Do you know the level of growth that will break your business?
Do you know how many new projects, clients or pieces of work that will make it impossible to successfully deliver the promised results?
Most people don’t.
If we want to know how to survive and thrive in an uncertain market we need to consider these things.
We often hear people talk about embarking on ambitious growth plans, wanting to double their business or bring in $X million/billion in revenue or deals.
The problem is these goals are ambiguous and if you don’t understand what’s at the core of them you can break your business.
And by breaking, I mean taking on more work than your culture, team, operations and longevity can cope with. The kind of growth that makes the system tip so you can’t deliver what you promised and leads to reputation issues and customer exodus.
So let’s look at the numbers.
When planning for growth, you need to understand ‘what by when’: How many new clients, projects or pieces of work you can onboard, engage with or deliver in a week, month, quarter or year without compromising quality or results.
For example, we have a client who’s set a cap of 100 clients. As a relationship business, the model won’t successfully service any more than this in any given year and the top priority is ensuring outstanding client outcomes. Something that takes time.
So this is the limit… for now. Things may change in the future.
This client also knows that, on the path to 100, if they bring on more than 25 clients per quarter they will fail to deliver to existing clients and consequently risk breaking the business.
Interesting thing is, more than 100 people want to be on the client list. Not a bad problem to have.
Once you sell a promise, the onus is on you to deliver it, otherwise you create bottlenecks that can lose business, cause customer frustration and damage your reputation.
Another client has a capacity of two days of meetings with key stakeholders each month. Doing more than this will generate too much momentum and result in a loss of productivity across the rest of their portfolio.
For my business, bringing on five new strategy clients a month would cause major problems.
As a result, we limit this because strategy work is intense and requires expertise, commitment and deep thought.
We can do a whole bunch of other things in any given month from training and workshops, to audits, content management and brand advice, but we always manage and schedule the volume of projects to ensure the quality of our work.
For another client, we did a LinkedIn outreach campaign that was so successful we had to dial it back so they could follow up the leads.
Their lead threshold?
3 per week.
We come across this all the time.
Some people don’t realise their own potential and find it overwhelming when the market responds.
So what does this mean for you?
Go out and shoot for your goals, but know your upper and lower limits – your ‘what by when’ – and the levers you will be pulling to build momentum.
This will help you prepare for growth you can service.
Nina
PS: We’re helping a number of our clients create Go-to-Market Blueprints this month. We figure out the best pathways to growth and opportunity for the coming year.
Would you like to join us?
PPS. Get more growth advice in this nice little eBook: Thrive When Others Survive – Strategies for Growth in Uncertain Markets