Prioritize Your Growth Initiatives

Read time: 4 minutes

Hey there 👋 - it's Brian.

Happy New Year!

It's that time where all your friends ask about your 2023 business goals. If you're anything like me, you've thought about it, but haven't written it down.

This year is different. We're bracing ourselves for an economic crash. So we want to do everything we can to grow our business to avoid looking our friends in the eyes and telling them we're dusting off our resume.

So today, let's prioritize our growth initiatives to focus on the main thing that will drive our businesses to hit our revenue goals.

I'll introduce a framework I used to help several Fortune 50s prioritize their initiatives: Desirability, Viability, Feasibility (DVF). And as always, give you steps you can take to use the DVF framework to prioritize your own initiatives.

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1 Story: Prioritize everything. Win nothing.

So imagine you run an energy drink business.

You're 3 years in and finally start to get traction. Customers are recognizing your brand in stores, you've built strong relationships with distributors, and built a team of 12 rockstar employees. But...

Your revenue growth isn't fast enough to cover your bills.

You expected you'd be growing faster by now and are started to worry about cash. Your friends tell you to pull out your resume, but you cringe at the idea of managing corporate politics for the rest of your life.

So you build a list of revenue generating activities you can do to grow faster.

Overcome your growth challenges and your business doubles. Employees are safe and you can finally pay for that new home you've been eyeing the next town over.

Lose the growth challenge and you lost your investment.

So you need to overcome the traction problem. You look at your initiatives to execute your goal for the year it's overwhelming:

• Expand product into California?
• Influencer marketing campaign?
• Launch a healthy energy alternative?
• Expand distribution into grocery stores?
• Provide a new flavor of the same product?
• Position our product into a new customer segment?

It's overwhelming. Where do you even start to figure out what to focus on?!

So today we'll introduce a framework to figure out which initiatives you focus on.

1 Strategy: Prioritize your initiatives on 3 factors: Desirability, Viability, Feasibility

At this point everything on your long list of ideas feels like something you should do, but you don't have enough time and resources to do it all.

Note: If you don't have a list of initiatives yet, see this previous issue on coming up with ideas for your business to focus on - then join us back here to prioritize that list!

So let's introduce the framework I used at several Fortune 50s to help them prioritize their initiatives:

Desirability, Viability, Feasibility (DVF).

This framework takes each initiative and runs it through how these 3 factors:

1 Tactic: Here's how you rank each initiative with the DVF framework

Now let's make it actionable. Here's how you can use the framework to prioritize your initiatives (steal this simple template):

Step 1:
Rate each initiative in terms of how desirable, viable, and feasible it is. Roughly estimate each category using a high/medium/low scale.

You want to keep this to an estimation, but below I've included a few ways to help guide your estimations.

Desirability:
Do your customers want this?

• Internet research: Use blogs, socials, and databases. Example: if deciding to expand into California, see if your target customer is there by looking at the US Census Bureau (here's a list of other databases)

• Customer interviews: Interview a sample of these customers to determine their pain points and if your solution is the right fit (use this interview guide)

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Build a quick, minimally functional, version of your product. See if it gets traction with customers and iterate with feedback (here's Y Combinator on how to make an MVP)

Viability:
How profitable will this be for you?

• Market size / growth rate: Is it a big market? Will the market continue to grow? (use this simple thread on how to size a market)

• % of the market you think you can capture: Are there too many competitors with a strong hold on the market?

• Costs: Will it be too costly to bring to market (e.g., marketing, distribution, maintenance)?

Feasibility:
Can you actually make this happen?

You want to make sure the initiative doesn't take too much time, money, resources to build. A few things to consider:

• People: Will you need to hire new people to build / manage the initiative?

• Process: Will you need to build new processes to maintain your initiative?

• Tech: Is there technology you need to build/buy specific to get your initiative running?

If you need a lot of investment, it's not a feasible project. Mark it low.

Step 2:
Rank each initiative's overall priority by averaging across desirability, viability, and feasibility (DVF).

Each initiative has a high/medium/low ranking for each of the 3 DVF columns. I like to convert these ranking to points to make it easier to average across the 3 columns. Each initiative gets 1 point for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high.

Example, Initiative A:
• Desirability: High (3 points)
• Viability: Low (1 point)
• Feasibility: Low (1 point)

Initiative A gets 5 points (out of 9 possible points).

Rank Initiative A overall get a "Medium" (since 5 points is in the middle):
• Low: 0 - 3 points
• Medium: 4 - 6 points
• High: 7 - 9 points

Step 3:
Sort the initiatives so you're focused on completing the "high" priority initiatives first.

Now you can confidently say "No" to the "low" priority ones.

That's a wrap!

If you have any questions, reply to this email and I'm happy to guide you.

If you found this helpful, please forward this email to 1 friend or colleague. They'll appreciate you and you'll help grow the community.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian

Clickworthy Resources

• Blog: How to make smart decisions

• Video: How to estimate market size

• Video: How to estimate anything (Fermi Method)

• Template: Desirability, Viability, Feasibility Framework