Why is business growth such an addiction?

We managed to achieve a pretty good growth number in the past 12 months. We are proud not just of the revenue and EBIT growth – but more importantly the sheer number of people who receive RedBalloon gifts grows exponentially. But why do we want to continue to grow, why do we have such an ‘addiction’ to growth?

We are impatient! There is so much we want to achieve and we are clamoring to do so. We want millions of people to have amazing experiences with their friends and family and through that we will have changed the way people gift forever. However, we’ve grown extremely quickly in the past eight years and we’ve learnt some important lessons about how to grow.

It’s all about growing with strength and continuing to grow our intellectual capabilities. It’s not just about achieving our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) it’s about creating new opportunities, career development for the team and having fun. (You cannot change the world without the means…)

Simply, we must keep attracting new customers, new partners, suppliers – and to support all this we continue to upgrade and innovate our technology.

We need a vision to be able to grow rapidly.

I often say to my General Manager, who’s now been on this journey with me for six years: “If only we knew back then what we knew now”, or “if only we had not implemented it that way, we wouldn’t be having to do it again now!” but to be honest, we grew fast, we did what we thought we needed to do, made decisions on the fly and I wouldn’t change a thing. We’ve always stayed true to our vision and values and that’s what counts.

We need great people to be able to grow.

The economic recovery poses challenges and opportunities. People will become more scarce – we have been able to recruit amazingly talented people at RedBalloon. But amazing talent will become increasingly hard to find. Again we may have to begin to source skilled professionals from anywhere on the planet.

We need great customers who want to share the story to continue to grow.

Our number one referral of new customers is word-of-mouth; it has been that way for eight years now and has now gone into overdrive, particularly in the social media arena. Our key strategy is obviously to continue to perpetuate our story via word-of-mouth, so we have to “give them something worth saying”, about the experience of dealing with us and their feelings after participating in an experience.

We need amazing suppliers to be able to continue our growth game.

The most satisfying aspect of running RedBalloon is watching the passion for the brand become catchy, I genuinely believe in the power that experiences have in connecting people and creating stories that people will tell and continue to tell.

People join RedBalloon because they believe it, customers buy from us because they believe it and we support an amazing community of experience suppliers (small, medium and large businesses) who get to deliver what they love doing to more people because of us. Each of those businesses in turn grow as we grow.

Kind of nice really, an Australian business supporting Australian businesses.

Growth is catchy… and good for the whole country.

Naomi Simson is the 2008 National Telstra Women’s Business Award winner for Innovation. Naomi was also a finalist for the Australian HR Awards and a finalist for the BRW Most Admired Business Owner Award in 2008. Also in 2008 RedBalloon achieved a 97% Hewitt employee engagement score. One of Australia’s outstanding female entrepreneurs, Naomi regularly entertains as a professional speaker inspiring middle to high-level leaders on employer branding, engagement and reward and recognition. Naomi writes a blog and has written a book sharing the lessons from her first five years.

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