What are the five ways to grow a business?
There are only five ways to grow a business: grow your share of the market you’re already in, expand into new markets or geographies, add new products or services, acquire or merge with another company, or form strategic partnerships. Knowing there are only five makes it far easier to see where your real opportunities are and to align the team on which levers to pull.
What are the five growth levers every business has?
There are only five, and naming them makes growth far less overwhelming. First, keep doing what you’re doing: if you hold just 1% of your current market, there’s plenty of room to grow share without changing anything else. Second, expand into new markets or geographies, like a Victorian business moving into New South Wales, or across to New Zealand or Southeast Asia, though that takes real resources and capability. Third, add a new product or service close to what you already do, the way a nail-maker starts also selling screws. Fourth, acquire or merge with another company, often a competitor, to fast-track growth and combine systems and resources. Fifth, form strategic partnerships, the most forgotten lever: who could you partner with, perhaps exclusively, so you both win without merging or acquiring? Every growth idea you have maps back to one of these five.
How do you decide where to focus your growth?
Map your revenue streams visually, because seeing them side by side makes the priorities obvious. We worked with National Rugby League teams on their five-year plans, and they had nine revenue streams, from match-day ticketing and food and beverage to memberships, broadcast funding and merchandise. Drawing each as a bubble sized by the money it makes changes the conversation. A club might realise its jerseys are actually outsourced to Nike, Adidas or Puma, who take most of the margin while the club earns a small licence fee. That tells you where to put your energy: chase sell-out crowds and ticketing, where you control the upside, and leave the strategic partner to run merchandise. Laid out this way across the five growth levers, it becomes easy to see where the biggest genuine opportunities are, and where you’re only nibbling at the edges.
Should you launch a new product or focus on your core?
Often, focusing on your core is the smarter move, even though a new product feels more exciting. The growth expert Verne Harnish has a line for it: “the riches are in the niches”, meaning that doing one thing exceptionally well and beating the competition all day long often beats spreading yourself thin. Before launching anything new, ask the hard questions: does it tie back to your strategic plan, your purpose and your vision? What could it realistically do in years one to four? And how much capability, sales and marketing effort will it take to deliver? Sometimes the answer is clearly yes: Apple deliberately expanded from the Mac into the iPod, iPad and iPhone, each a new offering customers wanted, and they were right. But just as often the effort isn’t worth the result, and doubling down on the core wins.
How 24HRBP approaches this
In a 24 Hour Business Plan session we map your growth options across these five levers, sized by opportunity, so the team can see where to focus rather than chasing every idea at once. Usually, the sharpest growth comes from a couple of deliberate moves, not from doing everything.
Watch the full episode on The 24HR Business Plan Podcast: Episode 5 - Five Proven Ways to Grow Your Company
