Daring to Compete

PART 3 Understanding EY’s 7 Drivers of Growth

EY has over 30 years’ experience supporting entrepreneurs from start-up to market leaders. In order to consolidate our knowledge from that experience to be able to provide better insights to entrepreneurs, we researched 250 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners and worked with 500 EY member-firm partners to access lessons from several thousand businesses. Based on this research we created the EY 7 Drivers of Growth – our unique insight into how to accelerate growth (see Figure P3.1).

Figure P3.1 The EY 7 Drivers of Growth

Our research identified three stages of maturity through which entrepreneurial companies progress:

1. Developing
2. Established
3. Leading

At each stage of maturity, we mapped leading practices from the best businesses globally in all industries. These are outlined in the first figure at the beginning of the next seven chapters.

Not surprisingly, we found that Customer was the most significant Growth Driver. Leaders of a successful business put the customer at the center of everything they do. Traditional thinking suggests that customer value is generated by focus on people, systems, and processes. Our research confirmed this, although we open up the descriptions of these relationships:

• People, behavior, and culture
• Digital technology and analytics
• Operations

Today we find an extraordinary pace of change in two of ...