Strategies for the Board Room from the Deep Web
Hacking is not a word often associated with the arguably high-brow industry of finance. However, in its most modern and innovative form, growth hacking describes an inventive method to create exponential revenue increases for businesses, all in a short amount of time and at a low cost per acquisition.
To most, hacking is known as the unethical invasion of computer security systems responsible for the widespread malicious destruction of computer networks. Hackers cite various social, criminal, and personal motivations for employing their savant-level IT skills in orchestrated attacks that they use to harass, make political statements and execute controversial pranks.
Self-proclaimed social justice hacking group “Anonymous” originated in the deep web on 4chan message boards, and it is known for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Anonymous” hacked and disabled the Church of Scientology website and its members staged protests while wearing macabre Guy Fawkes masks to conceal their identities.
Infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick highjacked the entire operations mainframe of Pacific Bell, IBM, Nokia, and Motorola because he was “addicted to hacking…for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure.” After serving time in prison, he rebranded himself as a “white hat” hacker and now sells his ill-developed skillset as a penetration tester and security consultant. [https://www.phishprotection.com/heroes/kevin-mitnick]
In business, sophisticated growth hackers leverage software, process adjustments, and technology functions in innovative and inventive strategies that are often experimental in nature and previously unproven.
When Gmail initially launched, it used an invite-only system to drive rapid growth. This strategy capitalized on people’s intrigue with exclusivity and their fear of missing out on new technology. The inherent nature of Gmail’s exclusivity was the “hack”. Furthermore, the company did not allow people to invite others to the platform, rendering it even more so. At one point, Gmail invitations were so sought-after that invitation holders auctioned off their spots to the highest bidders on eBay. An exclusivity hack like this requires no marketing budget.
“Hacking work is forbidden innovation. It is the act of getting what you need to do your best by exploiting loopholes and creating workarounds. It is taking the usual ways of doing things and bypassing them to produce improved results. Benevolent hackers see the future and pull us toward it,” writes Josh Klein, author of Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results.
Leveraging a strategic channel alliance can be a form of business growth hacking. Such a relationship can help a business overcome limitations with its current core competency and its preferred routes-to-market. When one business is relatively small, another growth hack is to combine forces by consolidating with complementary companies. This consolidation allows companies to restructure and create operational efficiencies while investing together in ancillary services or products that each business could not execute independently. Strategic partnerships also can improve efficiencies through the pooling of resources. By aligning sales efforts, combining purchasing for volume-based discounts, centralizing low-value, departmental operations like call centers, sharing high-value technology, and increasing the customer base through leveraged data, companies can find huge cost-savings.
Technology solutions providers can share coding for software features and collaborate to achieve a more advanced product. Such an example is in the recent partnership between Google Cloud and Atos. In that instance, Google Cloud adopted Atos’ heightened security features, and Atos capitalized on Google’s machine learning expertise. [https://www.geospatialworld.net/news/atos-unveils-north-american-google-cloud-ai-lab/]
Instagram utilizes complex algorithms and historical data to monetize human behavioral psychology. It capitalizes on the desire for peer acceptance, intimate access to celebrities, and narcissism, thereby organically encouraging massive adoption, engagement, and a never-ending web of reach. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram created a social media behemoth. The combined company consolidated its user activity patterns and technologies to monopolize the user-created content industry and dominate digital advertising revenue. It would have taken Facebook significantly longer to acquire an Instagram-like audience organically. The acquisition of Instagram earned Facebook that milestone overnight.
One of the most current iterations of business growth hacking is the automation of lead generation – a specialized technology function in the form of sophisticated SaaS APIs like Kennected™, a LinkedIn™ automation tool for sales teams that strategically sends pre-written, timed responses to targeted individuals. Specific interactions within LinkedIn’s private messaging feature trigger these responses. This tool takes the task of manually communicating to 100 people per day and automates it, freeing up an immense amount of time for employees to engage in other revenue-generating activities.
At Bond LP™, we employ our own bespoke growth hacking strategy, The Bond Partnership Roll Up™ Model. Our proprietary model speeds up diligence, integration, value creation, and maximizes owner liquidity. The model can turn a few small companies into one fast-growing, high-valued group of partners with the stated goal of merging and creating liquidity options for its founders at levels heretofore unavailable to the individual entrepreneur. The very same growth and consolidation method rapidly elevated a $10 million single-location entity to a North American company nearing $1 billion in revenue, all while merging 16 companies in a single day. Now the company is a publicly-traded entity valued at over $3 billion.
Bond LP™’s core methodology employs traditional ways of growing businesses while capitalizing on new strategies and selectively applying sophisticated fintech platforms that optimize valuations to provide the perfect exit for founders and exceptional returns for investors. Its world-class executive team members have combined their extensive connections, financial engineering capabilities, and a proven rapid growth formula to create the ultimate SMB growth hack.
Bond LP™ exists as a hyper-growth partner to successful business owners and helps maximize earnings while their companies continue to scale and evolve. Cumulatively, Bond LP™’s partners have leveraged their teams’ core strategies to create over $1 billion in net value enhancement for companies located in North America, South America, and Europe.