How did the best in the world become the best, and learn to battle adversity along the way in reaching their goals? Daring to Compete is a handbook for anyone seeking to learn the techniques and thinking behind the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Jack Cowin, Founder and Executive Chairman,
Competitive Foods Australia
Daring to Compete is a great book for any reader interested in understanding the entrepreneurial mindset around the world. With in-depth and personal interviews of EY Entrepreneur of the Year Country winners, the book identifies the traits of successful entrepreneurs and describes the EY 7 Drivers of Growth™. It’s a must read for any one who aspires to be an entrepreneur!
Judy Chan, CEO, Grace Wine Holdings Ltd., China
How exciting to finally have a book about daring entrepreneurs from different parts of the globe. Their stories, dreams and challenges will be inspiration for future generations of entrepreneurs.
Rebecca MacDonald, Founder and Executive Chair,
Just Energy Group Inc., Canada
Daring to Compete captures the essence of what it takes to be a truly successful entrepreneur in a rapidly evolving global economy. The authors not only break down what it takes to become an entrepreneur, they also share first hand insights from some of today’s greatest entrepreneurial success stories.
Michael “Dr. Woody” Woodward, PhD,
Organizational psychologist and author of The YOU Plan
and business media commentator
The world needs more entrepreneurs and people with an entrepreneurial mindset. Daring to Compete provides insights into the drivers of growth that successful entrepreneurs must continually develop at every stage of their journey. At Babson, we are educating entrepreneurial leaders who likewise develop an appreciation of what it takes to create great businesses that drive innovation and impact.
Susan G. Duffy, PhD, Executive Director,
The Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership,
Babson College
Featuring Insights from Winners of the
DIANE FOREMAN | BRYAN PEARCE | GEOFFREY GODDING
Cover design: Wiley
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Copyright © 2019 by EGYS, LLP. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Foreman, Diane, 1960- author. | Pearce , Bryan, 1959- author. |
Godding, Geoffrey, 1959- author.
Title: Daring to compete : Accelerate Your Business to Market Leadership with EY’s 7 Drivers of
GrowthTM/Diane Foreman, Bryan Pearce, Geoffrey Godding.
Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046265 (print) | LCCN 2019002637 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119546818 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119546795 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119546764
(hardback) | ISBN 9781119546795 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship. | Leadership. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
/ Entrepreneurship. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / General. | BUSINESS &
ECONOMICS / Leadership.
Classification: LCC HB615 (ebook) | LCC HB615 .F6747 2019 (print) | DDC
338/.04--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046265
Diane Foreman
For my late husband Bill Foreman, the finest entrepreneur
I ever knew.
Bryan Pearce
I dedicate my work on Daring to Compete to my family — my wife Karen and children Jenny, Scott, and Ali — who have moved around the world with me, and endured the long hours and many nights away on business travel for nearly 40 years. Their flexibility has enabled me to have an exciting career, build relationships with so many great entrepreneurs, and understand so much about what makes these entrepreneurs successful and able to drive exceptional innovation and growth. Thank you!
I also want to dedicate this book to the thousands of EY Entrepreneur Of The Year participants — innovators, creators, and purposeful leaders who have helped EY to build this important program over 30 years. As coauthors we are the voice to so many colleagues at EY who have guided, advised, and recognized many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. It is the willingness of entrepreneurs and EY colleagues to share your experiences and insights that make the collective wisdom contained in the EY 7 Drivers of Growth™ possible.
Geoffrey Godding
For my family — my wife Madeline and children Henry, Emily, Oliver, and Annabel — who have endured the consequences of my passion for what I do. For the incredibly talented and loyal colleagues with whom I have had the great privilege to work, and for the wonderful clients I have met and served, many of whom I count as friends, and without whom I would never have learned anything of real value.
Audere, augere, vincere
[ To dare, to strive, to conquer]
To EY, thank you for creating and supporting the WEOY program which has allowed tens of thousands of entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe to come together and share their passion and be inspired by each other. You have shown true corporate commitment to “Building a Better Working World.”
To Bryan and Geoffrey, thank you for putting your intellectual rigor, good humor, and disciplined debate into this book. Thank you also for spending your working lives supporting entrepreneurs, but most especially thank you for having faith in my intuition. It's been a privilege to work with you.
Daring to Compete would not have been possible without the collaboration of many valued friends and colleagues.
