Focus7 framework: A clear process for organizations to achieve growth goals

How do you know when it’s time to accelerate your organization’s growth?

Making the “go/no-go” decision whether to expand is something many leaders struggle with.

Though there are some extremely inspiring stories of organizations achieving amazing growth, there are many more where poorly timed or thought-out moves resulted in significant losses.

Suzie Yorke is the Founder of Love Good Fats, a snacks company that experienced unprecedented success very soon after launch. In her episode of the Toughest Call podcast, Suzie talks about the thought process she went through when she was presented with a huge growth opportunity while still a relatively new company.

If you’re facing a similar tough call on how to grow your organization, there is an excellent book that may help you with your own thought process.

“Fewer, Bigger, Bolder: From Mindless Expansion to Focused Growth” is written by Sanjay Khosla and Mohanbir Sawhney. I met them both while they were teaching at Northwestern University, and Sanjay, as President of Kraft Foods Developing Markets, grew their revenue from $5 billion to $16 billion over six years.

To help leaders avoid the trap of pursuing unfocused expansion that results in disappointment, Sanjay and Mohan put forth the Focus7 framework:

1. Discovery
2. Strategy
3. Rallying Cry
4. People
5. Execution
6. Organization
7. Metrics

In Discovery, you’re systematically on the hunt for promising insights that can be further scaled or developed, while ensuring you’re creating wider buy-in through carefully orchestrated workshops.

As you enter Strategy, you synthesize and prioritize what emerged during Discovery to find the opportunities that are most likely to be winners.

The next step is to develop a clear and simple ‘Rallying Cry’ for the chosen Strategy, that aligns and motivates the members of your organization that aren’t around the boardroom table.

You then need to ensure you have the right People in place with the skills, passion, and energy to bring about the desired transformation. Along with the responsibility, they must also be given the authority and support to succeed.

The Execution phase is often where the process goes awry as the initiative can become mired in complexity. Simplifying the initiative while thoughtfully redistributing organizational focus and resources that are not contributing to growth helps to recapture any lost momentum.

Organization emphasizes the need to refocus your culture on opportunity and collaboration to support and sustain growth.

And finally, Metrics is about creating a scorecard that allows leaders to monitor just a few key measurements of how the growth initiative is unfolding.

Sanjay and Mohan’s Focus7 is a market-tested framework to help any type or size organization achieve its growth goals.

You can find Fewer, “Bigger, Bolder: From Mindless Expansion to Focused Growth,” wherever you buy your books.

And to hear more about how Suzie approached the growth of Love Good Fats, listen to Toughest Call wherever you get your podcasts or click on the link in the comments.