Growing the Top Line

CHAPTER 6The Growth Framework: The 16 Ways a Company Can Grow

In this chapter, we expand the Four Key Questions into the 16 Growth Pathways. A critical part of our process, this powerful instrument helps you frame the growth challenge in a clean, repeatable, logical way. Having a tool to exhaustively consider how you could grow in a simple, direct way is critical to success.

When you consider the Four Key Questions as a series of choices, and limit the possible outcomes to new or existing, you get a powerful model: the Growth Framework

Before digging into the framework, it can help to answer the Four Key Questions, which largely determine planning success and failure. Practically, the way that they are best used is to consider them conversationally:

1. What % of planned revenues will come from existing clients?
2. What % of planned revenues will come from existing geographies/locations?
3. What % of planned revenues will come from existing goods and services?
4. What % of planned revenues will come from existing business models?

These are very simple questions for the team to wrap their heads around. Simple is powerful, and by answering these questions you can evaluate the best ways to achieve your objective. Because these present more questions than can be considered in the typical 2×2 format, we need a new framework to help us plan for success and help us talk about what happens when the four questions collide.

I spent time thinking through both my project and personal experience, ...