First, we are so grateful to the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners from around the world who participated in interviews – opening up and freely sharing their insights and learnings from their amazing entrepreneurial journeys.
Second, to my coauthors Geoffrey Godding – who has provided great leadership around the development and continual refinement of our EY 7 Drivers of GrowthTM – and of course to Diane Foreman, an exceptional serial entrepreneur, ardent alumna and supporter of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program around the world, and a great friend. Having the perspective of an incredibly successful business builder like Diane has been irreplaceable in developing this book.
To our tireless project manager for this book, Rebekah Craig (Ernst & Young LLP – United States), thanks for all of your dedication and hard work, and to Liz Bolshaw (Ernst & Young – United Kingdom) and Jenni McManus (Ernst & Young – New Zealand) for your editing support.
Thank you to the teams who helped research, develop, and deploy the EY 7 Drivers of GrowthTM. The learning from working with them and the many thousands of client interactions that have flowed from these wonderful initiatives have been the fuel for this book.
Thanks also to my coauthors Bryan Pearce, whose knowledge and experience of entrepreneurs is second to none and who epitomizes the spirit of partnership at EY, and to Diane Foreman, who is an unstoppable force of nature, overflowing with insights into the life of an entrepreneur, and is a joy to work with.
The world needs more entrepreneurs and people with a strong entrepreneurial mind-set, as numerous academic studies have shown.1 The world needs people who wake up every day, dreaming of building better – better products and services, better companies, better communities, and a better working world.
For more than 30 years, EY has been advising, guiding, and recognizing many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Through our work with these entrepreneurs, and hosting the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program, we have honored and come to understand the stories of thousands of entrepreneurs. At EY, we believe that great businesses of all sizes, including those run by the 15 Entrepreneurs featured in this book, have a strong sense of purpose and are committed to doing their part to build a better working world. Through our commitment to entrepreneurs, and shining the light on their contributions and accomplishments over 30 years, we are proud of our role in helping them to build better.
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalists and winners are among the “best of the best” in the world of successful company building. Each year, EY receives nearly 10,000 nominations for great entrepreneurs to be recognized in nearly 145 city or regional programs in more than 50 countries. These nominations are submitted by entrepreneurs, their peers, employees, customers, and suppliers. Nominees don’t have to be EY clients: in fact in 2017, less than 20% of nominated companies were our clients. Once nominated, entrepreneurs go through a series of judging rounds – each conducted by independent judges who are typically EY Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni and other entrepreneurs. We believe it takes one to know one, and the selection of award winners by their peers is one of the most meaningful aspects of the program for participants.
For decades, people have asked, “Are entrepreneurs born or made?” Through our interactions with generations of EY Entrepreneur Of The Year contestants and our work with many high-growth entrepreneurs as clients, we have gained exceptional insight into the knowledge and skills it takes to succeed. Through comprehensive research, we have distilled this insight into a framework or toolkit that we call the EY 7 Drivers of GrowthTM.
We have also seen certain character traits common to the highest-achieving entrepreneurs honored through our program.
In this book we want to share with you both the insights underpinning the EY 7 Drivers of Growth and some exceptional stories that show how builders of market-leading businesses came to create multibillion-dollar companies.
How did the eighth child of a Glasgow butcher, leaving school without qualifications at 16, build a multinational specialist oil and gas equipment manufacturer, now part of one of the largest of its kind in the world?
How did a young New Zealander manage to borrow NZ$1 million to found his company, secured as it was on a leisure park that did not exist, on land he didn’t own? And then how did he go on to build that company at an average annual growth rate of 364%?
What was it that propelled a baby girl in Malaysia, abandoned then taken in by a caring stranger, to harness her experience of lying awake listening to the torrential rain beating on the corrugated roof of their shack to build one of the world’s premier desalinization companies?
By reading this book, we hope you will be inspired and enlightened to apply entrepreneurial thinking to your business enterprise, wherever you are along your journey toward market leadership.
Diane Foreman, Bryan Pearce, and Geoffrey Godding
Dictionary.com defines “dare” as “to have the necessary courage or boldness for something.”1
Let’s face it – being an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO is a lonely job. Your road to market leadership is very difficult to navigate, especially without a reliable road map and the guidance of others who have walked that road and can help you to see around the corners.
Daring to Compete is written to provide entrepreneurs at all stages of their journey – from emerging to market leader – with insights from EY and 15 great business leaders from around the world. These Entrepreneurs (our 15 exemplary EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winners) share their insights on how they develop skills, knowledge, and accelerate their businesses and thrive as entrepreneurial leaders.
