Double Your Business in 12 Months- What’s Stopping You?

I was at a conference a few weeks ago talking to other business owners and one of the topics that came up was business growth. I took the opportunity to throw this question out since I’d been thinking about it a lot myself and I posed it to the group: “What is stopping you from doubling your business?”

It seems that many of the owners there had been having somewhat of a tough 2024 so far and how to get back to faster growth was on everyone’s mind. But my question was at first met with joking responses as it didn’t seem like something worth seriously considering.

The first person to play along said all he needed was more clients and he could double his business. The second and third person both said they could find the leads and clients; it was the staff that they were short on and which was limiting their growth. The fourth person suggested that it was money- if they had unlimited resources there then they could manage the rest.

I suspect though that all of them were wrong.

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If I gave the first guy all the clients he could handle- if I made his phone literally ring off the hook with people looking to do business with him, I very much doubt he would be able to take more than a few before his operation fell apart under the strain.

If I gave the next two access to an unlimited pool of staff, already trained and eager to start, I don’t think they’d really hire more than a few of them and pretty soon they would be running out of work while they tried to find more clients.

If I gave the last guy unlimited funds, he might come the closet or actually even be able to double his business- by revenue. He could spend an ungodly amount on marketing to drive sales up two times his current level and he could pay an insane amount to recruiters to find enough staff to take on all the extra work.

By the metric of doubling the revenue, he could succeed. But in this case, I strongly suspect the profits would fall through the floor and while he may double the sales he will have tanked the business in the process and not really doubled the whole business, just the top line. The minute the unlimited funds stopped he’d either have to cut back drastically or else go out of business.

Even though all these answers are probably wrong, it doesn’t mean you don’t need those things to be able to double the business. So what’s the point of this exercise? To stop and really think through what it would take, in what order, to actually successfully double the business, without a magic treasure chest of leads, employees, and funding.

Here’s how to do it.

How to Map Out Doubling Your Business and Make It Into a Realistic Plan

Lots of entrepreneurs have a vague goal of some revenue target or growth goal they want to hit. But in my experience, 98% of them stop there. They may track sales increases and vaguely figure out how much more they need in new business to get there but they rarely if ever go deeper. Without taking that extra time though, it’s very difficult to make steady measured progress towards that goal. But it can be done and it doesn’t even take that long!

You can do it in a spreadsheet, but if you’re not an Excel user you can also just do it on paper! This doesn’t have to be exact to start, just a general roadmap to give you an idea of what is going to be involved. If you commit, then I suggest making more formal projections.

Start with revenue, because that’s the easiest way to begin. Take whatever you did over the last twelve months and double it. Now figure out how much you have to do per month to get to that total. But then scale that so it’s not twelve even months but instead, it grows from what you are doing per month now and builds to an amount per month where when you add them together you get the goal amount.

Next, look at how many sales you are making each month and the average value of each sale. How can you increase that number and what will it take? Can these new sales be increased at a rate that is as profitable as the current sales? Probably not, at first, but you also can’t lose money to make sales. You have to figure out how to scale sales first. Also consider, have you looked at your pricing? If you can increase prices, you don’t need as many sales to get to the same goal. You also likely don’t need as much of everything else as you would if you didn’t increase prices at all.

From your current numbers, look at how much it takes you in staff to achieve your current sales. Now how many more do you need to add, of which positions, if you double your sales? In what order? Probably some positions won’t need to be added while others might and you may even need some new ones, such as managers since you won’t be able to double your own time spent on things.

Aside from people, are there more assets you’ll need in order to do this? More equipment, a bigger or second location, etc. Add in what those will cost and at what stage you will need to add these things.

Now look at how the new customers will impact the cash coming in and will that cover the added costs of new marketing, new staff and new equipment or whatever else you need. You can adjust the targets a bit each month to account for the cash flow as it comes in and allows you to continue growth.

You should wind up with a pretty good idea of what it’s going to take that tells you how many new customers you need to add, how many staff, how much in new equipment and space, and how much cash each will contribute and use.

With all the pieces working together, it should be clear to you where the actual bottlenecks will be. You might realize, OK- we can pull in more customers and buy more gear, but when we get to 50% bigger than we are now, we will need a second GM and that is going to be really tricky to do! Or you might realize you can get 25% bigger but then you’ll need a second warehouse and that is going to require a loan to acquire. Or you might discover your current marketing is not profitable enough and you need to rework your client acquisition plans or you’ve got too much churn and you need to fix the customer dissatisfaction problem before anything else is going to help.

You may even realize that you have two lines of business and only one of them really makes sense to grow- the other is too expensive and too difficult to scale but you’ve been putting a ton of energy into it up until now.

You may also discover (if you’re being honest) that you are the problem! You don’t or won’t delegate or your management style is causing turnover that prevents you from growing. If you are smart you’ll fix the issue and recognize that owners are as often the problem as anything else.

Whatever it is, now that you know the big thing standing between you and doubling your business, you can start working on it right now so when you hit that point you’re aware and ready with the solution. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up like so many business owners who hit a certain plateau and never really understand why or how to work past it and they spend years stuck at about the same size struggling with the same limitations.

By taking a few hours to pregame what growth looks like, you have an infinitely better chance of achieving it. And you don’t need to be a math whiz or business savant- you already know what you’ve got and what’s working- you just need to figure out how to do more of it and unblock whatever’s going to keep you from getting there so you can keep right on climbing up and up.

I would venture to say there is almost nothing that would prevent any business that is up and running from doubling in size if that’s the goal they want to achieve and they put even a modicum of effort into getting there. And even if you don’t quite make it in a year, I guarantee you’ll be a lot farther along if you try than if you don’t!

The only question is are you going to put in that little bit of time to make it happen?