Will you be the hare or the tortoise? 🏃‍♀️

Hi there 👋,

I’m guessing you’ve heard the tale of the Hare and the Tortoise. 

I won’t go into too much detail, but a hare and a tortoise race each other. 

The hare is much quicker, so you assume they’ll win, but they burn out. Instead, the slow, plodding tortoise is the first to pass the finish line.

We like to apply this lesson to all aspects of life. Just think of how often you’ve heard, “Slow and steady wins the race!”

As someone who ran a marathon, I can safely say, too often. I heard that phrase way too often.

But today, we’ll look at the pros and cons of being the hare or the tortoise.

What’s wrong with focusing on short-term growth?

Focusing on short-term growth comes with quick and easy rewards. 

It’s like the dopamine rush you get from scrolling on Instagram.

You know how to get it, and it feels great… until you realise an hour has passed, the laundry still isn’t folded, and you never went to the gym. 

Short-term actions like running ads, sending emails and using discounts all work while they’re happening. 

They’re one-hit wonders. Like the band that made ‘The Ketchup Song’.

Everyone knows the song, and yet no one could name another song by that band.

But at a certain point, it will get harder and harder to drive scalable growth only through short-term actions.

Each month, you’ll need another miracle to march these results. 

Your growth starts to level out because you’re only as big as that month’s hit wonder.

What does a focus on long-term growth look like?

Here are the most common examples of long-term growth tactics:

• Content marketing with in-depth SEO

• Building a well-known brand in the industry

• Creating a big reach through organic social

• Setting up a viral referral program

• Or building a loving community of customer-fans

The limit does not exist for these methods. If you do these well, you become an industry example of “how business should be done”.

Wow, sounds amazing, right? Why isn’t everyone doing these?

Well, because the process to get there looks like this…

With long-term growth tactics, you won’t see anything for a while. These strategies take time.

You’re planting a seed and then waiting for it to grow, rather than buying a basil plant from a supermarket and watching it die within two weeks.

Google needs to accept you as an authority. A brand is not built on peak quality but consistent quality.

Social media posts won’t reach people until you have more followers, but you need to reach people to get those followers.

In the meantime, you usually run out of money or have very impatient investors to deal with.

So what can you do about it?

The issue isn’t quick wins or long waits; it’s settling for just one of the two. 

You need to combine sustainable growth tactics and growth loops, with shorter-term growth strategies.

This allows you to keep investors at bay longer while your hard work pays off.

First, figure out what the right balance is for the stage you’re in:

• Startups might focus more on the short-term as they’re not aware yet of what could drive their long-term growth, and need to grow enough to invest in this.

• Corporates might naturally focus on long-term as they’ve had those quick wins and used up their short-term opportunities. They need to focus on brand building now.

A golden tip I give clients is to have a separate team, or at the very least person, response for short and long-term growth. 

If you have one person handling both, they’ll be tempted to focus on the area they’re more comfortable with. Or they might settle for short-term tactics due to pressure to meet targets.

Have a hare and a tortoise, and let each team go at their own pace with their own targets.

Don’t pit them against each other, as why would a hare be racing a tortoise?

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

I usually don’t struggle to find a recommendation for these newsletters. In fact, often the issue lies in just narrowing it down to one or two items.

But this week was the exception. There doesn’t seem to be much on this topic.

So instead, here’s a recommendation to revisit one of my previous editions of Growth Waves.

It’s all about finding the time to think long-term and zoom out. Will you a firefighter or an executive?

Those same investors that push you to get immediate results will be the ones who later come back and say you can’t run another discount or campaign. 

They’ll cut your ad spend and then ask why the revenue is dropping. 

You need a plan that extends past this month or next, and you need the wins that will keep you going until long-term growth starts to gather traction.

Don’t rely on one-hit wonders, don’t be the ‘Ketchup Song’, be Ed Sheeran when it comes to growth.

Daphne