They planned for 50% growth and grew fivefold
A few years ago, in November, the founders of an established business came to me. They'd heard I could help them test ideas for growth and wanted to learn how. This was already a substantial company: well past the startup stage, though not yet a large corporation.
We discussed their ideas, why they wanted to test them, and what results they were hoping for. I showed them how to run the experiments. They said it all made sense, thanked me, and told me they could take it from there. Not a consultant's favourite outcome: you answer all their questions in the first meeting, give them what they need, and they go off to do it without you.
They weren't away for long. A month later, they came back. They hadn't done any of it. Day-to-day operations had taken over, leaving no time for the work they knew would help the business grow. That was the first bottleneck we needed to address.
Making time for growth
We looked at how the founder could step back from day-to-day operations. Fortunately, much of the groundwork was already done: the company had an operations director ready to take over. The founder needed to hand over his remaining operational responsibilities and set up regular checks, so he could see how things were going without being involved in everything.
A week later, he came back. He'd delegated the operational work, his team was testing the ideas we'd discussed, and things were moving. Now he had a new question: what was he supposed to do? Watch cartoons?
Over the next few years of working together, he didn't get to watch a single cartoon. We turned to his goals. It was the end of the year, so we discussed what he wanted to achieve the following year. He was aiming for 50% growth.
That surprised me. If your company isn't huge yet and you're not even aiming to double in a year, I want to understand why. We looked at the opportunities in his market and how big comparable companies had already become.
They knew of several comparable American businesses that had sold at billion-dollar valuations, with annual revenue of around $150 million. Those companies were much bigger than his, but not so big that reaching that scale seemed out of the question.
He would need to grow the business many times over. He didn't know exactly how yet, but he could see where he wanted to go, and it looked achievable. His eyes lit up. We started working out how to get there, setting a bigger goal, milestones, and experiments to test ways of accelerating growth.
Faster growth exposes the bottlenecks
The company picked up the pace. Within a few weeks, parts of the business could no longer keep up. Problems emerged in marketing, production, and management, exposing the constraints that stood in the way of faster growth.
We tackled those problems one at a time. We identified what was holding the business back, focused on it, and tested possible solutions. Each successful change allowed the company to grow faster, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. That exposed the next bottleneck, which became our next priority.
Our ideas and plans changed along the way. The goal stayed ambitious; the evidence told us what to work on next. We watched for the parts of the business that couldn't keep up and addressed what was holding them back.
By the end of the year, the company had grown fivefold rather than by the 50% they'd planned. For a business of that size, it was a pretty good result.
We were pushing the company beyond its previous pace. That might mean increasing the traffic entering the sales funnel, setting more ambitious goals, or putting more effort into reaching them. Eventually, the weakest link shows up: the part of the business that prevents the rest from keeping up. That becomes the priority.
Once you've addressed it, you can push further and find the next constraint. Repeating that process helped this company grow far beyond what its founders had originally planned.
To find out what's holding your business back, book a diagnostic session.