Does your operational capability risk undermining your growth plans for 2026?

How confident are you that your growth plans for 2026 will deliver as you intend.  Will they really be “good growth” that adds long term financial resilience, builds your brand and customer loyalty, introduces new products or accesses new markets?  Or are they introducing risks that the business has not considered or planned to manage? 

Whether you're aiming to grow business as usual activities or break into new markets, all growth plans are inherently risky.  But the biggest risk of all is having plans that are misaligned with your operational capabilities.  The ability of your supply chain and internal operations to deliver effectively can either enable or restrict growth, so it’s important to understand the associated risks and manage them well so that they don’t become blockers to your growth plans.

Here's how your risks might show up....

• Customer risks

  • Growth is focussed on what the business can do more than what adds value to the customer, so doesn’t deliver on sales.

  • Growth is based on a short–lived trend so isn’t sustained.

• Operational risks

  • Growth plans are not aligned to operational capacity or capability, so operations either can’t deliver what’s needed or the ‘stretch’ impacts on quality, delivery performance and/or cost performance.

  • People are under additional stress and performance starts to spiral downwards.

• Financial risks

  • The business invests hugely in new capacity or capability that adds costs and impacts margin or, even worse, is underutilised if demand changes.

  • Growth increases turnover and profit, yet erodes margins and profitability, so actually weakens the business.

  • Growth is not sustained and the investment in capacity or capability is not recovered.

  • More cash is tied up in the business, either to support a more complex product range or to buffer against performance issues.

• Business risks

  • Growth is too reliant on short–lived market trends?  How will they impact your financial resilience

While such an assessment may indicate that some growth plans are unwise, it will more likely identify appropriate actions to make your growth plans more robust.  The point is that any growth plan is risky, as it’s taking the business into new territory.  However, provided that the risks are understood and managed, your chances of success can be significantly improved. 

Bottom line:  an effective growth plan needs to identify and manage the risks and ensure that plans are aligned across the whole business, in particular ensuring that Operations has the capability and capacity to support them effectively.  Only in this way will you ensure that growth is appropriately profitable and sustainable (i.e. maintains or enhances margins).

If all this seems overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be.  Veracity’s "high performance with ease" approach gives you the "whole system" perspectives that enable you to know you will deliver what is important to customers (what is most value creating) in the most effective way.  Critically it ensures you have an operating model (spanning the entire supply and customer value chain) that is an enabler for growth rather than a barrier to it.

This means that it matters less which risk you start with – and we recommend you start with the one that bothers you most – because our systematic approach will bring to the surface all of the issues that need to be dealt with to realise your growth plans.

Our "high performance with ease" strategy will ensure:

• the growth opportunities you pursue will be right for your business.

• your customers will experience real value add in working with you.

• you have the operational capabilities – internally and in your supply chain – to enable "good growth" and fully realise your ambitions both now and with agility to adapt in future.

• you will avoid delayed or over budget product launches.

• your workforce will be equipped to support your growth plans and continuously improve performance.

• your business will growth in ways that improve profitability and are sustainable.

For more information on how to assess the operational effects of your growth plans and how to tackle them, take a look at our webpage on this topic.  You’ll also find a lesson on how one company’s future was nearly destroyed through responding to an opportunity that seemed too good to miss.

You’ll find the web page here