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23 Leveraging Resources for Growth

or more, in as much as some of these companies reached signi fi cant scale much earlier than others.

Examining Differences in Growth Patterns

In previous chapters, the outlined management practices provided detailed insights into the kind of decisions that have been made, over time, at the researched fi rms. In order to detect patterns, practices were bundled with others that were similar; then, each of those was aligned with an individual chapter. The bundles ranged from ownership to governance and market focus, as well as across functional practices, such as marketing, fi nance, innovation, and production. Since all of the researched fi rms can be considered successful over an extended period of time, practices were not evaluated in terms of their relative effectiveness nor was their relative effective- ness compared to one another. Coming to the end of this detailed analysis, it is time to see if an assessment is possible that aids in determining which bundles of practices, or combinations thereof, account for most of the differences in growth performance. A number of questions were posed in this inquiry. In the absence of hard statistics, something deliberately avoided by the authors, pattern analysis was employed to fi nd answers that would help shed some light on the different growth paths observed among the interviewed fi rms. To compare different growth patterns, Graphic 23.1 was created, which distributes the companies according to their age in relation to their last known (sometimes only estimated) sales. In this chart, the fi rms range from about 20 to more than 175 years of age, with those founded more recently shown on the left of the chart and the oldest clustered on the right. At fi rst glance, one can spot the youngest fi rm ( Wyon , 1999) in the bottom left corner and the oldest ( Sefar , 1833) in the upper right quadrant. Super fi cially, this might suggest the conclusion that as fi rms grow older, their size increase — not an earth-shattering conclusion onto itself! Yet, simply looking at years of operation would not lead to signi fi cant insights. When viewed from the perspective of sales, or size — in this case taking all the fi rms above CHF 120 million in sales into consideration — the chart demonstrates that this segment includes companies of varying ages, ranging from u-blox (1997) to Sefar (1833); this indicates that among the larger fi rms there were both those which had been founded recently and some that have been operating for a long time. Equally, clustering companies that had sales below CHF 120 million included among the more recently founded fi rms Medartis (1997) and Wyon (1999), as well as long-running companies, such as Kuhn Rikon (1925) or Lantal (1886). Again, simply relying on years of operation would not lead to suf fi ciently deep insights regarding the reasons for the varied growth patterns. Even more telling were vertical patterns, clustering the companies by age, as expressed in decades. The 20-year vertical included fi rms as small as Wyon, with estimated sales of less than 20 million, as well as u-blox with sales of more than CHF 400 million. The same distribution from small (less than CHF 30 million) to very