Strategic Growth Frameworks for SMEs: How Market Leaders Outperform Their Competitors
Hi, I’m Aby
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How SMEs Can Beat the Market: The Growth Framework Behind 7‑8‑9‑10 Figure Businesses
Introduction
This week we begin a new growth newsletter series following on from our Agentic AI series, which you can read here In this series, we will explore the strategic levers that help SME business owners and entrepreneurs grow their companies into strong, expanding businesses with real competitive advantage.
Growth is the holy grail for any business owner or leader with serious intent. Whether an SME or a larger enterprise, the goal is the same: grow the business. Companies that do not prioritise growth risk remaining small, failing, or being overtaken by competitors. Yet SMEs often lack the resources required for sustained growth and can struggle to scale effectively 3 4. This growth series is designed to help SMEs acquire and build practical growth strategies they can apply immediately.
This week’s insights come from the McKinsey article Inspired for Business Growth: How Five Companies Beat the Market (February 2026). The article examines how a select group of companies achieved superior growth and profitability between 2019 and 2024—a period defined by the COVID‑19 pandemic, high inflation, and labour shortages. Despite these challenges, these companies consistently outperformed their competitors.
McKinsey highlights that market‑beating growth is not luck but the result of three leadership characteristics and strategic behaviours: a consistent commitment to funding growth, a diversified portfolio of growth engines, and execution powered by digital and analytics. Their strategies include differentiating the portfolio, establishing a virtuous cycle, and building a culture of innovation. Together, these mindsets and behaviours enabled these companies to beat the market repeatedly.
Applying the McKinsey Market Beaters framework to SMEs requires a shift in scale, but the core principles remain highly relevant. While SMEs may not have the capital of large corporations, they often possess something more valuable: agility. This blueprint will explore how SMEs can adapt the three pillars to beat their local or niche markets.
This week’s FLIGHT 78910 SME case study brings this to life. We feature the founders of Ultra Violette, Ava Chandler‑Matthews and Bec Jefferd, who generated $400k in their first six months. Despite being a small and medium‑sized business, they outpaced the crowded sunscreen market by applying the same three pillars McKinsey identified in global giants.
The SME Growth Advantage: Applying Proven Market‑Beater Principles to Scale with Confidence
This week’s blueprint gives SMEs practical strategic levers for how to think about growth and how to execute it. Small and Medium‑Sized Enterprises often struggle to scale because they don’t have the large budgets or deep resources of major corporations.
However, the McKinsey framework—Commitment, Portfolio Diversification, and Digital Execution—is actually more powerful for SMEs precisely because they are more agile. SMEs can move faster, make decisions quicker, and adapt these growth pillars with far less friction than large organisations.
The SME Growth Blueprint: Three Proven Levers Used by Market‑Beating Companies
1. Consistent Funding Commitment — The All‑In Mindset
The Framework: Outperformers don’t stop investing during slow months.
Application for SMEs: Avoid the stop–start trap. Many SMEs cut marketing or sales efforts the moment a recession hits or a major client leaves. To beat the market, an SME must maintain a consistent baseline of investment in customer acquisition and brand building—even when cash flow is tight. This is how you gain market share while competitors retreat.
2. Diversified Growth Engines — The Core & More Strategy
SMEs often get stuck doing one thing, but the McKinsey framework encourages looking for adjacencies.
The Framework: Balance the core business with new frontiers.
Application for SMEs: If you run a plumbing business (Core), don’t just wait for pipes to break. Expand into maintenance subscriptions (Adjacency) or smart‑home leak‑detection sensors (New Frontier). By having three small engines instead of one big one, the SME becomes more resilient to market shifts and less dependent on a single revenue stream.
3 The Digital Edge — Speed as a Superpower
SMEs often rely on gut feeling, but this framework encourages using data to act with precision. Digital Execution and Analytics become the SME’s precision tool.
The Framework: Use Growth SPA — Speed, Precision, Agility.
Application for SMEs: You don’t need a large data department. Simple tools like a CRM or Google Analytics can help you identify your Value Pockets.
