High-growth Frameworks

Brett Dawson took Dimension Data from a $2 billion to $8 billion business over the course of 12 years. He’s now focusing on making an impact in the business landscape through investments. These are his five lessons on building a high-growth business.

- Nadine Todd

1 Success begins and ends with your people

In any business, your entire leadership team needs to believe it can go out and do extraordinary things. My goal is always to achieve a rate of growth that’s three times the growth of the market. You can only achieve that with people who buy into the dream that we are going to outgrow the market, who believe that a good performance is three times the rate of growth of the market and who want to go out there and do it.

It’s all about mindset. Some people wake up and think ten minutes of exercise is hard. Others wake up and think three hours is hard. It’s all relative. You need to find the people who suit your vision, dream and culture, and then support and nurture them.

As a leader, you have to build the compelling vision and belief that we can do this, but you also don’t want to attract the wrong people who just believe and don’t critically analyse what you’re trying to achieve. It’s a delicate balance.

You want people who take it in and think, ‘that sounds aggressive; it’s a big, hairy, audacious goal — how do we get there?’ They need to be able to formulate a real, achievable plan.

2 Find your market opportunities

I’ve always had one simple mantra: We want our fair share of the market, and as long as you believe our fair share is 100%, then that’s all we want. And then we didn’t stop until we got our fair share.

You can’t ignore the fact that there are competitors — there are always competitors — but there are always market opportunities as well. As long as you don’t have 100% of market share, there’s an opportunity.

To achieve this, you have to have a culture that says we always want to win and grow and beat our competition. We want to expand our market share.