For many established business owners, planning the next stage of growth begins with a reasonable assumption: more revenue requires more customers, and more customers require more marketing.
Sometimes that’s exactly right. An email campaign, a new website, paid advertising or a stronger sales effort may ultimately be an important part of the growth plan.
But consider a $5 million business that wants to become a $6 million business.
Does the additional $1 million necessarily have to come from customers the business doesn’t have today?
That question changes the growth conversation.
Once the goal is growth rather than simply customer acquisition, the field gets much wider. There are more places to look for additional revenue, but there are also questions about what the business can sell, what it’s already converting, what relationships it can leverage and what may be preventing it from capturing growth that’s already available.
Marketing may ultimately play an important role. But looking at the business as a whole reveals a much broader set of possibilities.
Where Could the Additional Revenue Come From?
One place to look is the customers already in the business. Think about one of today’s best customers. Did that customer begin as a large account, or did the relationship start much smaller? If it started small, what happened between the first purchase and where the relationship is today?
Perhaps the customer began buying additional services. Maybe purchase frequency increased. Maybe the customer’s needs changed. Or someone recognized there was more potential in the relationship and developed it.
Now consider the other customers in the business. Are any of them following a similar pattern?
There may be a growth pattern hiding inside the business that no one has deliberately examined.
The same customer base raises another question: Who stays?
Which customers tend to stay the longest? Which leave? Is there a point in the relationship when customers are particularly vulnerable to leaving, or something the longest-tenured customers have in common?
New customers deserve the same kind of scrutiny. Rather than simply asking how to attract more customers, consider which customers the business genuinely wants more of.
The answer may not be the customers spending the most today. Some may be more profitable. Others may stay longer, expand over time or be particularly well suited to what the company does best.
Once those customers become clearer, another question becomes interesting: What tends to happen right before they need the product or service?
There may be a recognizable trigger. A contract expires. A provider disappoints them. They open another location. They hire someone new. Their business reaches a certain size.
The next customer may not look exactly like the current one. Who else has a problem the business already knows how to solve?
And who doesn’t currently think of this company as the solution?
The Customer Isn’t the Only Variable
Sometimes the growth opportunity isn’t about finding a different customer at all. It may be what the customer is buying.
If another $1 million started flowing into the business tomorrow, what would the owner hope those customers were buying?
Would it be more of what’s selling today? Something more profitable? Something customers have been asking for that the business doesn’t currently offer? Something that changes the nature of the customer relationship altogether?
And what would those customers be willing to pay for it?
What About the Opportunities Already Coming In?
Then there are the opportunities already coming in.
What happens when someone calls or submits an inquiry? How many initial conversations become proposals? How many proposals become customers? What happens after a proposal is sent? What happens to the prospect who says, “Not now”?
If good opportunities are already entering the business and disappearing somewhere along the way, the growth equation begins to look different.
Some opportunities may already be coming into the business from another source: relationships.
Which customers arrived because someone else sent them? Who sent them? Was it a one-off referral, or is there a pattern?
And we still haven’t looked at the other side of the growth equation.
What Could Be Getting in the Way?
A business can have plenty of growth opportunity and still be unable to capture it.
Suppose a company is turning away profitable work because it doesn’t have enough skilled people to deliver it. More leads won’t solve that problem.
Or perhaps demand is strong, but inquiries aren’t being followed up consistently. The owner may still be the only person capable of closing a significant sale. A fulfillment problem may be making the company reluctant to sell more. Technology, capital or internal processes may be limiting how much business the company can handle.
In each case, more marketing could do exactly what it’s supposed to do: generate additional demand without generating much additional revenue.
A business can have a growth problem without having a demand problem.
The $1 Million Thought Experiment
Go back to the $5 million business trying to reach $6 million.
Its first assumption was straightforward: another $1 million in revenue means finding another $1 million in new customers.
After looking across the business, the possibilities might look very different:
- $250,000 from current-customer expansion
- $150,000 from improved retention
- $300,000 from new customers
- $200,000 from a new or expanded offer
- $100,000 from partnerships
Total: $1 million in additional annual revenue
Those numbers aren’t a forecast or a recommendation. They’re simply an illustration of how the math could work.
