To Grow Faster, Think Smaller
The most important ingredient in a growth strategy is focus.
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I speak to a lot of companies that are struggling to grow faster. We’ve all been there! The business is growing, but not as fast as you like, and the pressure to grow faster is building.
The most common reaction is to go big! Spend a lot more on marketing, hire a lot more sales people and other big actions that might have big impacts. I understand why they think this way and I’ve done it myself in the past. You want a quick solution to increase growth and the bigger the action the more it feels like a quick solution.
In my experience, inflections in growth don’t come from these big actions. Sure, they generate a short term bump, but afterwards you are back where you started. Splashes don’t last.
At their core, these big actions are doing more of the same, just a lot more. If what you were doing was working, then your growth rate wouldn’t be a problem. Doubling down is unlikely to change that.
In my experience, big increases in growth rate always start small.
Better growth rates start with looking at your customers and better understanding each customer segment, how they think and why they make decisions. They come from insights you find in a small group of customers that you can use to build entirely new growth strategies. They come from thinking about customers as people, and then working backwards.
For example, focus on the handful of customers that are addicted to your product. The people that use it all the time, and know how to use it better than anyone else. There might not be many of them, but what do you know about them? What makes them so eager to use the product? And how do we find more of them? They might lead us to a very different but more successful audience and growth strategy.
This is frustrating advice, as everyone wants more growth right now. Spending months learning more about our customers, building new strategies and testing them isn’t fast and doesn’t help our growth rate this quarter.
Even worse, it might not seem like you are doing anything about the problem. “We’re studying our customers” is an unfulfilling answer to “When will growth improve?”, especially if that question is coming from the board or the CEO. Not everyone wants long term solutions to immediate problems.
But that’s exactly what you need to do.
There is a reason pouring the foundation of a house is one of the longest steps. If you don’t have a solid foundation, none of the rest of the work matters. You can’t build a growth strategy unless you have a strong foundation and if you aren’t growing fast enough then the foundation isn’t strong enough.
The best growth leaders I know make this kind of small scale study a continuous process. Even if the company is growing fast enough, they are studying small customer segments, looking for a stronger foundation and the next set of growth strategies. That way, when growth does slow down, you are ready with a new approach.
Growth is not the only big problem that benefits from a small scale approach, but it is one of the most important. When people think of growth they think of scale, so it can be counterintuitive that the solutions start so small.
If your company is like so many of us, you aren’t growing as fast as you like. Instead of going even bigger, start small. Study your customers and look for insights that can be the foundation of your next great growth strategy.
Then, go big.
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