to leverage for growth. GE Aircraft's number-one position in the marketplace, combined with organic growth and simultaneous productivity, gave it the leverage to make acquisitions in the service area.



But the only way this growth is going to occur is if everyone in the organization believes it to be possible. It is up to the organization's leadership to create the right mind-set.