Guides › Growing an existing business
Growth is the default answer to wanting more profit, and it is the slowest and most expensive one. Four levers act on the business you already have, and all take effect faster than acquisition.
Short answer: Raise prices, shift the mix toward higher-margin work, stop serving unprofitable customers, and remove costs not attached to revenue. These levers increase profit on the volume you already have and produce results in weeks rather than quarters. Start with the mix, since most businesses show wide spreads in profitability across what they sell and to whom.
Raise price. Change the mix towards what earns most. Remove customers or products that lose money. Cut cost that is not attached to revenue.
Each works on existing volume, which means the effect arrives in weeks. Acquisition-led profit growth arrives in quarters and costs money on the way.
Almost every business has a spread of profitability across what it sells and who it sells to, and almost none has looked at it recently. It is common to find the top fifth produces most of the profit and the bottom fifth consumes it.
Shifting effort towards the top requires no price change, no cost cut and no new customers — only knowing which is which.
This question routes to Cost & Margin Improvement — one of 29 engagements the platform runs. It does not produce advice in general; it produces this analysis for your business:
✓ Breaks profitability down by product, customer and channel
✓ Separates costs that scale with revenue from costs that do not
✓ Identifies unprofitable customers and what to do short of firing them
✓ Models the margin effect of a mix shift before you attempt one
✓ Ranks fixes by margin recovered per unit of disruption
✓ Shows the arithmetic, so the case survives challenge
You watch the analysis get built before you pay anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
Raise prices, shift mix towards higher-margin work, stop serving unprofitable customers, and remove costs not attached to revenue. All act on existing volume, so they take effect far faster than growth.
Often, though rarely abruptly. Re-pricing them, reducing what they receive, or moving them to a lower-touch service usually captures most of the benefit while keeping the revenue.
Those that exist to manage other work — rework, chasing, approvals that never reject anything, reports nobody reads. Removing that layer improves quality rather than trading against it.
Describe the situation in your own words and we will tell you which analysis answers it — before you sign up for anything.
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