Million Dollar Consulting, Sixth Edition: The Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 11

Leverage: More Output for Less Input

LEVERAGE: USING SOMETHING TO MAXIMUM ADVANTAGE

Give me a lever and a spot to stand and I can move the world.

—ARCHIMEDES

You can build a solo practice with arm’s-length relationships if you’re careful about your arm.

The need for solo practitioners (and boutique firm owners) to create leverage or scalability (to easily change in size) is conspecific to growth. That’s because of the S curve (Figure 11.1).

As you can see in Figure 11.1, organizations and practices achieve dramatic growth once the basics are mastered (seeing only economic buyers, writing proposals with options, populating the accelerant curve, and so forth). However, eventually growth slows, threatening a plateau. Plateaus, because ...