Mature Ecosystems Can Become Growth Constraints

At Banimo, we work across very different ecosystems including HCM and payroll, cybersecurity, education technology, cleantech and a range of other markets. The participants, economics and routes to market vary considerably, but one pattern shows up repeatedly.

As ecosystems mature, their operating models become institutionalized. Practices that started as choices gradually become accepted as simply how the market works.

Two recent experiences brought this into focus for me. I spent time at the National Laboratory of the Rockies and attended the annual Educause conference, two highly developed ecosystems with very different missions that our clients need to navigate and leverage. Both have established structures governing how companies participate, gain access, collaborate and create value.

That structure is necessary. The risk is accepting the structure as the boundary of what is possible.

You see this in the assumptions companies inherit when they enter an established market.

• How partners should be compensated
• Who owns the customer relationship – or how that relationship might be shared
• Which companies qualify as partners
• How access, certification or sponsorship works
• What direct sales owns versus what partners own
• Which activities and outcomes are evidence of success, rewarded by expanded leverage and financial returns

Those practices may be completely rational. Some may be requirements for participating in the ecosystem at all. But leaders should distinguish between rules they genuinely have to follow and conventions that can be challenged. This is the space where an team can distance it self from the competition.

Cases

I experienced this directly while building the partner business at Paylocity. And I see it today in the creative innovation driven by AWS in their Marketplace business.

The Paylocity case: Insurance brokers and advisors had trusted relationships with the employers we wanted to reach, and referral economics were common in the payroll/HCM ecosystem. There was and still is significant non-rev-share value to go around, meaning plenty of room to build a durable GTM network without buying referrals.

We focused on not competing with their core business, integrating with the systems they and their clients used, providing useful tools and information, and helping them strengthen their client relationships using other forms of economic and value exchange.

The referral, service commitments, and customer experience commitments became an outcome of the value exchange rather than the value exchange itself.

(NOTE: Paylocity’s fiscal 2026 10-K reports that more than 25 percent of new-client revenue still originates through its referral network.)

At AWS, the marketplace business has boomed as we all know. They are doing the same thing we did at Paylocity, which is innovating continuously, breaking things, and expanding ecosystem value by not accepting status quo. The AWS Marketplace Multi-product Solution listing type is one simple example, where AWS is finding incremental growth by rewarding ISV/SI collaboration, which leads to incremental revenue and revenue expansion.

The lesson here is that an accepted ecosystem practices may be a choice rather than a requirement.

Growth requires continuous reassessment

This is the more important issue for CEOs and CROs.

Whether you are entering an established industry ecosystem or building an ecosystem around your own company, simply learning how the system operates and then becoming good at operating within it is unlikely to produce differentiated growth for long.

You know this… Markets change. Customer needs change. Technology changes. New partner types emerge. Competitors enter. Existing routes to market become crowded.

The ecosystem strategy therefore needs a continuous assessment discipline focused on three outcomes.

• Customer value
  Where can partners help create new value for existing customers or expand the problems you can solve together
• Customer acquisition
  Where are there relationships, channels, communities or routes to market that can improve access to customers you are not efficiently reaching today
• Revenue expansion
  Where can new offerings, services, partner combinations or ecosystem participants expand the revenue opportunity

That assessment should not happen once a year during strategy planning. It should be part of the operating cadence. The best do this every month, meaning every week for those who own analysis, planning and execution.

When growth begins to stagnate, leadership should be asking what has changed, where whitespace has opened and which assumptions about the current ecosystem are preventing the company from pursuing it.

Yes we need to execute and deliver revenue outcomes. But there’s ample opportunity to listen to customers and partners, test the assumptions, identify the opportunity, change the operating model where necessary and put enough organizational commitment behind the change to produce better performance.

The system is not the strategy

You may have to play by some of the rules in a mature ecosystem. Understanding those rules is part of being effective.

Accepting them as the full definition of the opportunity is different.

There is almost always incremental growth available to companies willing to look harder at customer needs, listen to the market and challenge assumptions that competitors have stopped questioning.

At Banimo, this is a significant part of the work we do with leadership teams. We identify addressable whitespace across their existing and potential ecosystems, determine what needs to change to pursue it and help execute the change required to capture the opportunity.

The companies that continually reassess their ecosystem are in a much better position to outperform those that simply learn how to operate inside it.