Daring to Compete

Accelerate Your Business to Market Leadership with EY's 7 Drivers of Growth

Diane Foreman, Bryan Pearce, Geoffrey Godding

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119546818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

The successful entrepreneur's guide to accelerating growth

Daring to Compete offers real-world strategies to accelerate the growth of your business and secure your place as a market leader. This expert guide is the result of years of comprehensive research and experience from global professional services organization EY, originator of the celebrated "Entrepreneur Of The Year" program. Employing its worldwide reach and extensive network of successful entrepreneurs, EY has developed a model of sustainable business development—"The 7 Drivers of Growth TM." This innovative and highly effective approach to strategic growth is an invaluable resource for high-growth businesses, entrepreneurs, and start-ups. Favoring practical strategies over abstract theories, this book provides clear guidance on the Customer; Funding and Finance; Transactions and Alliances; Risk; People, Behaviors, and Culture; Digital Technology and Analytics; and Operations. This book brings the application of these drivers to life by featuring insights from Entrepreneur Of The Year award-winning entrepreneurs from a wide range of industries and geographic locations. These entrepreneurs share how each driver functions in actual business situations and present first-hand advice on their application and implementation.

Planned and sustainable growth is a challenge faced by businesses every day, from developing ventures to leading enterprises. Effective entrepreneurs embrace the drivers of growth and recognize what areas require sharper focus. This book allows you to identify and apply these elements in your own business—facilitating optimal outcomes and accelerating growth. This indispensable guide enables you to:

• Implement a proven business model to compete more effectively and achieve market leadership
• Gain the knowledge and confidence to face challenges, anticipate, and overcome obstacles
• Access research, tools, and services to accelerate growth and compete on a global scale
• Learn invaluable market leadership strategies from a team of highly successful entrepreneurs

Developed from the real-life stories of EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners, this book is an inspirational and informative must-read guide to business growth and market leadership. Daring to Compete is an invaluable resourcefor both aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs and established business leaders seeking to become more entrepreneurial.

PART 1
Daring to compete — understanding the DNA of entrepreneurs

Dictionary.com defines “dare” as “to have the necessary courage or boldness for something.”¹

Let’s face it – being an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO is a lonely job. Your road to market leadership is very difficult to navigate, especially without a reliable road map and the guidance of others who have walked that road and can help you to see around the corners.

Daring to Compete is written to provide entrepreneurs at all stages of their journey – from emerging to market leader – with insights from EY and 15 great business leaders from around the world. These Entrepreneurs (our 15 exemplary EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners) share their insights on how they develop skills, knowledge, and accelerate their businesses and thrive as entrepreneurial leaders.

The environment in which you operate is changing more rapidly than ever before, and disruption comes at you not only from industry peers but also from new entrants from other sectors that are leveraging innovative technologies and creating new business models. You understand all too well the magnitude of forces that are constantly changing and to which you must respond on a daily basis. These challenges (see Figure P1.1) include:

• Customer preferences and buying behaviors
• Recruiting and retaining top talent
• New competitors, business models, and supply chain implications
• Globalization
• Increasing regulation and associated risks of noncompliance
• Disruptive technologies
• Challenges of accessing capital
• Changing ecosystem – mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances

  

  Figure P1.1 The environment in which entrepreneurs operate

What sets you apart as an entrepreneur is that every day you are “daring to compete” in the face of these challenges – in fact, you see them as opportunities for accelerating growth. You are unstoppable!

Note

¹www.dictionary.com.

CHAPTER 1
What is the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year?

Each year EY receives almost 10,000 nominations from our 145 city or regional programs in over 50 countries, to compete for a range of regional, national, and eventually global titles recognizing exceptional entrepreneurship. Nominations come from multiple sources and less than 20% of them are EY clients. Once nominated, entrepreneurs go through a series of judging rounds – each conducted by independent judges who are typically EY Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni and other entrepreneurs. Ultimately each program annually selects a national winner based on a balanced scorecard of key criteria that together reflect the essence of a truly great entrepreneur. These are, in no particular order:

• Entrepreneurial spirit
• Value creation
• Strategic direction
• National and global impact
• Innovation
• Personal integrity / purpose-driven leadership

