I would say the typical business owner / entrepreneur we meet is focused on revenue growth as a top goal. Growing the top line is fundamental to growing a business of course.
I would like you to consider taking a step back for a moment and ask yourself and your team, what capacity do you have to grow the top line without margin destruction.
Might be you have excess capacity. You have people to meet with prospective vendors or clients, you have production capacity to build more widgets, or you have service and support personnel you are not fully utilizing.
As you ask your team these things, go deeper.
Look at the actual enterprise capacity restraints that exist across your entire business.
Think of capacity as the ability to get the maximum equity value growth leverage out of your organization.
Leverage that comes from being a best in breed in your world, small or larger.
Nothing wrong with being the best in a small niche.
First you need to be able to measure it. How exactly do you measure "capacity" anyway?
You have to answer these questions:
How best to define capacity in your specific enterprise / private business. You need a process.
How to properly measure capacity in a variety of operational areas. You need a metric.
What are are the fundamental components of capacity. You need to decide what to measure.
I admit this is not a science, and to answer these questions requires subjective assumptions.
But, we can define capacity through organizational comparisons of an individual business to fundamental governance and operational excellence, standards of exceptional management using benchmarked data of private firms in the same industry using recent sales data, profit margins, growth rates and so forth.
If you have a good data set of what makes a business a great one in your industry and your size, you can benchmark your business against this data to uncover GAP's or areas of capacity restraint.
Data is key, and AI will make this effort more powerful as we build it.
Lets use an example:
Q&A with you and your key executive team. Score this statement, one of many we would use.
We have a high % of recurring revenue.
Using a multiple choice answer set 1. yes and we can prove it 2. partly true. 3.we are like everyone else 4. Not sure how we compare to our competition.
We then score the answer and give it a weighting with # 1 we can prove it yes as a high weighting and, we are not sure at the bottom of a scale. from 1-10
Going through a series of questions in a variety of growth and value aspects of your business on how it runs operationally and so forth, we can build a model that measures areas of weakness and "capacity" to grow value of the business against the benchmark.