In this kickoff episode of 2025, Kunle Campbell sits down with Dr. Rebecca Homkes, a high-growth strategy expert, to explore how businesses can thrive amidst uncertainty. Dr. Homkes shares actionable frameworks from her new book, Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times, emphasizing how businesses can turn challenges into opportunities through strategic agility, learning velocity, and clarity of focus.
The conversation dives into the critical phases of growth: surviving through proactive measures, resetting through strategic clarity, and thriving by executing with agility. Dr. Homkes debunks myths around agility without strategy, explains the importance of aligning beliefs, and provides tools for identifying ideal customers and building sustainable growth. She also stresses that uncertainty is the best time to grow, offering a chance to uncover deeper insights from customers, suppliers, and employees.
Whether you’re navigating macroeconomic shifts, embracing AI for value creation, or striving for differentiation, this episode offers a practical playbook to help ecommerce operators stay ahead in 2025.
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Exciting news for our listeners! Kunle Campbell, your host and e-commerce expert, has just released his new book: ‘E-Commercer Growth Strategy.’ This essential guide is packed with strategies for attracting shoppers, building community, and retaining customers in the e-comerce space. Drawing on insights from the 2X eCommerce podcast and Kunle’s extensive experience, this book is a must-read for anyone in the e-commerce industry.
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Dr Rebecca Homkes: [00:00:00] Thrive companies bring three things together, right? A strong balance sheet, which you bring through from the survive phase, strategic insights, which you brought from the reset phase, and then you execute with agility and learning. And that’s the recipe.
Mhm.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Entrepreneurs will say, we’re going to skip strategy this year because we want to be more agile.
And I always smile very big and say, love the passion, but the definition of agility. Is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy, right? Agility without strategy has a different name. We call that chaos, right? Agility necessitates a clear growth strategy.
Mhm.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: The trap here is any customer who wants to buy our stuff as an ideal customer, Rebecca, like why spend time on this? No. A company for everyone is a company for no one. Really Force yourself to answer who is our ideal customer and what’s our differentiated value proposition for them.
Mhm..
So on this episode of the 2X [00:01:00] eCommerce podcast. We’re kicking off 2025 with an inspiring conversation about breakthrough growth. Strategy with Dr. Rebecca Homkes because this is the year to turn uncertainty into your. Greatest opportunity.
This is the 2X eCommerce Podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell
Kunle Campbell: so happy new year and welcome to the first episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast in 2025.
As we kick off this year, I want to help you start strong by talking a topic that’s essential to your success, which is break through strategy. Not just any strategy I’m talking about the kind of strategy that helps you navigate today’s uncertainties. Capitalize on opportunities and set your business up for sustainable transformative growth.
Kunle Campbell: So join me today with Dr.
Rebecca Homkes a high growth strategy expert, and one of the most insightful thinkers [00:02:00] I’ve come across. She’s a lecturer at London business school faculty at duke corporate executive education and a trusted advisor to leadership teams across the globe. More than that, Rebecca has a gift for making complex challenges, clear and actionable.
I intentionally brought her Rebecca on as our first guest this year, because I know how important it is for you to have. Clarity and focus as you plan your 2025. This episode is more than the conversation. It’s a toolkit. Rebecca shares, powerful frameworks and mental models that you can adopt to your business right now.
So whether you’re looking to strengthen your team, make better decisions or unlock new growth opportunities. This episode is for you. And before we dive in a quick reminder to follow this podcast on your favorite platform, it does help bring you more amazing guests.
And insights to keep you ahead of the curve. Now [00:03:00] let’s get started.
Rebecca, welcome to the 2x e commerce podcast.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Thank you so much for having me. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Kunle Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant stuff. Do you want to give us a bit of, your back story? for some context before we jump right into what we want to talk about.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to. So I have been a, I’m a dual citizen.
So I live between the UK and the U S splitting between Miami, San Francisco, and London. I’m a faculty member at the London business school and Duke and also advisor and faculty director at that BCGU or the university at Boston consulting group, but I actually, my background was in economics. So my PhD was from the London school of economics in economics.
I had worked for some of the big consulting. firms like McKinsey and Bain and thought that I was going to work at a big company, doing strategy and economics. And when I moved from the London school of economics to London business school, several years ago, I started teaching in some of our programs for entrepreneurs, [00:04:00] specifically the YPO or young presence organization and doing a couple of programs for them, doing a couple of office for them.
I just fell into my niche of. Bringing all of these things together to really focus on growth strategy. So that’s developing strategy, executing strategy, and innovating on strategy, which increasingly means bringing in digital and AI transformation into that. So I’m still at these universities, which I love, but I spend more than 80 percent of my time working directly with teams who want to do that.