The environment in which you operate is changing more rapidly than ever before, and disruption comes at you not only from industry peers but also from new entrants from other sectors that are leveraging innovative technologies and creating new business models. You understand all too well the magnitude of forces that are constantly changing and to which you must respond on a daily basis. These challenges (see Figure P1.1) include:
Figure P1.1 The environment in which entrepreneurs operate
What sets you apart as an entrepreneur is that every day you are “daring to compete” in the face of these challenges – in fact, you see them as opportunities for accelerating growth. You are unstoppable!
Each year EY receives almost 10,000 nominations from our 145 city or regional programs in over 50 countries, to compete for a range of regional, national, and eventually global titles recognizing exceptional entrepreneurship. Nominations come from multiple sources and less than 20% of them are EY clients. Once nominated, entrepreneurs go through a series of judging rounds – each conducted by independent judges who are typically EY Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni and other entrepreneurs. Ultimately each program annually selects a national winner based on a balanced scorecard of key criteria that together reflect the essence of a truly great entrepreneur. These are, in no particular order:
Each June, national winners representing more than 50 nations come to Monaco to represent their country at the world’s premier event that recognizes and celebrates entrepreneurial achievement. While there, they participate in a final round of independent judging. Ultimately, one is named the EY World Entrepreneur Of The YearTM – a highly coveted honor. The prize isn’t monetary: it is the recognition of exceptional achievement by a group of respected peers. Together the entrepreneurs participating in the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 competition in Monaco had the characteristics shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Key statistics on the entrepreneurs who competed at the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2018
Over the history of the competition, winners have included individuals such as Guy Laliberté of Cirque du Soleil in Canada, Wayne Huizenga (who created multiple companies including Blockbuster Video and Waste Management, Inc.) in the United States, Mohed Altrad of the Altrad Group in France, and Olivia Lum of Hyflux in Singapore. We hope you are inspired to join them by applying to your local EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program (details are contained in the Appendix).
EY’s 7 Drivers of Growth is a powerful management framework that enables business leaders to benchmark themselves against global, cross-industry leading practices,” says Ryan Burke, EY Global Leader, Growth Markets. “Importantly, it also helps them build their growth plan to deliver against their strategic objectives.”
Through our interactions with these great EY Entrepreneur Of The Year contestants, observing the selection process carried out by our judges (all of whom are independent of EY), and our work with many high-growth entrepreneurs as clients, we have obtained deep insight into the knowledge and skills these women and men use to drive sustainable growth. Through comprehensive research, we have distilled this insight into what we refer to as the EY 7 Drivers of GrowthTM (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 The EY 7 Drivers of Growth
First and foremost, successful entrepreneurs who achieve sustainable high growth have an unrelenting focus on the Customer. They put customers at the center of everything they do. To achieve optimal customer satisfaction, these entrepreneurs also invest time and capital on six additional areas: People, behaviors, and culture; Digital technology and analytics; Operations; Funding and finance; Transactions and alliances; and Risk.
These world-class entrepreneurs also understand the importance of maintaining balance between these drivers as they grow sustainable companies. For example, a leader who focuses only on current sales to customers without building a great team and culture and putting in place adequate funding and finance to support the growth will quickly find his or her company unable to deliver on its promises.
Our research also shows that as successful entrepreneurial companies move toward market leadership, they generally progress through three stages: Developing, Established, and ultimately Leading. They may move through these stages with varying speed, but will follow a similar pathway. While the specific activities that successful entrepreneurial businesses must focus on within each of the 7 Drivers of Growth will vary somewhat in each of these stages, many are common across the board.
This research that led to the EY 7 Drivers of Growth validated our firsthand understanding, obtained through thousands of interactions and face-to-face sessions with entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world.
These entrepreneurs have spent their lives continually daring to compete. For them, there is no finish line – their days are spent looking for ways to compete more effectively, innovate, diversify, and seize on the exciting opportunities that present themselves as a result of industry convergence and new technologies. Through our interviews, in addition to sharing their inspiring, transformational stories, they have explained ways that they have adopted these 7 Drivers of Growth in guiding their companies to success. As the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2016 winner for the United States, J.W. Marriott Jr. notes, “Success is never final.”
We hope that the EY 7 Drivers of Growth model becomes an indispensable road map you will use on your journey to market leadership.