On Wonderland’s March Waffle Wednesday Mariam Shodeinde shared tools, ideas and framework for resilient growth of companies. Mariam is currently the CEO of Thindo Oy and has more than a decade of experience in multiple start-ups and scale ups.

The event kicked off with Mariam talking about her views on growth and sustainable growth:

“One of the best things in company operations is that everyone sees themselves as a part of the growth story”

Growth is the lifeline of a company

The way of thinking about growth has changed during covid. Growth at all cost is history and resilient growth is what survives during economic challenges and difficulty. Is all growth good growth? Is the growth we are making generating value? Ecosystem approach to growth is something that creates a positive multiplier effect and strengthens the growth of the company.

Growth ecosystem means how do you take all the stakeholders in your network and build operations around them and turning it growth enabling function for the company.

There are many ways to reach growth in a company. Ecosystem growth is not mainly about choosing one of them but more of looking into company’s resources that you can use for best advantage. Resources are never endless but is there a way that you can still get the value of the things that you have to let go without passing the current capacity of resources. Ecosystem growth focuses on how you can do that with partners and get more competitive advantage than other players in the market.

Looking at product led and sales led growth we realize that the saturations in the market are huge due to the growing technology that leads to anybody being able to make new solutions fast. As a business how do you stand out at times where there is resistance from customers as in how and what they buy. Can you find another solution to compete and stand out in the saturation of the market than price.

Ecosystem growth is reaching your customers better, through channels that they trust and recognize so your message reaches them. Mariam emphasizes that most of the sales in the next 25 years has to come from an integrated ecosystem for a company to be able to reach the market or grow business.

Create an ecosystem or be a part of a network where your buyers already have a higher willingness to buy

You don’t need to be a huge reactor company to do this. In her presentation Mariam shared the framework of how to identify the right type of channels that you can either build up an ecosystem or enter an ecosystem to deliver the objectives that you want to reach.

Set a clear strategic objective. Do you want to enter a new market or increase customer reliance on your tech ecosystem? Maybe you want to increase the value of your brand.

Mariam shared with us a customer operations map that can be used as a tool to choose what type of partners your company should select. For example a security solutions company could find out that large data infrastructure companies as partners would be much better for them than agencies because companies that do big technology infrastructure, cyber security is a risk to them succeeding. As a result of looking into the operations map a cyber security company as a partner for them is the perfect fit as their values would strengthen and a small cyber security company that at the same time gets access to a large amount of customers that the infrastructure company already has.

Watch the whole talk here.

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