Lead these high growth, high performance journeys in absolutely every industry across most countries. And, you can work with me in many different scaling journeys, but I tend to see companies in kind of the hundreds of millions to a billion. But I also work with lots of them who are smaller and also some of the biggest companies in the world, but all focus on that center of gravity.
Do you want to actually lead one of these breakthrough growth journeys?
Kunle Campbell: I love the last statement you made, which is a breakthrough growth strategy. And we’re in [00:05:00] 2025 now, where do we begin? Where does the, where does strategy actually start from? If you’re essentially sitting down with your team and trying to make.
2025, a really outstanding year in comparison to all the years.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: I love the premise because one of the questions that I actually ask entrepreneurs and leaders inside big companies is do you actually want to lead a growth journey is we all say we want to grow, but We invented the term breakthrough growth a long time ago to say, actually, you’re going to break out of what you’re doing right now.
The term breakthrough growth comes from, you have a growth curve. You’re doing this linear growth every year, growing a small percentage. Do you want to break out of this curve and really reset that line? And that means doing new things, which could be harder or different or a change. So love the premise.
And I’d start there do [00:06:00] you and your team really want to lead one of these growth journeys? And that’s a starting point. And then the second starting point is to just grasp the notion.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: It’s going to sound cliche that uncertainty is the new certainty. There was this conversation towards the end of 2024.
We’ll just wait until we have an outcome of the U S presidential election. We’ll just wait until we have an outcome of the fed decisions. And we almost. Kidded ourselves that the year would close. We would start 2025 with this pathway to certainty and all of this clarity. And let’s be honest, right?
We are facing the same level, if not more uncertainty across all these different aspects. So let’s embrace it and then let’s reframe it, right? We sometimes, and I want you to listen to this. For me, when we talk to each other about uncertainty as leaders, we tend to put a word before it that means it’s going to be bad, right?
We ask each other, Hey, how’s your team dealing with uncertainty? How are you managing uncertainty? Like how are you changing your plan for uncertainty? We are without meaning to [00:07:00] prefacing it with the word that frames our brains is going to be bad. So I like to start every strategy meeting by. Reminding ourselves we’re facing uncertainty and then defining it.
Uncertainty is a series of future events which may or may not occur. Whether or not those events are good or bad depends on what we’re trying to do and how we’re set up. So that’s your job. Figure out what we’re trying to do and then set up to succeed in that environment.
Kunle Campbell: Should you even label them good or bad in the first place?
Like uncertainty?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: No. And you will find yourselves doing this, right? If you’re doing some of the classic strategy tools and analyzing the situation, I will find teams, even ones that I’ve worked with for a while, labeling trends as risks. And we don’t mean to, but we label everything that we don’t know in the future as a risk or a or bad, and I have to say good or bad, even though I want you framing everything as an opportunity, because I’m finding this, if I don’t say good or bad, you’re going to [00:08:00] instantly think that I need to give you good.
So I train your brain to say. see that aspect of well, now, when you really got one of these high performing teams, they’re doing it naturally, but our brains aren’t formed to do this and Hey, it’s not our fault. Our brains weren’t formed evolutionary times to see an unknown future as a great thing, right?
We were trained and formed to see an unknown future as a risk to protect against. So we constantly need to do reframing.
Kunle Campbell: Makes sense. Makes sense. In regards to uncertainty, again, is there opportunity? Uncertainty
Dr Rebecca Homkes: can only be very clear about this. Uncertainty is the absolute best time to grow. And that passionately and truly, and also empirically, is uncertainty is the best time to grow a business for many reasons, but I want to share the most powerful one. It’s the best time to grow a business because it’s the best time to learn. When [00:09:00] you’re facing uncertainty, your customers or consumers, are actually much more clear about what they value and what they’re willing to pay for and what they’re not.
Your partners and suppliers are much more honest about what they need from you. Your employees, if you’ve got a team or a small team are much more honest about what they want from you as an employer. In frothy markets, it’s actually more difficult to learn. Which feels like a weird paradox, but in frothy markets, people are willing to try lots of things, right?
We’re not as disciplined. We’re not as nuanced and on certain markets or industries or times, it’s actually the best time to learn because those feedback loops, those kind of cycles of learning and taking an insights are the closest, so that’s why it’s the best time to grow. And another reason it’s a great time to grow is the notion of what strategy and growth is.
Hasn’t changed. And I really ask leaders of companies or teams to just pause once in a while and acknowledge that we sometimes get a bit hyperbolic about everything’s different and everything’s changed. No new paradigm shift. We’ve heard it [00:10:00] all before, right? Is what we’re trying to do with strategy is the same thing.
It’s always been. And that’s value creation. And we think about growing your business in 2025, we’re trying to create value. And all value creation is driving the biggest gap possible between two things. Now, on one hand, your customers are consumers willingness to pay your products, services, and solutions.
