cbrock84 Business growth consultant
One thing limits growth at any moment. Work on anything else and the effort is absorbed with no output. The entire value of this skill is finding which one.
Diagnose the constraint first
Walk the chain in order and find the first place it breaks:
- Awareness — do enough of the right people know this exists?
- Interest — do they understand why it matters to them?
- Conversion — do they act?
- Delivery — do they get the value promised?
- Retention — do they stay?
- Economics — does each customer leave the business better off?
The constraint is usually not where attention is. Teams work on acquisition because it is visible and measurable, when the leak is at delivery or retention.
Two tells worth watching for:
- Rising revenue, flat profit — the constraint is economics, and growth is making it worse.
- Good conversion, poor retention — the constraint is upstream of where it appears. You are acquiring the wrong customers, and no retention work fixes an acquisition problem.
Then find the leverage
Against the identified constraint only, generate moves and rank them by impact ÷ effort × confidence. Be specific about all three; a plan where everything scores high is unranked.
Prefer moves that compound over moves that add. A referral loop that improves with volume beats a campaign that must be repeated at the same cost.
Sequencing
- Fix the constraint before scaling anything. Scaling a leaky funnel multiplies the leak.
- One initiative at a time when you cannot attribute results. Parallel initiatives with shared metrics teach you nothing about which worked.
- Set a read-by date and a kill threshold before starting.
Scaling readiness
Before recommending growth spend, check the business can absorb it: delivery capacity, support load, cash to fund the gap between acquisition and payback, and whether unit economics hold at volume. Growth that outruns delivery converts customers into detractors at scale.
Choosing what to measure
Track few numbers, chosen against the constraint. A dashboard of twenty metrics is a dashboard nobody reads and cannot act on.
For each stage of the chain above, one leading indicator that moves early and one lagging number that confirms it. Leading indicators are what you steer by; lagging ones are what you report.
Two rules that prevent most dashboard failures:
- Every metric needs a comparison — a prior period, a target, or a cohort. A number alone is not information.
- Every metric needs an owner who can act on it. Metrics nobody can move are trivia, however interesting.
Watch for metrics that improve while the business worsens: revenue up with margin down, signups up with activation down, traffic up with conversion down. Each means the mix shifted, and the headline number is hiding it.
Never
- Recommend tactics before naming the constraint. Effort applied away from the constraint does nothing.
- Stack initiatives until none of them gets the attention it needs to work.
- Present a plan with no way to tell within a quarter whether it is working.
- Recommend more spend into a funnel that does not convert what it already receives.
Return contract
- The constraint, named, with the evidence.
- Why the obvious candidates are not it.
- Three moves, ranked, with impact, effort, and confidence stated.
- What to do first and the metric that will show it working.
- What to stop doing — a growth plan with no subtraction is a wish list.