New Zealand businesses are facing the toughest environment in more than a decade. Productivity growth has slowed to a crawl — just 0.2% a year over the past ten years compared with 1.4% in the two decades before that. At the same time, competition is sharper, costs are rising, and customers are more selective.
BNZ’s Growth Levers Insight Report identifies ten areas that businesses can use to drive growth. Each one is important — but the real gains come when they’re pulled together:
- Vision & goals
- Strategy & business model
- Funding & capital
- Innovation
- Market understanding
- Leadership
- Operational efficiency
- People & culture
- Customer focus
- Professional advisors
The survey of almost 1,000 New Zealand businesses showed a consistent pattern:
- Most rely on a handful of levers — customer focus, operational efficiency, and people & culture.
- These deliver solid results, but mostly incremental gains.
- The levers that unlock step-change growth — strategy, innovation, funding, and advisors — are used less often.
BNZ studied six high-performing companies. The standouts weren’t just efficient — they deliberately pulled more of the ten levers.
- Spring Sheep Dairy – Built its growth by combining strong market insight with bold innovation, carving out a global niche in sheep milk nutrition.
- Tracksuit – Started with customer validation, building tools customers wanted and then scaling quickly through strategy and capital support.
- Phoenix Recycling – Anchored its expansion around a clear vision and sustainability goals, which shaped culture, operations, and customer trust.
If you want resilient, sustainable growth, you need to expand your toolkit. Fundamentals like customer focus and efficiency are the baseline. The next level comes from:
- Sharpening your strategy – clarity on where you play and how you win.
- Planning for capital – the right mix of equity, debt, and timing.
- Embedding innovation – product, process, and business model improvements.
- Deepening market understanding – staying close to customer shifts and competitor trends.
- Leaning on advisors – outside perspective to spot blind spots and create accountability.
The takeaway is simple: growth isn’tjust about working harder on today’s levers — it’s about pulling the right combination to unlock tomorrow.
At PlanA Consulting, we see this with SMB owners every day. The businesses that thrive are those that deliberately stretch beyond what’s comfortable and invest in the levers that create lasting, profitable growth.