And the other hand, your total cost of getting it to them. So anchor back, at the beginning of this year to, we are trying to lead breakthrough growth. We’re going to do that by creating value and value creation, driving the biggest gap possible doing our consumers willingness to pay for our products.
Services and solutions and our total cost of getting it to them. And if you just visualize those two kind of levers are levers of value creation, moving apart, that’s your anchor. And that hasn’t changed. And there’s power in the consistency, right? Of the definition of growth strategy, despite all of the changes around us.
Mhm.
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Mhm.
Kunle Campbell: One of the underlining themes I picked up from uncertainty [00:14:00] is truth. So you spoke to the fact that your suppliers, your partners, your team will be essentially more truthful because the stakes are really high in an uncertain environment. People become, they just have to reveal, what they are.
That’s in a. In a best case scenario in when things are perfect, in economics, what’s it called a perfect market or, but. My question is more around, how do you create that environment of truth as that baseline in an uncertain period?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: An environment or where the truth comes from these environments of learning, right?
And we’ve made learning a bit cliche, but I want to pause on that. And it is the actual number one differentiator.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Now, if we look at what the number one differentiator is of these organizations who consistently thrive, not just survive, not just constantly reset [00:15:00] their strategies, but the organizations that consistently thrive, the number one differentiator is learning velocity.
And I always say, just remember four words for me. Learn faster, grow faster organizations that learn faster or organizations that grow faster. But this is actually a difficult capability to build and you got to mean it right. You can’t claim your learning organization because that sounds great in town halls, right?
You got to really mean it, which means building this culture of trust and learning. And it starts with your own team. If you haven’t built this culture of trust and learning with the team, it’s not going to expand to your customer suppliers and partners. And when we see this in power and action it’s quite powerful, right?
Some of my favorite examples are, post COVID when companies open back up and there are some great cases I wrote about in the book of these fabulous entrepreneurs. And one of my favorites was, one of the largest brands of amusement parks and zoos in Scandinavia. And when they open back up with 20 percent capacity restrictions, [00:16:00] post COVID.
Lots of limitations on what they could do. They had to do in less than two weeks, but they normally had two months to do, open for the season. And so they told their customers, Hey, we’re going to make mistakes. Tell us what’s working. What’s not, but Hey we’re going to mess a lot of stuff up.
And because they told their customers, they were going to make some mistakes. Their employees felt more comfortable to try new things that they’d never tried before, and all the way down to fraud. Frontline employees. They were trying and experimenting and learning, and they got such great feedback for customers.
Cause they did things that summer that they’d probably been talking about for a decade, right? But they had now finally, because of this culture of trust, right? We told the customers we’re going to make some mistakes. So feel free to try. It empowered all the employees up and down the organization to try some things.
It’s incredibly powerful, but I’m going to repeat, you got to mean it.
Kunle Campbell: So it’s, it’s really that culture I like your point around the organizations that, that, that learn faster, grow faster. That is really important [00:17:00] because our audience are typically e commerce operators and in, in our context, there’s a lot going on. So if we flashback into 2024,
there, there was just recovering inflation. Yes this past year in 2024 with share of wallets. So the bigger companies like the Amazons, the targets have been very aggressive in share of wallets, leaving just less share of wallet for other retailers, particularly on the smaller end, which is also on that inflation umbrella, because they’re all pressured.
And then we had artificial intelligence and some organizations have significantly downsized, I forget the name of the company, but there was this company that essentially they stripped down the head counts in customer experience and replaced it with AI agents, and by about 80%, that’s huge number.
So just reflecting. Reflecting on all of that [00:18:00] as an e commerce operator, how do you learn fast, adapt really fast? How do you listen to the exogenous more what is going on outside? And how do you also lean inwards? And merge both worlds together to say, okay, this is what I’m learning.
And these are the steps to be a bit more agile in decision making and essentially in, in action.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, a great question. And, e commerce leaders are in such a privileged position. I know it doesn’t seem that way. Sound like that sometimes, but colleagues and other organizations or businesses are always saying to me, I could learn faster, Rebecca, if I was just working in a digital business model, I was doing digital operating models and we see it.
You can learn in any environment, right? Physical or digital, et cetera, but really lean in and embrace that you are in this active learning environment. And one of the first things to do is identify. Where do I need to learn? And I know that sounds [00:19:00] silly, right? But think about your top growth priorities.
Like kind of what are those couple of ways that our hypothesis says are the best ways to grow. And we often, as soon as we set a growth priority, we put metrics against it. What are the metrics we’re going to measure my KPIs or my OKRs and we give them milestones they need to hit, but. These high growth, kind of these thrive organizations, they take this extra step and they say, what do we need to learn?
