The Campbell Academy Business Blog

The other side of growth (or growth by accident)

Capitalism was never really meant to be about unlimited growth (or at least not by my very simplistic understanding of it).

Adam Smith's economics was about being better, not being bigger.

If you had 100 bakers in a town who were servicing the market, the poor ones would fall away because the customers would go to the good ones, and the good ones would get bigger and better, so it would continue overall.

You'd never get to just one baker because empires fail and people get complacent, and as they get complacent and stop looking after their customers, so other people take their place, and there's an ever-fulfilling cycle of improvement of quality.

It's a wonderful idealistic thought that that's how the world would work, but of course, it doesn't work quite as simply as that.

People game things over and over again to try to make things work the best for them and not for other people. They shortcut and they conceal things, they hide things and they're dishonest.

They also don't really care about their customers as long as they can use triggers and social prompts to get people to give them money, and they don't necessarily have to make their business bigger at the expense of everyone else.

But it doesn't have to be like that, and in fact, in many places, it isn't.

If we start off in our views of the future for our businesses looking only at growth, at how much money we can make, and how we can maximise things, we will decrease the quality of our products, decrease the way we look after our team, decrease what we invest in our facilities and increase the number of lies we tell in our marketing.

All of those things are a short-fired way to make a little bit more money, a little bit more quickly, but do you really want to be here later?

In setting your stall out to be here later (over the long term), it means that all of those things that you were neglecting to make money quickly need to be cared for and invested in and taken care of.

You need a team that is healthy and happy, well looked after and well remunerated.

You need a facility that befits the standard and quality of the product you wish to provide.

And you need not cut your margins everywhere, burning relationships with suppliers or even customers.
As you look after your customers, your clients, your patients, whatever you call them and whatever they are, getting better and better at doing that, taking more and more care of them, will lead to a greater, better, bigger business.

We could see growth as a side effect of exceptional businesses, or we could see business as a side effect of growth.

It's our choice, but if you seek a fulfilling, satisfying, contributing organisation, I would suggest that growth is a side effect.