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How do you scale a business quickly and accelerate long term growth?

Consider the Flywheel Effect.

A flywheel is a large and heavy metal disk. It takes lots of effort to get it moving, but once it begins to turn, it builds momentum. So, once it starts turning, the flywheel will turn faster and faster with the same amount of effort.

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The Flywheel effect helps many organizations build and grow their business strategy.

Did you know?

The Flywheel concept was termed by Jim Collins in his book 'Good to Great.'

Example Of The Flywheel Effect

Amazon's Flywheel is a strategy focused on customer experience to drive traffic to their platform and third-party sellers & partners.

Byte Author Uploaded Image1. The flywheel starts at Customer Experience. Excellent customer experience drives traffic to Amazon.com.

  1. Because Amazon attracts lots of customers, sellers put their products on Amazon.com. This creates a greater selection of products for customers.

  2. Increased sales allow Amazon to lower the cost structure and reduce prices. This, along with customer experience, increases the traffic to Amazon.com.

    Each element starts to increase and it take on a life of its own. More traffic leads to more sales, leading to lower prices. In other words, the flywheel starts to turn faster. All of this results in the accelerated growth.

Quiz

What is the starting point of the Amazon Flywheel?

A Customer Focused Flywheel

The flywheel isn’t just a business or marketing strategy, but rather a business mindset. The distinction is important, as a marketing strategy makes it applicable only to certain areas of a business, like sales.

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A customer mindset puts the customer at the centre of your business, helps you identify and refine products, keep customers engaged, and drive a selling process. If you can build a flywheel around the experience of your customer, you'll unlock new potential for your business.

Quiz

When do you stop focusing on customers?

Think About Replicable Success

What successes can you create, and recreate?

These will be key elements of your organization's flywheel, and will empower your success to snowball, with increasing speed.

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Summary

Could you benefit from the flywheel effect?

Think about where you want your business to be in 5 years. Now work backwards.

What type of customer-centric flywheel will help you get there?

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License:

This Byte has been authored by

RS

Rosie Seth

AWS Strategic Partnerships

PG

Peter Gima

Helping organizations transform their business to the cloud.

DD

Debashree Dasgupta

Product Innovator

English

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