In this Issue

💵    $100 Is the New $20
🐢    Don’t Wait, Innovate
🎨    Creating CoStrategy

💵  $100 Is the New $20

A friend of mine said, “It feels like we have to grow by 20% to make 5%.”

Stable to slow growth used to be conservative, now it’s scary. Costs are rising faster than companies are growing.

Inflation is bad for consumers: $100 is the new $20.

It’s worse for businesses. With rapidly rising costs — labor, energy, freight, equipment, and supplies —it feels like we’re on a treadmill, and someone else is pressing up and faster at the same time.

The economists may not have declared it yet, but this is what stagflation feels like: “profitless growth.”

In a slowing economy with rising costs, growth is the strategy. In CoStrategy, we guide our clients to build for 10% to 30% growth with at least 25% gross margin.

It’s not easy, but it is achievable with a new playbook.

When my family business hit rock bottom, my dad gave me the best advice of my career. He said, “It’s not about the business we’ve built. It’s about the business we’re building. What are we going to build next?”

I give you the same challenge: What are you going to build next?

📊  One Stat to Watch

92.5%

For the third consecutive year, 92.5% of CEOs ranked inflation as their #1 growth concern, according to Capstone Partners’ 2025 Middle Market Business Owners Survey.

🐢  Don’t Wait, Innovate

Preparing for things to return to “normal” is an illusion. It’s not coming back.

You have three options when your market shifts:

🐢 Turtle: Waiting it out is a natural instinct, but it’s the worst option. When markets recover they evolve to something new. The companies that innovate and lead the change become the new market leaders.

🚪 Exit: Sell or walk away. If the cost of fighting and reinventing your business is too high, exiting is reasonable. You may not get maximum value for your business, but it reduces your risk exposure, stops the bleed, and protects your wealth.

⚙️ Innovate: My preferred choice is to fight. Adapt and change your business to win in a new reality. The challenge is to align your company’s core skills, assets, and capabilities with a new growth market.

It’s necessary to innovate because your company is overbuilt for the old market and underbuilt for the next one.

In my book, Sticky Branding, I shared stories of companies that repositioned to grow.

For example, following the loss of its two largest customers, Central Group lost 60% of its revenue in 18 months. Seeing the market shift to offshore manufacturing, they pivoted to a new market: corrugated point-of-purchase displays.

Within 10 years Central Group grew from $16 million to $50 million, and is currently over $150 million.

When growth stalls, leverage your core skills, assets, and capabilities to pivot to a market that will reward your expertise.

🎨  Creating CoStrategy

Fifteen years ago I founded Sticky Branding with the vision to teach companies how to grow into Sticky Brands: getting your customers to choose you first.

This was born out of my family business experience. After hitting rock bottom, we transformed our company with a new name, new positioning, and a new strategy.

It worked, and we rocketed into growth mode. Even in the Great Recession of 2008, we kept growing until we sold the company in 2013.

The pandemic was another awakening. We had clients that lost 90% of their revenue that we brought back to profitability within 7 months selling services they’d never sold before.

We proved Sticky Branding was more than branding. It was a battle-tested growth strategy for when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This is now CoStrategy: a complete philosophy, system, and toolset to transform a company to grow.

CoStrategy has three core objectives:

1. Profitable Growth: We aim for 15% to 30% growth to triple your business every 4 to 8 years.
2. Visibly Own Your Niche: Build a brand so strong that the only way to compete with you is to buy you.
3. Co-Create Strategy: You don’t need consultants to tell you what to do. Develop your team to grow to the next level.

I am looking for 10 founding members for CoStrategy: non-competitive businesses approaching or past $10 million in revenue. Are you interested? If you’re nodding along and want to learn more, let’s schedule a call.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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