Growth strategy
The pipeline is 3× target. The forecast misses anyway.
Coverage ratios feel like reassurance. They only work if the pipeline behaves like the one the ratio was calculated from, and most don't.
Rialto Bridge
Growth strategy
Articles on growth strategy.
Growth strategy
Profit was up 40%. The overdraft was fuller in December than in January.
Rising profit alongside tightening cash is not a contradiction: it is the normal signature of growth, and it has a…
Growth strategy
The satisfaction score is 8.7. The person who signs the renewal never answered the survey.
High satisfaction scores and sudden cancellations are not a contradiction: they are usually a sign the wrong population is being…
Growth strategy
The win rate is 26%. Every proposal costs two days of senior time.
Quoting everything looks like commercial ambition. The arithmetic of a low win rate says something else, and the work you…
Growth strategy
Revenue is up 11%. Volume is flat.
The same growth figure can describe four completely different businesses, and only one of them is actually growing.
Growth strategy
One customer is 31% of revenue. The concession never shows up in the price.
Concentration rarely arrives as a discount. It arrives as scope, terms and queue position, and as a set of requests…
Growth strategy
New business has a funnel, a target and an owner. Expansion has none of the three.
Most firms can tell you what it costs to win a customer. Far fewer can say what it costs to…
Growth strategy
The two-week holiday went fine. The buyer prices the six-month absence.
Nothing broke while the owner was away: which tells you less about transferable value than most owners assume, and almost…
Growth strategy
The pilot met every success criterion. Nine months later there’s still no contract.
Pilots that succeed technically and fail commercially usually share a single design flaw, and it is fixed before the pilot…
Growth strategy
The programme has fourteen partners. Two of them send work.
Signing a partner is not the same as acquiring distribution, and the gap between the two explains most disappointing channel…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.