Excessive and blind growth can contribute greatly to business failure. Growth must be balanced with meaningful, long-term strategies. “Growth-hacking” is a term coined to describe the exponential growth tactics commonly applied within Silicon Valley tech startups. This concept employes pushy and sometimes even shady tactics to promote growth in spite of excessive production of churn (p. 60). This idea is reminiscent of the notorious business scandal, Enron. This is a textbook example that has some implication to support Jarvis’ idea of excessive growth leading to business failure. As the company gained success and became the leading market competitor, Enron centered their company culture around aggressive trading. The competitive environment caused the main goal of employees to be closing as many cash-generating trades as possible in the shortest amount of time. They were not focusing on the quality of their connections, work, and trade, just focused on building an empire and marginally increasing their status within the market. This immense pressure and the lack of meaningful growth and lack of an upper bound, the company got too greedy. They began committing malpractice and creating fraudulent financial records, by focusing on “future” gains (something Jarvis advises not to do), which created the illusion of profits. This dishonesty and lack of transparency ultimately led to the demise of the company, as they plummeted into bankruptcy (Bondarenko, 2001).
In addition, Jarvis explains that people often focus on the wrong things when starting a business. They begin by working on scaling, website, office spaces, business cards, and computers. These are all things that accumulate expenses, which is not ideal when you do not yet have any profits to cover these expenses (p. 64). Sometimes these ‘flashy’ extras are not needed, not right away, thinking cheap and fast can be a helpful starting point, as the main thing to focus on is how to be good at what it is you specifically do and offer. This still provided individuals with the opportunity to market themselves, but for what they have to offer intellectually, opposed to how cool their set up is. Focus on one’s skill set can help in promoting career growth, through increasing one’s scope of influence and level of ownership (p. 70).
Jarvis concludes this chapter with the following thought-provoking messages. The following has been retrieved directly from his book.
BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT
- How you could prioritize your existing customers or transform them into repeat customers
- The smallest version of your business idea that you could start with now, with little to no investment
- How you want to grow as a business, or as an employee who doesn’t require transitioning into work you don’t actually want to do (p. 73).
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