The search for growth often comes down to three choices: buy, build, or partner. Acquisitions traditionally offered CEOs a faster path to scale, while partnerships offered the ability to unlock opportunities that were difficult to pursue alone. Now, AI is shifting the build playing field: lowering experimentation costs, quickening build cycles, and letting AI-native businesses be designed from the outset.
That shift has expanded the range of new ventures that can be built. And, accelerated how quickly they can scale. Successful ventures now reach $10 million in revenue within 31 months on average, compared to a previous average of 38 months and they break even with 40% less capital than before.
But there is a catch. The more successful a venture becomes the harder it is to protect.
The systems that power the core business — governance, teams, processes and controls — can get in the way of the new venture scaling. Which is why CEOs need to be ready to step in.
Choose where to play and how far to go
Before the CEO can protect the scaling asset, they first need to identify that scalable idea. Often the strongest ideas sit at the intersection of a growing market, a valuable customer problem, and an area where the company can build a distinct, sustainable advantage.
But, choosing where to play also means deciding how far to go. How close should the venture sit to the core? Should it pursue the home market or somewhere new? What happens if it starts competing for the same customers – or revenue – as the business paying today’s bills? Or can the new venture fuel growth on top of existing revenue?
Honeywell shows what can happen when a company builds around its distinctive advantages. It created Honeywell Connected Enterprise to turn decades of industrial expertise into recurring software revenues. By 2023, the business had grown to around $1.5 billion in annual sales and is growing around 3x faster than Honeywell overall.
Make several bets and back the scaling venture
Successes inevitably sit alongside failures. Meaning, CEOs need to give teams room to experiment and learn when ideas fall short, without continuing to fund ventures that aren’t working.
AI is changing the pace of that equation. Faster, cheaper experimentation means companies can place more, smaller bets, then concentrate capital and talent behind those showing real traction. It’s a proven formula. Companies launching three or more ventures simultaneously – the portfolio approach – can achieve up to 30% higher revenue growth than those making a single bet.
The Saudi Telecom Company Group shows what a portfolio approach can deliver. It has consistently built successful ventures across multiple domains including payments, internet of things, cyber security, data centers and cloud infrastructure. It does this by combining incubation, partnerships and venture investing, and its subsidiaries are now growing 10 to 15 times faster than the core business.
Decide with evidence, not vanity metrics
One of the reasons ventures fail, is that leadership start seeing project reporting rather than evidence that the business is working. That’s crucial – a venture can hit every project milestone yet still fail to become a good business.
The signals that matter are customer and commercial facts. Are customers using the product? Coming back? Willing to pay? Are the economics improving?
It’s important that funding is given a similar discipline: short review cycles and clear thresholds for further funding can help CEOs act on evidence. Much like a venture capitalist, they can call a halt when the evidence says a venture isn’t working and move capital towards opportunities demonstrating the strongest traction.
Stop the venture from being prematurely corporatized
Funding a new venture inside a corporate comes with advantages independent start-ups spend years trying to establish: customers, capital, data, expertise, distribution, and an established brand. The challenge is accessing them without inheriting the constraints that come with them.
BCP found that balance when it launched Yape, a mobile wallet. It was staffed with product development, engineering, and design talent rather than traditional bankers. That allowed Yape to operate differently while drawing on BCP’s strengths. It has since become a super app scaled to more than 18 million users.
But, that balance can be hard to maintain as a venture succeeds. More parts of the organization get involved, governance expands, and the venture can gradually inherit the processes it was initially protected from.
These are moments when CEO involvement can make all the difference: removing internal barriers, opening doors to partners, adding funding as growth takes off, or protecting a promising venture from being pulled prematurely into the core. It works too — where CEOs personally prioritize venture building, new businesses can contribute nearly 20% of enterprise-wide revenue within five years.
CEOs cannot – and should not – make every decision. But staying close enough to the facts to know when to step in, and doing the things only they can do, may be what turns business building into a repeatable source of growth.
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