So you’ve nailed the vision. You’ve got the mission statement, the purpose statement, maybe even a glossy poster with mountains, eagles, or a team rowing a boat in perfect unison. You’ve got a strategy that sounds bold, ambitious… and possibly copied from the last offsite PowerPoint.
And now you’re chasing growth.
Here’s where most of us make the classic mistake: we throw the kitchen sink at it. And the bath. And the toaster. We try everything – new marketing campaigns, new products, new customers, new TikTok dances (that one rarely ends well).
It’s the classic “spray and pray” approach: fire random stuff out into the universe and hope someone, somewhere, buys something. Your target audience? Basically all 8 billion humans alive today. Someone will bite, right?
Why the Spray-and-Pray Approach Doesn’t Work
When we try to do everything at once, three things can happen:
- We exhaust the team
- We confuse the customer
- We burn money fast
So instead of trying to do everything, the magic happens when we focus on one big thing: our Breakthrough Issue.
What’s a Breakthrough Issue?
It’s the one big thing holding us back right now. The rate-limiting step. The obstacle that, if we fix it, unlocks the next stage of growth.
It’s not about tidying up every loose end. It’s about asking: what’s the single domino that, if we knock it over, makes all the other dominoes fall more easily?
A good Breakthrough Issue (BTI) ticks two boxes:
a) It will unlock growth.
b) We can do something about it (sorry, no controlling birth rates or the UK weather).
The Four Cs of Breakthroughs
The more specific we are regarding our BTI, the more helpful it will be for our strategy. The four Cs can help narrow it down to one specific issue to fix:
Care – Do customers even care about the problem we’re solving? If they don’t, we’re basically shouting into the void. Pharma companies often run “disease awareness” campaigns before launching a drug. Why? Because if nobody cares, nobody buys.
Convince – Potential customers might care about the problem but not be convinced a solution exists. They may accept the status quo and not even be looking for a solution, let alone our branded solution.
Compete – Customers may care, they’re convinced, but someone else is shinier, or faster than us. Here, we need work out what stops us from being first choice and what we can focus on. NB be careful not to jump to the conclusion that price is the barrier – this comes down to the value customers see.
Construct: Customers may care, be convinced and see us as the preferred choice, but can they actually buy? Is the issue something externally we need to influence (legislation, policy, systems)? Or maybe it lies in our own company? Maybe our booking system belongs in the 90s, maybe we don’t deliver to their country, maybe the onboarding process feels like applying for MI5 clearance. Maybe it is our people who need support. If there is a problem impacting our ability to sell and deliver for our customers, we need to fix that first.
The Point
Growth doesn’t come from doing more — it comes from doing the right thing at the right time. Find your rate limiting step, your breakthrough issue, and you can focus your time and resources on what really matters.
How can I change?
If you want to make the first step to move forwards take a look at our Scale-Up programme if you are a South Gloucestershire business and our Growth programme if you are a Bath and North East Somerset business.