What are those couple critical learning moments within this priority that if we unlocked this insight, we could dramatically accelerate growth and part of execution is then not just hitting the milestone. But really closing some of those learning loops and open them back again. And the world of AI is a great testing ground from that.
And yes, there’s organizations making great strides in AI. There’s organizations that are doing a lot with AI, but not actually bringing that learning loop in, it’s going to be very. Difficult. It is very difficult to create real competitive advantage or a differentiation in a world of AI. Let’s just be honest, algorithms are [00:20:00] commoditized.
Compute is expensive, but if you’ve got the money, you can pay for it. We’re all basically training on the same training sets and LLMs that are open and publicly available just for different price points, there are so few ways to build competitive advantage in a world of AI, you’ve actually got two options, right?
One is your own proprietary data. And then the second is your learning velocity, how quickly you lip these learning loops around how you’re using it. So learning has always mattered, but it’s never going to matter more than it does in 2025 going forward because anyone resting on their laurels of I’ve got a great loyal customer base or if my bigger companies, Hey, we’ve got the biggest budget.
We’ve got the best AI models. All of that is being quickly commoditized. It’s very difficult to build moats around customer advantage. Learning is the absolute tool, but it’s a capability that you’ve got to build.
Kunle Campbell: The question really lies in where do you, speaking of AI where do you focus the learning on I’ll [00:21:00] give you an analogy with the AI there is an opportunity.
For brands, particularly consumer brands to actually humanize themselves a lot more than they used to. And that in of itself is a differentiator and refreshing in the consumer’s eyes and the eyes of consumers. In the background you could still help AI enable. That humanization but the question is that there are also other areas to learn from inventory management.
So in 2025, where do you think, and I know this is quite nuanced, a question. What, how is there any model, any mental model to decide or prioritize? Where to focus your learning on to give you that competitive edge.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah when it comes to AI here’s the very basic approach that I take is first, we need to pause [00:22:00] about one very important thing is we’re talking about a growth strategy.
There’s no such thing as an AI strategy, no such thing. So I never want to see a slide deck or a manual or a presentation on our AI strategy. It does not exist, right? AI does not replace value creation. AI’s role is to enable support and accelerate how your business creates value. If you have questions on how you create value, AI will not help you in 2025.
And I think sometimes, especially as entrepreneurs we want to just grab on to the newest. thing, whether it was blockchain or crypto or AI, and we can name all the trends that you and I have seen over the past couple of decades, value creation does not get replaced by any of these. So we’ve got to start there.
Now do the hard work, in your strategy reset and determine how you create value. Now once you’ve done that then use those two value creation levers, right? To AI. And again, I know it sounds simplistic, but stay with me. This is what works. We [00:23:00] say, okay. We can use, our value creation is increasing customer or consumer willingness to pay.
It’s also about dramatically reducing our costs. Okay. What can we do to dramatically increase consumer willingness to pay personalization? As you’ve mentioned, customization, right? Going from there’s a real power. What I’m loving. I’m seeing some brands doing right now is moving from persona based to true personalization, and we used to call it.
Personalization, but it was really, we gave you 15 personas and we assigned you to one of them, right? We can actually do personalization and customization at scale, not just about email traffic, but truly understanding your behavior. So as a team brainstorm, the 10 to 15 things you can do to move the needle up.
Then brainstorm the 10 to 15 things you can do to move the needle down. What tasks can you automate, right? Where can you bring more efficiency in if you’re not using these tools to accelerate coding and et cetera. Once you’ve got those. There’s two traps to fall into the first trap is just do a bunch of quick wins, the personal productivity stuff where we’re going to start summarizing [00:24:00] meeting notes with it.
Fine. You’re not moving the needle. The other trap is, an organization that have boards fall into this is don’t do any little stuff. Just do stuff that really moves the needle. Both of those are traps because if you just do quick wins, you’re going to be stuck in this endless cycle of personal productivity.
If you just work on midterm stuff, you’re going to get through 25 and someone, one of your investors or board members or senior team members going to be, what are we doing? We just spent 11 months working on AI and nothing’s happened. So I like to bucket, those brainstorm initiatives, needle up or needle down into three buckets.
Ready? You got your quick wins. You’re just do it. Let’s get going. You’ve got your. Conventional and midterm it’s let’s not kid ourselves. We’re the only ones doing this. Our competitors probably are too, but it’s going to help. And then your moon shots, what are those lower probability of working, but higher impact if they do.
And then I like to parallel path, which means do at the same time, all three of those things, one or two needle up and needle down of my quick wins, my midterms and the moon shots and throw some moon [00:25:00] shots in there. Because more than often than not. When companies brainstorm moonshots, they’re actually very practical, implementable.
They just haven’t really allowed themselves to embrace this notion before. So that’s how I approach bringing together this worlds of growth strategy and AI.