Example: A retail SME might discover that 80% of its profit comes from 20% of its customers. Instead of broad advertising, digital tools allow the business to target those specific high‑value profiles. This makes a small budget perform like a large one.
Flight 78910™ SME Spotlight: Ultra Violette
WATCH Video Feature: They Made $400K In 6 Mths Selling Sunscreen | Ava Chandler-Matthews & Bec Jefferd
The co‑founders of Ultra Violette, Ava Chandler‑Matthews and Bec Jefferd, took time to plan their business on paper, carefully considering the role branding would play as a key strategic lever in their growth. After this planning phase, it took almost two years to bring the product to market — but within their first six months, they generated $400k in sales.
Their story is a perfect case study for the McKinsey Market Beaters framework discussed in this newsletter. Despite being an SME, they outpaced the crowded sunscreen market by applying the same three pillars McKinsey identified in global giants
SME Takeaways
Highlights for SME Business Owners
1. Consistent Commitment to Funding Growth
McKinsey’s “Market Beaters” fund growth decisively, even in uncertain times. Ultra Violette didn’t simply test a product—they invested with conviction to ensure it became a category‑defining offering.
The High‑Stakes Bet: Ava and Bec famously re‑mortgaged their homes and invested $200,000 of their own money to fund initial development. This wasn’t a “wait and see” approach; it was high‑conviction funding aligned with long‑term growth.
The Uncompromised Product: Sunscreen is notoriously expensive to develop due to strict regulation. Instead of cutting corners to save cash, they spent two and a half years and tested more than 100 samples to perfect the formulation. This deliberate “over‑investment” in product quality before launch is exactly what McKinsey describes as funding growth engines.
2.Diversified Portfolio — The Skinscreen Adjacency
The framework highlights the importance of moving into adjacencies. Ultra Violette didn’t just sell sunscreen; they created an entirely new category: Skinscreen.
SME Key Takeaway:
- Bridging the Gap: They identified a space between prestige skincare and mass‑market sunscreen. By combining active skincare ingredients (like Vitamin C and Hyaluronic Acid) with SPF, they created a “portfolio” inside a single bottle.
- Segment Expansion: They didn’t stop at one face product. They quickly expanded into body products, lip balms, and multiple finishes (mattifying vs. hydrating), ensuring they owned the entire “sun protection” shelf—not just one product slot.
3. Leveraging the Digital Edge for Speed
McKinsey notes that outperformers use technology to move faster than the market. Ultra Violette applied this by adopting a digital‑first, DTC (Direct‑to‑Consumer) model, allowing them to bypass traditional retail hurdles and accelerate growth.
SME Key Takeaway:
- Agile Feedback Loops: By launching online first, they gained immediate data on customer behaviour. This allowed them to adjust marketing, messaging, and inventory in real time—while traditional brands would have waited months for retail reports.
- Social‑First Speed: They built a community of “keen young customers” through social media before ever appearing on a physical shelf. This digital momentum created such strong demand that they sold out of six months of stock in just half a day.
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Strategic Takeaway:
How This Framework Specifically Helps SME Growth
- Overcomes the Growth Plateau: Most SMEs eventually hit a ceiling where the founder can no longer manage everything. This framework provides a roadmap for shifting from founder‑led sales to a system‑led, multi‑engine portfolio.
- Reduces Risk: By diversifying growth engines, an SME is less vulnerable if its primary product slows down, becomes obsolete, or faces a new competitor in the local market.
- Improves Efficiency: SMEs have no room for waste. The precision element of the digital framework ensures every growth dollar is tracked, measured, and optimised—avoiding the “spray and pray” approach to marketing.
- Attracts Talent and Investment: A small business that can demonstrate a diversified portfolio and data‑driven decision‑making becomes far more attractive to banks, lenders, and high‑quality talent looking to join a winning team.
The Conviction Factor
The case study underscores the power of conviction. Many people told Ava and Bec that the sunscreen market was too crowded and dominated by global giants. They ignored the predictions of failure and backed their own belief—mirroring the conviction shown by the top five companies in the McKinsey report.
They didn’t beat the market because they had more money; they beat it because they concentrated their resources on a superior product and used digital speed to scale before incumbents could react.
