How do you measure growth?

  • How do you assess how well your business is doing?  
  • What does “growth” mean and how do you measure it?
  • What percentage of your revenue is profit?  How does knowing that – or not knowing – affect your strategic decisions?
  • Does the business drive revenue growth or do you, by working harder?  What would happen if you stepped back for 90 days?
  • If your revenue went up last year but your stress also went up, what exactly did you grow?
  • If you wanted to double sales, what would be the first thing you would do?

What is the value of growth?

  • Are your margins expanding or contracting?  Why, and what can you do about it?
  • How much of your revenue is recurring, contractual, or otherwise predictable?  How much is one-time or unpredictable.  How much depends on you personally closing every deal?
  • Are you discounting to close deals?  Could you close without it?  If not, why not?
  • Do you know which of your products or services drives the most growth?  Profit?  How much of your sales efforts go into supporting these products?
  • If an investor or lender looked at your financials, what would they see?  What would they like?  What would you need to explain or excuse?

What’s driving your growth?

  • Is growth coming from new customers or are you doing more business (or just raising prices) with the existing base?
  • What percentage of your revenue last year came from customers you didn’t have two years ago?  What does that tell you about your pipeline?
  • What is your customer retention rate year over year?  How much value would you get from a 10% improvement in retention?
  • What is the lifetime value of your average customer?  What are three things you could do to improve that?

Do you have the capacity to grow?

  • How many things in your business only work because you personally make them work?  How much could you be growing the business if you weren’t focused on those things?
  • Are you investing in the future of this business, or are you extracting from it?
  • What would create a growth ceiling in your current business model?  How close are you?
  • If your business doubled in size tomorrow, what would break first?
  • Are you solving the same problems over and over again, or do you create systems and processes so those problems disappear permanently?

Want more information on growing your business?

Read Bootcamp#2 post to learn more how to define, recognize and measure growth

Bootcamp #1: Finding and managing your time’

Module #1 questions: time management