Kunle Campbell: Yeah, so those are the key, so the theme here is value creation points. Yes. Quick wins, midterms, and then the moon shoots. Okay. So there’s that balance across the board.
Exactly. That makes sense. Makes sense. Let’s dive into your book, Survivor is Set and Thrive. Why should we, okay. Why should we be in survival mode? . All of the time. It just seems counterintuitive. Everybody wants to thrive. Yeah. But it starts from survival. Is this an evolutionary path or do we always have to have that survival instinct?
Yeah. In us our running our businesses.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: No, I don’t want you stuck in survive. [00:26:00] That’s a real trap. You can get stuck in survive mode, but here’s what I’ve learned. Good survive is proactive. Survive the trap that we sometimes make is we swing. And what I, by swing, when markets are frothy, as we saw in 21 and 22 for a lot of markets, interest rates, low cash, free flowing consumers, trying everything we spend, we grow, we invest.
And then when things slow down, high inflation or high interest rates or cash is being pulled back, we go into recession proofing mode, right? And we have those recession workshops. Now, if you’re doing this with your business, small business to medium to large, you’re always swinging back and forth, which means you’re not building capability in either.
You’re not really a growth company. You’re also not really great at stabilizing. So you always have these basics in place. And if you’ve got the basics in place, here’s what happens when the market does throw a shock, it could be big macro shocks like COVID or Brexit or war, but also internal shocks.
Like you lose a major investor or you lose a major customer account. [00:27:00] Or what just happened to a lot of companies recently, Google or Amazon change an algorithm and all of a sudden 30 percent of your business goes right. That sends you into survive mode, but if you’ve got your basics in place, you have less to do than everyone else.
You do a pause. You review your, what I call the survive basics and the survive power moves. The basics are super easy to remember. They’re the four C’s cash. Cost, customers, communication, sit with your team and say, Hey, what’s our minimum cash flow? What’s our, maximum fixed cost percentage, what’s the customer indexing.
We want to be in any one customer. How are we going to keep clear communication lines? Once you’ve got those basics in place, when these shocks happen, you can move faster than everyone else. So no, this is not about being paranoid. This is not about running, too lean. This is about setting yourself up to survive.
I’ll say it again. Good survive is proactive. Survive.
Kunle Campbell: So it’s about keeping track of your cash, your costs, your customer sentiments and [00:28:00] communication all around.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yes. Think of it as like trigger points, right? We’ve set where these trigger points are.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: These no breach points. Think of almost like a dam or a seawall, right?
And when we get close to those, we need to pause, make sure we’re where we are and then we can go back to growth. Now when you’ve done those again, when there is a shock in the market, you have so much less to do. What happens for organizations is they lose discipline really fast. And as soon as they’ve moved beyond, what we’re calling survive mode, it could be a, a recession or kind of a down period for the company.
They go back into growth mode and they lose that discipline, which means they need to learn it all again the next time that this happens. And in everything in growth strategy, you want to slow down to speed up. You want to put this foundation in place. So when you’re executing that much faster than everybody else.
Kunle Campbell: So is this like a data tracking system that that almost gives you an alert, whether we’re red, amber or green, is that what you’re insinuating here? It
Dr Rebecca Homkes: depends on the size of the company in [00:29:00] the industry. Some companies just keep track of this in an Excel sheet, some, have it in a more kind of.
Sophisticated system that kind of gives them alerts and any of those work, right? The notion is you pre agree with your team, where these trigger points are. Survive. Remember, we don’t want to spend much time and survive. You want to have this, think of it as I built this foundation so that, and I can build a growth pathway, look, markets will always swing.
We can get into long run bull markets and we forget markets will always swing. Your business model doesn’t have to, if you put some of these proactive measures in place.
Kunle Campbell: Okay, so it’s a dashboard essentially with a trigger point. You’re tracking regardless of what the market, where the market is at you’re tracking these this, these points here and then moving to.
Kunle Campbell: Is there any other thing in the survive layer that we need to cover?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, before we can move on to reset, survive, you’ve got to do a little more than the basics. You’ve got to do some power moves [00:30:00] like repurposing or partnering, leaning onto your partners, accelerating learning velocity.
Often when there’s downturns for a company or a market, we stop learning. We’re so focused on operational metrics. We turn off the learning tab and we know that these are the best times to learn. Really leaning into employee engagement and making some of these tough decisions. Look, there’s nothing strategic about the survive basics.
If you want to move out of survive better and faster than others need to employ some of these additional power moves.
Kunle Campbell: And then the transition to to reset what does reset mean as a concept?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. Reset means change, right? And change is a big, scary word. We like to talk about how we’re embracing change and we’re leading change and we love change. Most of us don’t. Don’t right. We need to be very honest about that.
