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Introduction
Every brand that generates revenue by the billions each year started as a small and striving enterprise. The resilience, commitment, and forward-thinking choices needed to grow a business to these heights aren’t common. Each company is only as profitable as its employees are productive, but leadership plays a significant role in an organization’s ability to survive and thrive in ever-changing social, political, and financial environments.
This article will introduce you to a few keys to building a billion-dollar venture. Most often, billion-dollar-level growth and stability come to those who have been in business for decades. No matter which path your particular company takes on the road to ten figures, the following concepts, based on Gregory K. Jones’ experience and insights, can help you get there faster.
What Are “Billion-Dollar” Brands?
Billion-dollar brands are those that have reached a certain level of customer satisfaction, positive public relations, and general popularity, making their brand worth at least a billion dollars. A brand can be represented by everything from a logo, a wordmark, to the likeness of its founder, and its most famous product.
Some of the most famous brands to reach this status include Google, Walmart, Oracle, McDonald’s, Facebook, Volkswagen, eBay, and Intel. Many of these brands come from the tech sector, but not all. The strategies outlined below can be used in virtually any company.
Finding The Next Big Thing
You may think your company has to be a trendsetter in the market and lead the pack with some major, new innovation that takes the world by storm. While being at the forefront of a new advancement in a particular field is going to help you skyrocket toward your billion-dollar goal, there are other ways you can be part of the rising tide of innovation in your niche. Namely, you can focus on predicting what the future gaps in an industry are, even if you weren’t the one who came up with the “next big thing.”
Generative AI is an example. Maybe you’re not OpenAI and you didn’t come up with ChatGPT. However, knowing there is now a kind of technology that is easily accessible to the public, can quickly perform rudimentary tasks, can create simple documents like email messages or a website copy, and can answer various kinds of questions, means you can consider what needs will likely pop up regarding that technology. Teaching people how to use ChatGPT effectively in their professional or academic endeavors, or providing security measures for exam proctors to guard against the use of AI during tests, are examples of ways you can ride the wave of the innovation without being the one creating the wave itself.
For billion-dollar brands, the focus isn’t always about creating the next big thing (McDonald’s didn’t invent the hamburger), but about learning new ways to use it and new ways to serve the people who use it (mass-producing quickly-assembled versions of a hamburger).
Building Your Brand
Every solid brand equates to a solution. McDonald’s means fast, delicious food at an affordable price—perfect for harried parents and struggling college students alike. Mont Blanc means elegant, sophisticated writing implements for the executive class—a go-to for providing gifts for writers and the wealthy.
To return to the AI example, AI provided a solution to doing things manually that often might eat up hundreds of hours of people’s time. Tracking customer orders and sending update emails, drawing an image, creating a song—all of these time-consuming tasks can now be completed within a minute or less. Better yet, these actions are often done to a degree that matches, and sometimes even surpasses, what a human is capable of, and at a fraction of the cost of hiring them.
Having a relevant, useful product or service matters more than how new it is. After all, you could release a brand new, ultra-hot space heater in Dallol, Ethiopia, where winter low temperatures reach around 85°F / 29.4°C. It’s innovative, yes. But since there is no demand for the item in an area of the world with such high year-round temperatures. So there’s no way to sell that product consistently (or even at all).
Even having the right product or service that solves the right problem at the right time won’t get you far if you don’t have an appropriate marketing strategy, including understanding where to engage with your target customer. Savvy marketing makes sure people know you exist and understand the benefits of buying from you.
The Right Way to Lead
Those in charge of an organization are the ones who steer the ship. How you lead within your company will determine how quickly and in what ways it grows.
Stay Aware
Leading an enterprise of any kind starts with having a solid understanding of its various parts and how they work together. This gives you the ability to see what the strengths and limitations of your team are, allowing you to make better decisions about what trends to chase and which to leave alone so you don’t waste resources.
Consider if each of your departments, small teams, and employees is being leveraged in a way that supports success in their roles. If not, be sure to make adjustments to the organization of your workforce to make them more productive. This contributes to the brand’s growth in many ways, but most importantly, it ensures you’re not squandering funds because your workers are getting burned out in their positions. Employees also shouldn’t be working in roles that don’t put their best talents to use on behalf of the company. Having to recruit, hire, onboard, and train new people consistently takes extra time and money that could be better spent moving the company closer to its goals. Keep the workforce you currently have satisfied and engaged, and you can keep rehiring costs to a minimum.
Be Open
One of the worst things you can do for your business is to get stuck in how you think about and view the world. Things are constantly changing across all industries around the globe. The ventures that do well are the ones that can adapt. While it may be easier to continue using strategies and tools that are familiar, sometimes those processes have stronger alternatives that have come to light. Stay aware of what’s currently available on the market or which strategies are proving most effective for your competitors and partners in the field.
This doesn’t mean you have to make major changes constantly. Erratic, random shifts create a level of chaos that can sabotage any forward momentum your company has. But it does mean consistently assessing your current position in the market and the resources available to you to ensure that the methods you’re adopting are still the best options for you based on your goals. Stay open to the idea that your current strategies can be improved upon.
Focus Resources
Just like you can damage your brand by chasing after every trend that pops up, you can do damage by spreading your business too thin by trying to do too many different things all at once. This often results in a business that offers a lot of options, but doesn’t actually do any of them well.
Instead, hone in on making sure you are creating the products or providing the services your organization is best suited to handle. This allows you to become one of the top names in your industry for those particular items or experiences. Mont Blanc could theoretically attempt to go well beyond the scope of luxury writing utensils and create laptops, set up writing colleges across the world, or provide publishing services to aspiring authors. But this would mean spreading their team and resources across multiple avenues without any strategic reason to do so. Instead, they stick to what they specialize in so that people know they are getting their pens from a brand that has mastered creating those items.
Putting all of your energy into dominating your particular niche makes it easier to rise to the top of your industry and reap the billion-dollar benefits of being a household name in your field.
Conclusion
With the appropriate perspective, leadership style, and awareness of patterns in your market, growing your business can be a relatively straightforward endeavor. Never forget that nurturing any enterprise to new heights takes patience, tenacity, and resilience. When you embrace these characteristics as you consistently give your customer base the solutions that they need, you’ll be well on your way to becoming the next billion-dollar brand.