GROWTH ADVISORY
Growth, produced by a process the business can actually forecast.
We work with management teams on where new commercial relationships come from, and on the pricing, concentration and route-to-market decisions that determine what that revenue is worth to a buyer or a lender.
Start a conversationTHE CONSTRAINT
Most established companies convert well. Fewer can produce the conversation.
A business that has grown through referrals, inbound and the relationships of a few people usually closes at a rate a newer competitor would envy. The constraint is almost never conversion. It is volume, and volume is capped by whatever currently produces it.
There is usually a second constraint sitting alongside the first. The contacts a business has already acquired, quoted and lost touch with accumulate faster than any team can work them. That population is the cheapest demand the company will ever have access to, and in most businesses nobody has the capacity to reach it.
THE WORK
Demand the business can plan against.
We start with the market as it already behaves. What triggers a purchase, what language buyers use when they describe the problem, and which companies are showing those signals now rather than in principle. From there we work backwards to the offer and the message that meet them, and build the channel that produces qualified conversations at a rate the business can forecast.
Origination
Identifying the companies that fit and approaching them directly, and working the contacts the business has already acquired. Both at a volume that produces a forecastable number of conversations rather than an occasional one.
Positioning and offer
What the business sells, to whom, and against what alternative. Most origination problems turn out to be offer problems wearing a channel costume.
Pricing and terms
What is charged, how it is structured, and what is collected upfront against what sits in the back end. Pricing decisions compound faster than volume decisions.
Concentration and route to market
Where revenue is dangerously clustered, which segments are underweight, and whether the next stage of growth comes through direct sales, partners or acquisition.
WHERE WE USUALLY START
The demand that already exists inside the business.
Before building a new channel, we work the one already sitting in the CRM.
Most established companies hold years of contacts who enquired, were quoted, or went quiet. They were qualified once. Nobody has the capacity to work them again, and the cost of acquiring them has already been paid.
We contact that population systematically, at a volume a sales team cannot reach manually, and return qualified conversations into the pipeline. It produces revenue inside the first quarter, and it establishes the baseline conversion data that everything after it is designed against.
Contacts, not leads.
People who already know the business, already understood the offer, and did not say no. The conversion economics are unlike anything a cold channel produces.
A measurable baseline.
What proportion connect, what proportion book, what proportion close, and at what value. That data determines the design of the channel that follows.
Revenue in the first quarter.
The engagement is structured so the first phase pays for the work that comes after it.
The first is arithmetic. A channel that produces qualified conversations at a forecastable rate raises revenue, and a multiple applied to a larger number produces a larger outcome. That is the reason most owners engage.
The second is what happens to the multiple itself. A buyer is purchasing future cash flow and a lender is underwriting it, and both are asking the same question, which is whether the revenue survives the departure of whoever currently produces it. Where demand can be explained, measured and repeated, the answer is straightforward. Where it arrives through relationships that do not transfer, the discount shows up in diligence rather than in negotiation, by which point it is a fact rather than a position.
The same work produces both. Only the reason for doing it changes.
PROCESS
How an engagement runs.
1. Diagnostic
Where demand currently comes from, what converts and at what rate, how revenue is distributed across customers and segments, and what pricing looks like against the value delivered. We also audit the contact population already held: how many, how old, how reachable, and what was originally quoted. The constraint is rarely where it is assumed to be, so the answer comes from the numbers rather than from the brief.
2. Definition
The market as it actually behaves. What triggers a purchase, what language buyers use, which companies are showing those signals now. From that, the offer and the message that meet them.
3. Build
The channel that produces qualified conversations, and the commercial infrastructure that turns them into contracted revenue. Qualification criteria, stage definitions, pricing structure and terms, so the process is written down rather than improvised.
4. Operate
The channel runs and the targeting sharpens against what the market returns. Reported against the baseline recorded at the start.
QUESTIONS
Initial questions frequently asked.
Does this connect to your other practices?
Only if you want it to.
The practices are engaged separately and neither is conditioned on the other.
How are engagements structured commercially?
An engagement fee and a success fee.
The engagement fee covers the diagnostic, the build and the direct costs of running the channel. The success fee is a percentage of revenue collected from contacts the engagement produced, measured against a baseline recorded before we start. The intention is that most of what we earn is determined by what the work produced rather than by what was scoped at the outset.
What does an engagement look like?
It opens with a diagnostic conversation running in both directions.
We look at where demand currently comes from, what converts, what the numbers say about concentration and pricing, and where the constraint actually sits. If there is a fit, we scope against what we found rather than against what was asked for. If there is not, we say so and you keep the read-out either way.
Who does the work?
The same people who scoped it.
We run a small number of engagements at a time so the people in the first conversation stay close to the work.
How long before anything happens?
The first conversations arrive within weeks.
The value accumulates well beyond that.