Most of us don’t love change. And I get asked this a lot. Leaders will say to me, we love the survive reset thrive process. We’d love to do it. [00:31:00] But could we just not use the word reset? Because I’m afraid that reset will scare my team or my board doesn’t want to think anything’s changing.
We almost try to stop it. Soften the word, but reset means change, but it doesn’t mean change everything.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: No, the reset process is sitting down with your team and going through six critical questions about what it takes to lead growth. And those questions are what’s going on and how’s it going to change and what a success.
So where are we going to play? How are we going to win? What could stop us? And what should we do? So go through these questions, reset your beliefs. Reset your right to win where you want to play in the market, what the finish line is for you at the end of this growth cycle, the challenges you have to address, and then what those new priorities might be, you can go through this and not change much from year to year.
You can go through this sometimes and change almost everything, right? And there is no right or wrong. The wrong is not pausing, revisiting these critical assumptions.
Kunle Campbell: Are these frameworks in the book?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yes. So the resets actually the [00:32:00] majority of the book, each of these reset questions forms one of the chapters of the book where I talk through how to ask the question, give you lots of different examples of companies from all sizes, from a couple million to several billion as they went through it and the actual frameworks and practices you can go through.
But again, the reset is the majority of the book because that’s the part most people skip. If you look at most conferences and Title and anything along those lines and articles, they’ll say, don’t just survive thrive. Thrive doesn’t happen just by surviving, right? Thrive happens because you’re willing and able and then resource this critical reset that you need to take.
Kunle Campbell: So just for me, I’m hearing you right. So from what I picked on you. You have alert systems, you have a very solid dashboard that tells you where you are, whether you’re slipping towards survival mode, or you’re on a growth phase, or you’re just coasting and then you, yeah, a reset it’s what’s the actions we’re taking [00:33:00] based on all of that data that we have to get to where we want to go in the future.
In this case, in 2025.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yes. So looking back at some of those assumptions you’ve made in the past, being prepared to update those assumptions and then make new choices on them and the basics of growth, who are our customers? What’s our value proposition? How are we going to reach them? And then what are the key priorities we need to win this year in order to meet those growth targets that we’ve set for ourselves?
Got
Kunle Campbell: it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. So from a change perspective let’s, let me throw in an analogy here with a, with an e commerce business that is, that has a target to, to essentially double it’s been stagnant for the last three years. It’s not necessarily grown. And. They essentially want to double it double the business, particularly the profit, the bottom line, which would mean increasing the subscriber maybe the subscriber [00:34:00] counts in the business by 40 percent in the next year.
How would you go about the change piece or the reset piece? Using the framework, if you’re speaking with the operators of this business.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, this feels like a pretty real example, and I’ve seen similar examples of this recently, and I’m sure you’re probably working with some as well.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: The 1st starting point is not what should we do? The temptation in a strategy workshop or session is to start with what should our goals be? And that’s the last question you should ask. Don’t even ask the question in the first couple of hours of the first day, you’re going to get the list wrong every single time you start with your beliefs, align as a team on our beliefs.
What are our critical beliefs around where the industry is going, where our customers going, what they value and about us and teams that don’t tend to align on choices. It’s often because they haven’t aligned on beliefs. First, your beliefs form the foundation of your growth strategy. Once you updated your beliefs.
Then you go to your right to win [00:35:00] or your competitive advantage. I don’t know what happened to this topic over the last couple of years, but we’ve lost all discipline on answering it. And everyone says the same thing. We’re customer centric, super engaged team, lots of experience, blah, blah, blah. Everyone is saying the exact same thing.
Truly. What’s your right to win? You’ve only got three options. You’ve got stuff as a company. Others don’t. You can do stuff as a company. Others can’t. Or you can build moats around your advantage. So moats are fences are this loyalty lock in and really challenge the team. What do we have that others don’t?
And what can we do that others can’t? And how can we build moats? And you’re going to find some gaps. And those gaps are going to be some insights about what you need to strengthen or buy and build over the next growth cycle. Then you’re going to visit your, where to play questions, and you’re going to switch the order.
And you’re going to start with right to win, then do where to play. And that’s who’s our ideal customer. The trap here is any customer who wants to buy our stuff as an ideal customer, Rebecca, like why spend time on this? [00:36:00] No. A company for everyone is a company for no one. Really Force yourself to answer who is our ideal customer and what’s our differentiated value proposition for them.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Only once you’ve done those three questions and you’ve got the insights, do you set the goal? What is success? And then the top priorities to get there. We’re in a world of template based strategy, this notion of growth, cacking and okay. Ours and rocks. We’re just asking everyone to fill in a template over an hour and call that a strategy.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. There’s nothing strategic about these templates. We need to bring the insights back to strategy. If you actually want to lead these breakthrough growth journeys or in our example, truly double growth over this year.
