Growth hiding in plain sight

The growth plan for most companies is: ask sales to sell more, marketing to convert better and the product team to polish the experience.

It’s all useful work - especially when growth is coming fast. But many of the leaders I've worked with recently are seeing growth go in the wrong direction, and the focus is still on getting better at selling what it already sells, without asking whether they could offer something different or more valuable.

It’s easy to see why. The current offer has customers, revenue and data behind it. A new one raises awkward questions about who would buy it, whether you could deliver it and what it would cost.

Question the problem you solve

Every offer reflects decisions made for particular customers, under particular constraints. It is worth asking which of those constraints and assumptions still apply.

Take energy. We buy kilowatt-hours, but what we want is a warm home and a charged car for as little money as possible. What might a business model look like if it started with that outcome, rather than a unit cost?

The same question is worth asking of your business. Expertise you’ve built over years could be valuable to customers you’ve never served. An existing customer relationship could support an ongoing service you’ve never considered.

Familiarity with the current business can make it surprisingly difficult to see what else it could become.

A route to new growth

What do customers trust you to do but you’ve never offered?

What does technology now make possible?

What is your business is uniquely positioned to deliver?  

Those questions belong together. The answer often sites where they overlap.

Finding it and acting on it is hard. You have to be inventive. You also have to build a team that rewards risk-taking, challenges accepted facts, and is comfortable running competing ideas in parallel. It's gruelling, uncertain work, but it's also very good fun.

The market is different today. Big opportunities are scarcer, the risk-appetite for digital bets is lower and, in this environment, doing nothing often feels safer than change.

But the approach works. Over the last 15 years we've been involved in some remarkable projects. Between them, they've created significant new enterprise value, helped clients raise substantial investment and reach millions of new customers.

Find out early then build fast

A room full of colleagues agreeing that an idea is exciting tells you very little about demand.

Make enough of the experience for customers to understand it, try it and decide whether to adopt it. Watch what they actually do. Work out what it takes to deliver the most valuable slice.

Find these things out while you can still change the solution.

AI can make something look and feel finished in a matter of hours. That helps enormously, as long as everyone understands it isn't finished.

An offer customers can try makes the opportunity easier to judge. Working through what it would cost to deliver gives finance a useful question to answer. People responsible for running it can help shape it before decisions become expensive to reverse.

The opportunity is usually already there, in the customer relationships, data, reputation and know-how the business has built up. Most organisations just aren't set up to see it. Counterintuitively, some of the best opportunities sit in the businesses and products that look most mature on paper, with low churn, strong brand recognition and customers who use you every day.

Our Expand mission is built to find these opportunities hiding in plain sight, and create the solution that gets them to market.