Most Leadership Teams are not short on effort. They work their Rocks, run a solid L10 meeting and keep the Weekly Scorecard green, and still the growth rate isn’t what the Visionary wants. The answer is usually in the data, but rarely in the obvious numbers. It sits underneath them, in the Growth Levers.
It reports the result, but it can’t tell you what to do. Should we let go of some clients? The P&L can’t answer it. You need what each client pays, what it really costs to serve them, and how much of your scarcest people’s time they use: data kept in different systems. Joined together, they answer the question.
A Growth Lever is a measure, built by joining two or more sets of data, that explains why your business is growing at the rate it is, and that one person can move on purpose.
No company should pull all 15. Every lever adds complexity and takes leaders’ time, and pulling one spends something real. A lever is worth pulling only when the gain clearly outweighs that cost.
Leadership hours, and team attention taken from other work.
A hire, a tool, marketing spend, or revenue you give up, such as a client you let go.
Trust spent with clients, staff or partners, such as a price increase or a changed role.
Fifteen levers in five families: Journey, People, Clients, Economics and Leadership. Open any lever to see how to calculate it and what pulling it looks like.
Where do people get stuck between first contact and becoming a client, and which step costs the most?
Which actions actually move people to the next step, and are we doing them?
How many clients can our critical employees handle?
What does each person who leaves really cost us?
How many weeks until we need to hire?
How much profit does each client produce?
How much of our new business comes from our best kind of client?
Are we keeping the clients who bring the most profit?
Which services earn the most, and are we selling more of them?
Do we charge what we’re worth, and do clients pay it?
Which marketing channels bring in profitable clients for the least cost?
How long does it take clients to pay us?
What does it take, in hours and cost, to serve each client?
Are clients getting the results they paid for?
How much of our leaders’ time goes to growing the business?
Growth Rate comes first: is it too slow, too fast or just right for where the Visionary wants to be? A Vital Sign out of range, like Utilization or Cash Reserve, is a constraint. Fix it before pulling a lever that would push it further out.
A trend you can trust takes about 4 weeks measured daily, against 5 months weekly. After you pull a lever, a real change shows in about 2 weeks instead of 2 months.
Name one owner, make it a Rock, set the pulled forecast, track it daily and review it monthly. Measure the execution, not just the result: a good idea only half carried out tells you nothing.
Start with the Growth Benchmark to see how you compare. Or get the free guide to the 15 Growth Levers and the 7 Vital Signs.