Free 4 Step Business Growth Framework Poster

In business, simplicity is the key to almost everything, no matter what industry or position you’re in. Keeping things reduced to the minimum viable product, whether that’s an actual product or something intangible like an idea or strategy, is essential to maintain focus and communicate effectively to stakeholders, employees and customers. That means coming up with a concise plan you can easily convey to your team.

Here's a great way to cut through a lot of noise and define a framework for thinking about the four core areas of the business that are critically important – it's called the ABCD framework.

ABCD stands for Accumulate (leads), Better (product) , Conversion (hustle) and Dedication (to service).

Make the ABCD model obligatory in your company rather than optional: If you can see ABCD as a discipline, then you can start demanding it from your organization. Hold your team and business unit leaders accountable for sponsoring ABCD initiatives, and charge your bright, high potential employees with being accountable. Some of the most powerful companies in history, ranging from GE to Honda to Google, have connected involvement in initiatives such as ABCD to career development, incentives and promotion—because the sustainable ABCD growth model is what they expect from their leaders. The ABCD model also becomes an investment that you start funding programmatically, instead of scraping budget dollars together each quarter, because it’s vital to the ongoing health and success of your business. You stop hoping ABCD will happen and start requiring it from each other and yourself.

Start measuring performance based on the ABCD criteria and hold weekly company meetings to review your ABCD statistics. Performance data for ABCD is generally easy to collect. Ideally one person is responsible for collecting and presenting the data for each letter - A, B, C, D - at each meeting.

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Greg Twemlow, October 2016