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Growth Strategy: Find the Constraint Before You Chase More Growth

A city skyline reflected in glass with a person visible in the foreground, illustrating a business growth strategy focused on removing bottlenecks.

Most businesses can produce a long list of things they could do to grow.

The harder question is which one actually matters.

Should we spend more on marketing? Hire salespeople? Add a product? Raise capital? Enter a new geography? Acquire a competitor? Change pricing? Build partnerships?

Without diagnosis, growth strategy becomes a collection of activities.

I prefer to start with the constraint.

If demand is strong but delivery capacity is maxed out, more marketing can make the business worse. If the product is weak, a bigger sales team amplifies rejection. If customers love the product but nobody knows it exists, distribution may be the constraint. If opportunities are everywhere but the company cannot finance them, capital may be the bottleneck.

Growth becomes much easier to think about once you identify what is actually limiting it.

Choose the engine

There are only so many fundamental ways a business grows: more customers, more value per customer, greater frequency, new products, new markets, new channels, partnerships or acquisitions.

You do not need all of them at once.

I would rather have one or two growth engines the company understands deeply than eight initiatives competing for resources.

Then I want to know the economics. What does growth cost? How quickly does it pay back? What additional people, systems and working capital does it require? Does each incremental dollar of growth create value or simply create a larger company?

That distinction is important. Scale is not automatically value creation.

Build the system around the opportunity

Once the constraint and growth engine are clear, resources can align around them.

People. Capital. Marketing. Technology. Partnerships. Measurement.

This is why growth strategy belongs inside the larger Business Strategy & Corporate Transformation framework. Growth is rarely an isolated function. It is the output of an organization whose strategy and resources are pointed in the same direction.

Sometimes the highest-leverage growth move is organic. Sometimes it is a strategic acquisition. Sometimes it is a partnership. And sometimes the best growth decision is to stop doing something so the company can concentrate on what already works.

Continue exploring

This article is part of my Business & Strategy authority series. Continue with Business & Strategy hub, How I Evaluate an Acquisition Target Before Getting Excited About the Deal, Founder & CEO Decision-Making: How I Think When There Is No Perfect Answer and Corporate Turnarounds: How I Think About Fixing a Business That Isn't Working.

Chad McMillan

Chad McMillan is a creative entrepreneur and strategic advisor with over 20 years of experience in and around the capital markets, focused on finding hidden potential in companies, ideas, markets and people, and advancing what they can become.