Business growth is tougher than ever, demanding bold leadership, clear strategy, and inspired teams. Success means stripping sentimentality, leveraging assets, and embracing AI as the decade’s biggest growth lever. At Q5, we help leaders turn vision into action, building resilience, conviction, and entrepreneurial focus to thrive despite adverse conditions.
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The recipe for business growth has never been simple, but right now it feels a lot harder than usual.
Leadership teams that see an opportunity and know they have to grow to succeed are trying to thread one of the narrowest needles in decades.
Slicing through these strong headwinds to generate growth takes leadership vision, strategic certainty and the mindset to build and inspire ‘boldness-ready’ teams.
We’ve been lucky enough to support some gutsy groups who are staying on the front foot, helping them not just use the right tools for tough times, but do so with the shared entrepreneurial focus that’s needed.
That starts with recognising that the path to growth may not be evident in the stimulus coming from the day-to-day business. Costs, taxes, tariffs, conflicts and politics are taking their toll and weighing down momentum. UK profit warnings are up 20% year-on-year, with both sales and FTSE100 earning in decline against 2024. The business environment isn’t just difficult, it’s actively disincentivising risk-taking and reinvestment.
Making growth happen means stripping away any strategic sentimentality about the cards in your hand. Whether it’s strategic assets, knowledge of customers, intellectual property or the level of productivity and performance, a fundamental view of the value in the business and how it matches up to the landscape of the future is the bedrock of every successful growth plan we’ve seen.
Robust, objective analysis on whether the best play is to drive underexploited aspects with discipline or to strike out for new spaces is irreplaceable. It also serves a vital human function in giving leaders the space and permission to rethink old verities, challenge received wisdom and put real evidence and insight behind creative ideas.
Even with a clear strategy, conviction is often the scarcest resource. More often than not, it comes down to the instincts and ‘weather-reading’ of senior leaders and Boards.
For pioneers and founders, the vision and the spark of an idea is always compelling, but how far to push it isn’t always as clear – and especially how to drive the market rather than accept what the market offers.
Building confidence in the proposition, validating unique and powerful aspects, and how to translate that vision for the people around the business (customers, partners and team) is a vital part of building the early stage ‘shared inspiration’ that will fuel the first stage of growth.
While it may look different from the outside, leaders of established businesses know all too well that, without a similar level of commercial boldness, large cap companies’ broad exposure to negative headwinds can just as quickly drag them down.
Faced not only with adverse external conditions but more systemic, complex organisations and settled customer / product fits, seizing growth opportunities in major businesses means building entrepreneurial conviction & incentives at a mass scale.
As a result, large company growth plays are often more directional and strategic, working on multi-year timelines and drawing on more substantial assets – and powering that larger ‘engine of growth’ takes leaders who can impose a high bar for focus and impact.
Panning for gold in the sea of ideas, insights, opinions, business operations and market moves that occupy the days of major business leaders requires not just a very sharp eye, but working in the right way to build a critical mass of contributors who can together ‘turn the ship’ and hold it to the right course.
In 2025, no growth strategy can ignore AI. For every business, directly or indirectly, it’s already reshaping the landscape. While it’s tempting to see AI as another uncertainty, its speed and scale make it the biggest growth lever of this decade for almost every organisation.
The totemic Generative AI use has tripled in two years, but in terms of deep integration into value levers and operating models many businesses are just at the start of their investment and adoption curve.
That will change quickly. AI offers a unique potential for leapfrog growth:
The organisations serious about growth are already looking to pace AI’s maturity in their value chains, and harvest its benefit – which means being willing to rethink or replace even the longest standing ways of working.
Above all, making growth happen in this environment is about agency, leaders choosing resolve over resignation, boldness over drift and evidence over inertia. Most businesses know how to execute, but picking the moment to reconsider and refocus around the right sources of value for the future takes a leadership force of will. Working with those leaders and helping them see growth through from ambition to actuality is at the heart of what we do at Q5.
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