Kunle Campbell: That’s interesting. Super interesting. Let’s flesh out the beliefs and the foundation of growth because there’s belief and there’s matter of fact.
Yes. Which is truth, essentially data. So how do you want to flesh that out for an e commerce operator? Yeah.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. [00:37:00] Beliefs aren’t religious dogmas, right? Is, we are operating in a changing world, right? We have big tech players who are changing how they’re competing, right? The Amazons, the Googles, the Shopify is, we have a new administration in the U S and the UK.
We’re just talking a little bit more about the U S one at the beginning of 25, because so many unknowns are there, which is putting regulation of some of the tech players into a different set of questions. We have ranging geopolitical tensions and you think I’m running an e commerce business. How does this affect me, Rebecca?
If you think inflation’s going down and tariffs come in with a little supply chain volatility. Guess what’s happening to your price levels again, no matter how small of a business you are. So we need to forego the notion that we are planning strategy in a certain time. We are making strategy in a very uncertain time.
So you got a line on beliefs. Now, what are some of our critical beliefs on a macro and political front, but also industry specific? And it’s going to feel uncomfortable sometimes articulating a belief because you’re going to have to write down. I [00:38:00] call it essentially a belief is essentially a memo to yourself.
You’re writing a memo to yourself in 2026, how your 2025 self saw the world. But here’s the thing we’re making choices based on our beliefs. They’re just implicit growth strategies about saying, let’s, as a team, voice these things out loud, what’s really going on so we can make the right choices on them.
And here’s why we do it. Once you’ve got your beliefs. We’re doing something called parallel pathing. So parallel pathing means that I’m doing two things at once rather than in a sequence. So I’m actively testing my beliefs while I’m executing my priorities. And here’s why I’m going to get feedback or learning on whether or not my beliefs are valid.
way before I get feedback on learning and whether or not my priorities are executing well, I’m going to bring that learning in and constantly adjust and adapt. And the beliefs can be anything from where public spending is going to levels of inflation, to consumer patterns, to Shenzhen’s shopping [00:39:00] behaviors, whatever matters for your industry.
Take the time to align on some of these critical beliefs.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Okay. Okay. So my takeaway from there is believes what’s happening externally. in the industry, macroeconomically, what is going on here? They would tend to be negative or positive. It’s just you’re trying to reflect the situation, the external situation.
And then step two, the right to win is in the midst of all of that. Yes. What’s our most, what’s our competitive advantage? Let’s really dig inwards to see how we’re going to navigate this external environment where we’re in.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Exactly. Your competitive advantage in that world, in the world you believe will happen.
We often talk about our competitive advantage in the past world, right? But in the world that we’re operating in, we need to talk about our right to win going forward, right? Not just the one we historically built our business on.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. So in like for most e commerce businesses [00:40:00] that are reliant on say a South an Asian or Far East supply chain there’s a tariff as you mentioned with the new, administration which could, take away.
So with the interest rate gains of gold, which, which would probably have used to reduce prices. My mean. Increased prices delayed shipments. So it’s okay, what do we do? And then step three, which is where do we play you leaned very much into ICP development, who’s our ideal customers where do we play?
Does that also mean like the marketplaces we operate in, are we doing retail? Are we, is it. The, is it very customer specific or is it also markets oriented? So in the midst of all of this where are we going to, are we finding a purple ocean or blue ocean? Do you want to flesh?
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah is the who, what, how, but who is markets, sub industries and customers, depending on the size of your business and where you’re looking to grow [00:41:00] into. And. Often, if you do the beliefs exercise right, it should open new market possibilities. I like to say teams, if you took this belief to the extreme, what would we be doing?
Ignore your existing business model for a bit. If we really took this belief, where would we be competing? What markets? And it’s really a fun brain exercise because you’re not going to do all of the things, right? But then you say, If we really took this belief, we should be competing, pan European rather than just in one country, or we should be opening really leaning into the B2B marketplace, not just the B2C and I’m using, of course, generic examples, but having this notion of your who, what, how is again, market sub industry.
And customer. And if you’re going to go through, at the time of the reset, don’t just do a book report I always called and just basically write down what you’re doing today. The reset is about putting options on the table again, and then we’ll prioritize at the end into what we’re actually going to do.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Okay. Okay. And then [00:42:00] with all of that, you finally set your 2025 goals. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Okay.
Kunle Campbell: The final part of of your book is Thrive. So the name of the book for just to reiterate again, it’s called Survive, Reset, Thrive leading breakthrough growth strategy.
How would you define Thrive? Which is the fun part, I think.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, Thrive is the fun part. And. What’s funny is when this was an article and also when it was a book, entrepreneurs will say, can you just send me that chapter, Rebecca, that’s the part that I really want to understand more about.
