Can You 10X Your Business?

We talk a lot about business growth in this newsletter but we don’t often talk about how much growth. Mostly that’s because growth goals are personal and a function of what each owner wants from their business. But let’s talk about it today!

How much growth should you aim for and what’s a good but achievable goal? Well, again, that depends, but really, any goal is possible for most businesses. The cap is the size of the market, but the workaround there is to expand your market as part of your growth goals so you never actually run out of room to run if that’s what you’re aiming for.

For example – if Amazon never expanded beyond selling books then even if they eventually replaced every other bookseller (an unlikely event) they eventually would have run out of room to grow. So pretty soon after launching with books, they added music, movies, and every other kind of product. The rest is history. They didn’t 10X the business, they one million X’d it!

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On the other hand, lots of businesses are happy to get 10% annual growth. That’s an amount you can manage without going crazy and running yourself ragged. But if you only grow 10% a year it’s going to take you seven years to double and you won’t 10X in your working lifetime.

So how can one business grow from a garage startup to the most valuable company on earth in a couple of decades and others barely keep up with inflation over the same time period?

The answer is goals and systems. You absolutely aren’t going to hit 10X or anything like it if you aren’t intentionally aiming for growth and pretty aggressive growth at that. And even if you set a big goal like “10X growth in three years” you aren’t going to hit it if you don’t put the systems in place to get there.

Now if you feel like you want to grow but also that something as audacious as 10X growth simply isn’t part of your plan is there any reason to even think about it? I would say, yes, there is! And I think it could help you a lot more than you realize no matter what your actual goals are and how your business is currently set up.

Here’s why I think spending an hour thinking about growing 10X is actually going to be super beneficial for you and your business.

How Planning to Grow 10X Helps ANY Growth Goal

The reason I think that game planning 10X growth is beneficial is because of the second requirement for hitting that goal aside from just having it – systems.

Think of it like this – if you only grow 10% a year you can do that by doing pretty much exactly what you are already doing. If you just raise your prices a bit, get a few more customers than last year, and maybe hire one more person, you can easily do 10% better than last year if all goes well. You don’t need to change anything about how your business works to do 10% better. You don’t need to delegate any real work you haven’t already delegated. You don’t need to significantly ramp up your new client acquisition. You can basically coast along as you are.

On the other hand, if you were to grow by 10X, you’d need to do a lot differently. First, you’d need to figure out how many more customers you’d need. It might not be 10X more, either. Because that just might not be possible. You might need to think about what else you could do to sell more to current customers, sell to them more often, and what new things you could sell.

You would have to figure out how to deliver all those new sales – supply chains, vendors, logistics, etc. depending on what kind of business you have. It might require new locations, new equipment, new processes, etc.

You definitely are going to need more people but maybe not just more of who you already have but new positions, new roles, and new layers of management.

You are going to need a way to attract all these new customers and sell them on your business.

You have to ask yourself what you would do first, then second, and third. Could you fund it all yourself or would you need to borrow to help fund some of the things you’d need to grow? Would you need to partner with other companies to help you get there?

Since this is a thought exercise, you don’t need to limit yourself to start. Just imagine what a 10X version of your business would look like. Imagine different ways you could get there and then start narrowing it down to the most realistic. Try to imagine if you HAD to make this happen for some reason – how could you actually pull it off?

If you can come up with something that actually makes sense to get from here to there then the next question is “Is this something you would actually want to try?” If you can’t in any way conceive of how it could be done then how close can you get? 8x? 5x? 3X? If one of those would work then why not try?

Suppose you come up with a plan that you could see could really get you to 5X bigger in three years and you try it and at the end of three years, you are only 3.5X bigger. Did you fail? Hardly! Because if you hadn’t tried chances are you’d only be 20-30% bigger than you were three years ago instead of 350%.

CapForge barely did $50K in its first year of doing accounting. It took five years to get to over $500K in revenue in a year. It took another five years to get to $5M – 100X growth. Was that because I was aiming big from the beginning? Yes! Did the company grow and evolve and continuously redesign how we did things over the years? Yes! Am I aiming for another 10X growth over the next five years? Absolutely! But if you had asked me year one if I ever thought we’d even have come this far of course it would have been almost impossible to imagine. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t imagined at least trying, it NEVER would have happened.

So how much growth should you aim for? Only you can decide what makes sense. But my suggestion is to aim big because it forces you to think about and plan for what that would look like. If you don’t aim big then you’ll never realize or do what you need to do to get there. And even if you miss, missing a big goal still means you are going to be way, way bigger than missing a small goal!