Alessio Vinassa on How to Sustain a Competitive Advantage

I’m Alessio Vinassa. My answer to how to sustain a competitive advantage is to grow without sacrificing the ability to change. That means protecting decision speed, financial room and operational alternatives, even when cutting them would improve this quarter’s results. Resilience makes growth more durable, not merely more cautious.

When does short-term growth weaken long-term performance?

Short-term growth weakens long-term performance when better current results depend on removing the options a business will need later.

A company can improve its margin by concentrating purchasing with one supplier. It can increase utilisation by eliminating spare capacity. It can accelerate sales by accepting greater dependence on one customer or market.

None of these decisions is automatically wrong. The problem begins when the improvement is measured but the new dependency is not. A stronger quarterly result can conceal a weaker operating model.

I have experienced five financial collapses. In one business, seven-figure monthly revenue did not prevent an external shock from reversing much of our progress and halting operations for several weeks. Revenue demonstrated demand; it did not demonstrate resilience.

That distinction changes how I evaluate growth. I want to know not only what produced the result, but also what must remain unchanged for the result to continue.

Efficiency removes unnecessary cost. Fragility removes necessary alternatives. Leaders need to distinguish between them before approving a saving, not after discovering what the saving made impossible.

The useful question is not whether to optimise. It is what the optimisation assumes about tomorrow. If the answer requires uninterrupted funding, stable regulation and permanent supplier availability, the business may be borrowing performance from its future.

How to sustain a competitive advantage through resilience

Resilience sustains competitive advantage by preserving the ability to serve customers, redirect resources and pursue opportunities when conditions change.

A competitor can copy a price, recruit a specialist or purchase similar software. It cannot instantly reproduce an organisation’s accumulated judgment, tested operating alternatives and ability to make coordinated decisions under pressure.

These capabilities develop together. Better visibility helps a team recognise a change earlier. Clear decision rights let it respond without waiting for every issue to reach the founder. Operational alternatives make that response possible.

This is why I describe resilience as a design principle, not an afterthought. Its value comes from the way the business operates, not from a document stored for emergencies.

Consider two hypothetical companies facing the same disruption. Both have strong products, but one must spend its available cash restoring basic operations while the other can redirect capacity toward customers whose needs have changed.

The second company has more than protection against losses. It has the freedom to compete while the first is constrained. That freedom can support customer retention, selective hiring and investment when others are forced to retreat.

There is no guarantee of outperformance. Resilient businesses still make mistakes and face losses. The advantage is that one setback is less likely to eliminate their ability to make the next useful move.

The durable advantage is not avoiding every shock. It is retaining the capacity to act after one.

Where should leaders invest without sacrificing discipline?

Leaders should fund resilience where a specific dependency could interrupt value creation or force an expensive decision.

I use three priorities: visibility, optionality and responsiveness. Together, they make resilience an investment discipline rather than a general request for more resources.

1. Visibility: Can we detect a material change early enough to respond? Monitor cash collection, customer concentration and critical operating dependencies, not only booked revenue.
2. Optionality: Do we have a credible alternative? A second supplier, transferable data or a different route to market matters only if it can actually be used.
3. Responsiveness: Who can act, within which limits, and on what evidence? A contingency plan without decision authority is a delayed conversation.

These priorities do not justify duplicating everything. Redundancy has a cost, and excessive buffers can protect inefficient operations from necessary scrutiny.

Take a hypothetical supplier decision. The lowest quote may still be the right choice if switching is easy and disruption is tolerable. If replacement requires months of qualification, maintaining a second qualified source may justify a higher current cost.

The assessment should include the cost of the alternative, the consequences of losing the primary option and the time required to recover. Precision will be imperfect, but explicit assumptions are better than treating the risk as zero.

My rule is simple: protect critical options, not familiar structures. Sometimes adaptability requires closing an operation rather than preserving it.

In my work advising founders and leadership teams, the objective is better risk interpretation and assumption-testing, not removing all uncertainty. A business should take risks it can understand and carry, rather than risks hidden inside an attractive growth figure.

How do you measure resilience-led growth?

Measure resilience-led growth by pairing commercial results with evidence that the business can adapt without destroying value.

Revenue, margin and customer acquisition remain important. They become more useful when leaders also examine the dependencies behind them.

A practical review can pair each growth measure with an adaptability question:

• Revenue growth: Is customer concentration rising faster than revenue?
• Margin improvement: Did the saving remove waste or eliminate an essential fallback?
• Expansion: Can the business fund a delay without abandoning its strongest operations?
• Execution speed: Can teams make consequential decisions without routing everything through the founder?

I would also track time: time to detect a problem, time to authorise a response and time to activate an alternative. These measures expose whether resilience exists in practice or only in a presentation.

For example, a quarterly scenario review could test the loss of the largest customer or an interruption at a critical provider. This is a recommended exercise, not a claim that every business needs the same timetable.

The review should produce a decision: accept the exposure, reduce it or invest in an alternative. Repeatedly identifying a vulnerability without assigning an owner does not improve resilience.

This connects directly to disciplined decision-making under pressure. Leaders need agreed thresholds before urgency makes every choice feel exceptional.

Over time, compare performance across changing conditions, not just during favourable periods. Growth that survives only one set of assumptions is less valuable than growth supported by a business that can keep learning and reallocating resources.

Key takeaways

Resilience-led growth protects both current value creation and the capacity to compete tomorrow.

• Measure the dependencies created by growth, not only the revenue it produces.
• Invest selectively in visibility, optionality and responsiveness.
• Preserve critical alternatives without using resilience to excuse unnecessary cost.
• Build judgment and operating capabilities that competitors cannot reproduce simply by buying the same tools.

FAQ

Resilience and growth reinforce each other when adaptability is treated as a commercial capability.

Is resilience the same as business continuity?

No. Business continuity focuses on maintaining or restoring critical operations; resilience also includes adapting the operating model when previous conditions no longer apply. Restoring the old structure is not always the right commercial decision.

Does investing in resilience reduce profitability?

It can reduce near-term margin when alternatives, reserves or additional capabilities cost money. The investment is justified when it protects critical value or prevents forced decisions whose consequences outweigh that cost.

Why is resilience difficult for competitors to copy?

Resilience depends on connected capabilities built through repeated decisions, testing and learning. Competitors can purchase similar technology, but they cannot instantly acquire the judgment, coordination and working alternatives that make it useful under pressure.