And I always used to joke and I joked with the publisher, they wouldn’t let me do it. But what I wanted the publisher to do was only sell the first nine chapters. And once you promise that you’ve read those, you could get the final ones about what it takes to thrive is because it’s not a given, right?
You have to earn it and it’s hard, but it’s a very simple recipe. Okay. Thrive companies bring three things [00:43:00] together, right? A strong balance sheet, which you bring through from the survive phase, strategic insights, which you brought from the reset phase, and then you execute with agility and learning. And that’s the recipe.
And it’s not two out of three is good enough. You need all three. Strong balance sheet, strategic insights, and then execute with agility and learning. And thrive is more than what I call the kind of the basic cliche stuff. Yes, you need a great team and a great culture and a solid strategy, but we know that, right?
It’s about these extra things that really comes down to these notions of acting on beliefs. Learning velocity, this agility to make good decisions quickly aligned with strategy, the shared context about what matters and why it matters and then trust, and we spent a lot of time on trust in this conversation.
And for a good reason, it is one of those differentiators of what it takes to be this thrive organization is you’ve got this reliability across this network of commitments that go up. Down and across the organization. So it can only call it blast. And if you wanna [00:44:00] be one of these breakthrough growth companies, I always envision this rocket blasting into the air.
And again, blast stands for beliefs, learning velocity, agility, shared context and trust.
Kunle Campbell: Makes sense. Makes sense. Okay. Wrapping up in 2025, do you have any final words of advice? . e commerce operators, just looking to thrive and missed the volatility that’s in front of us.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, many, let’s keep it simple. It’s a fascinating, it’s a fun industry. It’s going to change so much. We’re going to be talking in six months. By the time we get to the summer, we’re going to wonder what the hell are we thinking? At the beginning of the year, when we thought that these things were going to be the biggest trends, yes. Take a breath. I always say is take a breath. Don’t get caught up in the frantic nature of everything’s changing. Everything’s different. Take a breath. [00:45:00] Strategy matters more than ever. It’s tempting in a world that’s changing a lot to say, let’s just not do strategy. No, let’s just be operationally focused.
Like why have a strategy if it’s going to change? Gross strategy and clarity of how you create value matters more than ever. Slow down to speed up, take the time to build out some of these insights that will allow you to move faster than others. And I get this a lot. Entrepreneurs will say, we’re going to skip strategy this year because we want to be more agile.
And I always smile very big and say, love the passion, but the definition of agility. Is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy, right? Agility without strategy has a different name. We call that chaos, right? Agility necessitates a clear growth strategy. So you’re going to take a breath for me.
You’re going to lean into a value creating strategy. And then the third is breakthrough growth is hard. And I need to say that, and that’s some real big feedback I got from the first draft of the book is colleagues. And my editor [00:46:00] said, don’t say it’s hard. People don’t like things that are hard. You say this is hard a couple of times.
We want you to change that language. And I started doing that then realized, but that’s no longer the truth, right? Coming back to truth. This stuff is really hard. But then I had this really powerful insight was hard is great. Transcribed Because when you do the hard stuff well, that’s differentiation. So don’t push back when something feels hard.
I want to repeat, when we can do the hard things well as a team, that’s what leads to differentiation.
Kunle Campbell: When we can do the hard things well, it leads to differentiation, yeah, and it buys you time. It buys you a lot of time. Yes. Yeah.
Kunle Campbell: Rebecca, it’s, I was really looking forward to this conversation and yeah it’s it was well beyond my expectations.
It went really well, so I appreciate it for those people who want to find out more about the book. It’s Survive, Reset, Thrive, Leading Breakthrough Growth [00:47:00] Strategy in Volatile Times. You actually have a website for the book, which is yourname. com. Rebecca Holmes. Slash book, it’s available on all platforms, Amazon, Walmart, Barnes and Nobles, Waterstones, even in the UK.
It’s available, so please get a copy. It was very timely having you on at the start of the year. I really appreciate it. I’m sure operators listening to this episode have, have lots to take away. I’m going to put a very detailed I’m going to put a very detailed outline in the show notes.
So guys, please check the show notes out of this book. There’s lots of insights, when Rebecca gave to us. Thank you very much. Rebecca.
Dr Rebecca Homkes: No, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and best of luck in 2025 to all of your listeners.
Kunle Campbell: Thank you. Same. Thank you.
So thank you for tuning into this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast. I hope this conversation with doctor Homkes. I’m Chris gave you clarity and [00:48:00] confidence as you plan 2025. Frameworks and insights are just theories. They’re actionable tools you can use to make smarter decisions navigates on certainty and quick breakthrough growth in your business. So if you found value in this episode, Please subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.
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