Conclusion
For any SME business owner or entrepreneur who doesn’t just want to start a small company but wants to grow it into a much larger one, understanding how growth actually happens must sit at the centre of strategic thinking. This week’s newsletter offers insight into what SMEs can do to build a strong, growing business with sustainable competitive advantage.
Once scale differences are accounted for, the principles from this week’s McKinsey article remain the same for both SMEs and large enterprises. A lack of attention to growth—whether through an unclear mindset, limited understanding of growth mechanics, or a passive attitude toward execution—creates predictable problems: cash‑flow strain, revenue stagnation, profit erosion, funding challenges, and ultimately business failure at any stage. A business that stays stuck in survival mode rarely progresses to the next stage of growth 3..
This week’s blueprint highlights the strategic levers that help SMEs accelerate growth opportunities and build competitive advantage, just as the market beaters in the McKinsey article did.
The FLIGHT 78910 SME case study reinforces this. Two founders used commitment to funding growth, portfolio diversification, and digital execution to build a brand that challenged a major CPG category (skincare/sunscreen), raised $15 million in investment, and expanded into 28+ countries. Their journey demonstrates how SMEs can grow when mindset and execution align.
Other founders in the FLIGHT 78910 series show the same pattern.
- Peach & Lily prioritised growth through customer acquisition and retention, ensuring repeat sales sustained the business.
- Farmgirl Flowers used disciplined cash‑flow management as a strategic tool for controlled expansion.
- AirAsia’s founder viewed growth and scale as competitive weapons.
- David Fogarty leveraged adjacency diversification to capitalise on trends and scale rapidly.
Across these examples, growth wasn’t the result of predicting the future—it was the result of conviction. While others waited for certainty or hoped growth would arrive, these business owners and leaders engineered it. They invested when uncertainty was highest and treated growth as a continuous process, not a one‑time plan. This is the same relentless focus seen across the weekly FLIGHT 78910 SME founders who built 7‑, 8‑, 9‑, and 10‑figure businesses.
SMEs and entrepreneurs looking to grow can also learn from B2B insights: benchmark growth against your market, place multiple growth bets, quantify share of wallet for every customer or prospect, measure annual revenue growth from acquisition, track annual margin expansion, and—where applicable—design sales compensation that rewards top performance 5
Across both the McKinsey article and our FLIGHT 78910 case studies, the message is consistent: SME business owners who want to grow must adopt a growth mindset and commit to growth in every business cycle. This is how strong, growing businesses with competitive advantage are built—ultimately leading to 7‑, 8‑, 9‑, and 10‑figure outcomes.
Just like this week’s hero image of an aircraft preparing for take off, the destination is set before the journey begins. The pilot knows the coordinates for LAS Airport before leaving the runway, even if weather or turbulence requires adjustments along the way. In the same way, an SME must decide: Do I want to build a small business, or grow it into something much larger? Whether the goal is £1M, £10M, £100M, or £1B in revenue, clarity of destination shapes the mindset required to navigate the stages of development and growth. The FLIGHT 78910 SME Netflix case study is a powerful example of this strategic discipline.
Next week, we continue our Growth Series with more insights on how SME business owners and entrepreneurs can build strong, growing businesses with sustainable competitive advantage—ultimately increasing valuation and unlocking 78910‑level outcomes.
If you’re an SME owner who feels overwhelmed about how to position your business strategically in this new landscape and want to unlock strategic visibility, reach out to me contact@the2015bgroup.com
References
- How SMEs Should Implement AI: The Strategic Mindset Behind a Winning Generative & Agentic AI Strategy – The2015B Group
- How growth leaders outperform by getting and staying ahead | McKinsey
- Growing pains: How to help small businesses scale | News | Warwick Business School
- The rise of MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) | McKinsey
- Seven tests for B2B growth | McKinsey
- Rebecca Jefferd and Ava Chandler-Matthews – National Finalist, EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Australia | EY – Australia
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About the Author
Aby Rufus
Business Investor Strategy Expert Entrepreneur with an MBA in Strategic Planning—offering billion-dollar strategic solutions for SMEs.
