Over the past six years, I have been running events for the founders of the fastest growing businesses across Europe. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know a lot of them very well and have watched their businesses thrive (or flounder). But what are the common building blocks that I have seen in successful growth businesses?

Here are 7 key factors in my mind that the most successful companies share.

  • A clearly articulated mission that everyone in the company knows, understands and believes in. Having buy-in and shared ownership of purpose is key to staff motivation and getting them to go the extra mile.
  • A product that has a clear point of differentiation from the competition. In my mind, a business’ product differentiation is its strategy. How it takes that to market is operations and tactics. A product that fills a clearly-articulated niche and aims to delight your customers will go far.
  • Clearly stated values that are understood by everyone in the company and that business lives by. A company’s values drive its culture – but culture is all about how people treat each other and customers, it’s not about beers and ping pong tables; in fact there is a good argument to say that the simple employee satisfaction delivered by a nice office and social activities is a poor goal to strive toward. Real engagement comes from overcoming challenges and from pride in your product, not just from having good coffee.
  • Values aren’t just written up on the wall, they determine who you do and do not hire, they are referred to in meetings and form the basis of recognition, rewards and performance reviews.
  • A belief in giving employees autonomy and trust. Setting clear goals and objectives and not getting bogged down in rules and processes is essential to coalescing a team that’s on-message despite not having been along for the ride from day one.
  • Investment in training. Hire people that are stepping up to do their job and invest in them. Why would you hire someone taking a sideways step to do exactly the same job they did elsewhere? What does that say about their ambition? Hire people with the ability and drive, not the experience – then give them the experience.
  • Reward and recognition for performance – formally through mechanisms like appraisals and salary reviews, and informally through public praise, newsletter mentions or employee-of-the-month awards.

Get these things right and you’ll build a solid foundation for future growth.