Business growth: The sum of its parts

By Campbell Mitchell, Executive General Manager Customer Experience

28 August 2017

Suncorp New Zealand is here to partner with its business customers, to cover their risks so they can focus on becoming more successful in what they do. 

Success doesn’t come easy, especially in a country where 97% of companies are SMEs. And those businesses are telling us that ‘success’ can be measured in many different ways. 

Growth is an important metric, but it’s the sum of several parts.

Our recent From Risk to Reward research showed that 61% of New Zealand businesses are either actively growing or looking to grow. But 78% of businesses also believe that work-life balance is more important than growth.

We can break down terms like growth to get a better understanding of where we are succeeding, and what we might need to do as businesses to achieve our goals.

People first

To really set your business up for growth, you need to understand your employees and make sure that they are fully engaged so they can do great work for your business. 

Next, your customers.

Fundamentally, growth is about connecting the products or services your business produces to a customer need and delivering solutions for that need.

We need to get closer to our customers, find out what motivates them, where their pain points lie and what they see as opportunities so that we can understand how to play a bigger part in their lives.

Building resilience in the face of risk

The key to business resilience is to understand the future trends and risks that your business is facing, and make sure that you’re prepared for them. 

Whether that’s through diversifying your offering, future-proofing your distribution lines, or even taking out insurance, understanding future trends and risks can help your business be more successful.

To help New Zealand businesses grow and succeed, we need to look beyond the bottom line and assess how our businesses are performing to achieve the kind of success we want.