Each June, national winners representing more than 50 nations come to Monaco to represent their country at the world’s premier event that recognizes and celebrates entrepreneurial achievement. While there, they participate in a final round of independent judging. Ultimately, one is named the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year^TM – a highly coveted honor. The prize isn’t monetary: it is the recognition of exceptional achievement by a group of respected peers. Together the entrepreneurs participating in the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 competition in Monaco had the characteristics shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Key statistics on the entrepreneurs who competed at the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2018

Over the history of the competition, winners have included individuals such as Guy Laliberté of Cirque du Soleil in Canada, Wayne Huizenga (who created multiple companies including Blockbuster Video and Waste Management, Inc.) in the United States, Mohed Altrad of the Altrad Group in France, and Olivia Lum of Hyflux in Singapore. We hope you are inspired to join them by applying to your local EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program (details are contained in the Appendix).

CHAPTER 2
What are the EY 7 Drivers of Growth^TM?

EY’s 7 Drivers of Growth is a powerful management framework that enables business leaders to benchmark themselves against global, cross-industry leading practices,” says Ryan Burke, EY Global Leader, Growth Markets. “Importantly, it also helps them build their growth plan to deliver against their strategic objectives.”

Through our interactions with these great EY Entrepreneur Of The Year contestants, observing the selection process carried out by our judges (all of whom are independent of EY), and our work with many high-growth entrepreneurs as clients, we have obtained deep insight into the knowledge and skills these women and men use to drive sustainable growth. Through comprehensive research, we have distilled this insight into what we refer to as the EY 7 Drivers of Growth^TM (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 The EY 7 Drivers of Growth

First and foremost, successful entrepreneurs who achieve sustainable high growth have an unrelenting focus on the Customer. They put customers at the center of everything they do. To achieve optimal customer satisfaction, these entrepreneurs also invest time and capital on six additional areas: People, behaviors, and culture; Digital technology and analytics; Operations; Funding and finance; Transactions and alliances; and Risk.

These world-class entrepreneurs also understand the importance of maintaining balance between these drivers as they grow sustainable companies. For example, a leader who focuses only on current sales to customers without building a great team and culture and putting in place adequate funding and finance to support the growth will quickly find his or her company unable to deliver on its promises.

Our research also shows that as successful entrepreneurial companies move toward market leadership, they generally progress through three stages: Developing, Established, and ultimately Leading. They may move through these stages with varying speed, but will follow a similar pathway. While the specific activities that successful entrepreneurial businesses must focus on within each of the 7 Drivers of Growth will vary somewhat in each of these stages, many are common across the board.

This research that led to the EY 7 Drivers of Growth validated our firsthand understanding, obtained through thousands of interactions and face-to-face sessions with entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world.

These entrepreneurs have spent their lives continually daring to compete. For them, there is no finish line – their days are spent looking for ways to compete more effectively, innovate, diversify, and seize on the exciting opportunities that present themselves as a result of industry convergence and new technologies. Through our interviews, in addition to sharing their inspiring, transformational stories, they have explained ways that they have adopted these 7 Drivers of Growth in guiding their companies to success. As the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year^® 2016 winner for the United States, J.W. Marriott Jr. notes, “Success is never final.”

We hope that the EY 7 Drivers of Growth model becomes an indispensable road map you will use on your journey to market leadership.

CHAPTER 3
Do you have the E-gene?

What is an entrepreneur? The dictionary definition is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”¹

But that’s far from the whole story!

Entrepreneurs don’t just run businesses – they create, expand, and redesign them. They risk the unproven to realize and constantly evolve the future.

Entrepreneurs don’t just make and supply products and services – they imagine them and constantly adapt them to meet existing and anticipated customer needs.

Entrepreneurs don’t just meet the demands of markets and existing customers – they adapt markets and they create new customers. They expand, diversify, and evolve.

Entrepreneurs don’t sleep – they dream. And they take risks to see their dreams become reality.

An entrepreneur’s business is never a “done deal” – like entrepreneurs themselves, it’s always a work in progress.

For decades, people have asked, “Are entrepreneurs ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1. Daring to compete — understanding the DNA of entrepreneurs
• Part 2. What success looks like: 15 stories from the “Winner’s Circle”
• Part 3. Understanding EY’s 7 Drivers of Growth
• Part 4. Traits, skills, and the importance of intuition
• Appendix
• About the authors
• About EY
• Index
• Wiley End User License Agreement