The Pandemic Was a Case Study in Growth. Here Is How to Prepare for the Next Disruption.
Another disruption is coming. We cannot tell you its name or its timing. We can tell you it will arrive, because it always does. The smartest way to get ready is to study the last one closely.
The pandemic was the most demanding growth test in a generation. Six years on, we can see who grew, who declined, and what made the difference. Treat it as a case study. The lessons are practical, and they apply long before the next shock lands.
Start with where things stood in 2020. Early in the crisis, Board of Innovation surveyed 750 companies. Only about 15 percent reported a revenue increase across the year. The other 85 percent were holding on or falling back. The question was who would recover. InnoLead
The recovery did not come down to luck. McKinsey's analysis of the period found that the companies gaining ground made bold moves while competitors stood still, and that business-model innovation was the clearest dividing line between them and everyone else. Most of those moves pointed in one direction. Toward the customer. New products and services for changing needs. Reworked sales and service models. Faster product development. McKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company
The pattern held as the years went on. McKinsey studied companies that outperformed their peers from 2019 through 2024, a stretch that ran through the pandemic, inflation, and labor shortages. The winners beat peer revenue growth by about five points and profitability by about seven. The difference was conviction. They invested when uncertainty was highest. They built real capabilities. They treated growth as something to engineer. Only about a third of companies kept investing through the cycle, and the gap between the leaders and everyone else widened. Fortune + 2
None of this is unique to a pandemic. Even in calm times, failure is the norm. Forbes reports that 8 out of 10 businesses fail. Harvard Business School research finds that about 95 percent of new products fail. A shock simply reveals these weaknesses faster. They were there all along. MIT Professional Education
Here is what the case study comes down to. The companies that came through had something real to invest behind. They stayed close to their customers. They held a value proposition that was genuinely different, and they made sure the market heard it. They ran a business model that turned the offer into real revenue. Fear lost its grip on these teams, because their bets were grounded in evidence.
The companies that struggled were usually missing one of four things:
Close contact with customers through deep dialogue
A unique value proposition and a clear right-to-win
A value proposition communicated well enough to land
A business model that turns the offer into profitable, repeatable revenue
Every one of these is solvable. None of them requires a crisis to fix. This is the work of the front end of innovation, and it is where marketing science earns its return.
The next disruption will test the same four things. The time to build the discipline is now, while you can do it with a clear head. Prepare in calm, and you will not have to scramble in the storm.
Lawrence Innovation helps B2B leaders do exactly that. Contact us for a conversation about where your growth will come from.