🎯   Sliding vs Deciding
🤝   Path of Referral
🗺️   4 Zones of Growth
🎯 Sliding vs Deciding
Your decision-making can be sliding or deciding.
Most businesses are sliding. What feels like “strategy” is really reacting. The business slides into its brand and competitive advantage one opportunity at a time.
Peloton is a dramatic case of opportunistic growth. In the pandemic, they boomed. Revenue grew to $4 billion in 2021. The company believed it was transforming the fitness industry.
They expanded factories and invested heavily to grow with the wave. They didn’t think it would end, but it did. By 2022, revenue was down to $2.5 billion, and the company was hemorrhaging cash.
Opportunistic growth works until it doesn’t.
When things boom, be skeptical. Understand why your market is growing before you invest.
When things become uncertain, be prepared to change. Get closer to your customers to truly understand their needs so you can position your business for its next stage of growth.
Opportunities become more heightened and scalable when you decide.
🤝 Path of Referral
John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”
One hundred years later, Wanamaker’s quote still rings true for most marketers.
The most effective marketing is deliberate. You don’t have to be on all channels, all the time. Focus your energy to where your customers are going to be.
One of my favorite questions is: Who knows about a customer’s need first?
Instead of finding one customer at a time, focus on the much smaller group of referral partners who can make introductions at exactly the right moment.
Look for partners who integrate your products into their solution, or where there are natural “starts and stops” to where one service ends and another begins. That’s your Path of Referral.
A Path of Referral is bigger than a referral partner or a center of influence. It’s a channel.
For instance, cardiologists are referred by family doctors. Cardiologists don’t need to run Google Ads to find people who have recently had a heart attack. They need to build relationships with local doctors who can refer patients.
A Path of Referral can become a strategic marketing channel. You’re not only building relationships. You are building brand awareness and integrated services with your service partners. The goal is for them to recommend your business first when they know a customer needs your services.
đź“ŠÂ One Stat to Watch
60%
of executives admit they delay hard decisions because they over-trust legacy strategy, according to research by McKinsey.
🗺️ 4 Zones of Growth
There are four predictable areas you can grow your business, what I call the 4 Zones:
- The Core: Increase your capacity to reach and serve more customers in your niche.
- New Products: Grow the share of wallet within your existing customers by offering additional products and services.
- New Markets: Take what you already sell to new customers in new regions and industries.
- New Business: Build new products for new markets. Effectively, start a new business or division.
Start with the Core, your current business. If you’ve got more runway, don’t change directions. Double down.
Look to the “corners,” New Products and New Markets, when you’re ready to develop new revenue streams.
Unless it’s absolutely strategic, avoid the New Business quadrant. It’s a trap. It dramatically increases complexity while diluting your core business. Growth comes from focus, not expansion.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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