You've built a strong business. What grows it from here is a different kind of challenge.
Getting a good business to grow from here, at the pace the plan needs and without eroding margins, feels like it should come down to sales: more of it, better at it, someone to drive it.
More often than not, you'd be looking in the wrong place. Your growth problem usually isn't a sales problem.
The reason sits a step above and beyond the sales team, in what you take to market and why a client should choose you over the rest. Most firms here sell what they do: the service they run, the features they've built, the way they design and deliver. But a client doesn't buy any of that for its own sake. They buy what it gets them, a business kept safe, a cost taken out, a result they couldn't reach on their own.
Compete on what you do and you sound like everyone else, and the conversation slides to price. What decides whether a client chooses you, and whether they'll pay what you're worth, is how clearly you make the case for the result you deliver, and that case is set above the sales team, before a deal ever reaches them.
You see the cost of it downstream. Deals you'd back yourself to win slip away, or land only on price. Good people, working hard, can't lift the win rate on their own. The forecast won't firm up enough to invest behind. Your buyers increasingly arrive already knowing what you do; what they'll choose you for is being shown a result they couldn't see for themselves.
None of that is fixed by pushing the sales team harder. It's fixed above, beyond and including them. The hard part is seeing clearly where it's really going wrong when you're in the middle of it, and knowing what to do about it.
You’ll know this is for you when you read it.
It’s for owners and leaders of IT, MSP and tech firms, somewhere between £5m and £20m, who want more from their growth than they’re getting. Sometimes it’s because the business is doing well and it’s a question of how to grow faster. Sometimes it’s because something has stalled, or is proving more of a challenge than it should be.
Either way, the real question is the same:
what’s the next move?
For some
You’re still the one who wins the important work. The business has grown on your relationships and your instinct, and that’s taken it a long way, but you can feel where that runs out.
For others
There’s a capable commercial team in place and it still isn’t lifting the result the way it should, and you’re under real pressure, from a board, from investors, from your own ambition, to get to the next stage.
And running underneath all of it is what you want out of this yourself. More of it rests on you than you’d like. You want some of the pressure that comes with growth off your own shoulders, and you’ve started to think about what the business would be worth when the time comes to sell or step away.
If any of that sounds like where you are, that’s a good place to start a conversation. More profitable, more predictable, worth more,
whichever end of it you’re starting from.
Aidan Corbishley has spent over twenty-five years in the technology sector, the last fifteen leading commercial growth on the leadership teams of established IT and tech businesses, and he has personally won the large, complex deals that delivered it.
At Northgate that meant building an outsourcing business from greenfield: no proposition, no marketing function to lean on. He built the proposition, defined the market it would compete in, then won the work himself, growing contracts to over £25m against established incumbents.
Since then he has run commercial operations at scale: latterly running a business unit delivering around £67m in sales annually across enterprise software, cloud and consultancy. Four businesses in fifteen years, the same seat in each: the leadership table, accountable for the growth number, the team and the plan.
What keeps coming up with leaders of technology firms.
Commentary
Growing revenue is the easier half of growth.
From Why are technology businesses growing revenue but not profit?
Aidan writes on the commercial questions facing owners of firms in this market.
Read the article →See where your growth really stands.
That starts with an hour of my time: twenty-one questions across the seven areas that shape growth, which I walk through with you. You get back a written view of where your growth stands and where to look first, and it’s yours either way.
If it’s worth going deeper, the first piece of paid work is fixed in price and stands on its own: an independent view of your growth, grounded in your numbers and time with your people rather than in opinion. What happens after that is up to you.
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