The Growth Hidden Inside Your Business
Hi there
This week I have been musing on how most businesses already contain more growth than their systems can release. The answer is not another channel, product or hire. It is removing the friction that stops good work compounding.
I hope you find the following articles inspiring…
The next AI advantage may be operational
Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion to acquire services businesses and rebuild how they operate with AI. The interesting part is the model: buy established companies with customers, revenue and industry knowledge, then improve the machinery underneath them. That is a more grounded proposition than starting with technology and searching for a market. It also raises the standard for existing owners. A buyer may increasingly value not just your earnings, but how readily your workflows can be measured, redesigned and automated. For founders, the question is becoming: how legible is the operating system behind the numbers? Read the article here.
Print earns attention by refusing to disappear
ASOS is relaunching its magazine as part of its autumn campaign, which feels counterintuitive for a business built online. That is precisely why it is interesting. Digital distribution is efficient, but efficiency has made many feeds interchangeable. A physical object creates a different kind of encounter: finite, designed and harder to swipe past. Every brand should ask whether its chosen format still signals care and distinctiveness. Sometimes the strongest marketing move is not another message in the busiest channel, but a better experience in a less crowded one. Read the article here.
Buyers need to diligence the founder-shaped gaps
A useful M&A piece argues that conventional due diligence often misses how much of a company lives inside the founder’s head. The accounts can be clean, contracts orderly and pipeline convincing, while crucial judgement still depends on one person remembering which customer needs reassurance or which supplier agreement has hidden flexibility. This matters on both sides of a deal. Buyers need to test how decisions are really made, not merely inspect documents. Sellers need to turn situational awareness into systems before going to market. A business becomes more transferable when its judgement, relationships and routines can survive the founder’s departure. Read the article here.
AI adoption is spreading beyond engineering
OpenAI’s latest enterprise data says Codex usage is growing fastest in functions such as legal, sales, recruitment and marketing, rather than only software engineering. Vendor data deserves a measured reading, but the direction makes sense. Most organisations do not lack isolated AI experiments. They lack repeatable workflows that move from assistance to execution. The practical lesson for smaller businesses is to stop asking where AI might be interesting and start looking for work that is frequent, structured and easy to check. A weekly reporting process may be a better first target than an ambitious autonomous agent. Useful adoption begins with a dependable unit of work, not a grand transformation slogan. Read the article here.
A brand inflection point demands sharper choices
Rhone’s new marketing leadership is trying to move the apparel company through a broader stage of growth without losing what made the brand credible. That is a familiar tension for founder-led businesses. Early customers often buy into specificity, while scale creates pressure to widen the message until nobody feels excluded. The danger is that broader becomes blander. Growth requires finding more people who value the same core promise, not sanding away the promise to appeal to everyone. The strongest brands expand their reach while keeping a recognisable point of view. If your positioning could be copied into a competitor’s deck unchanged, it probably needs another round of work. Read the article here.
Retention deserves its own growth system
An article on customer revenue growth makes a distinction I like: retention and expansion should be managed with the same intent as acquisition. Too many companies build detailed funnels for winning a customer, then rely on goodwill and heroic account management to keep them. That leaves valuable growth to chance. Existing customers provide evidence about where value is real, where delivery creates friction and what adjacent problems they would pay to solve. The point is not to squeeze more revenue from every account. It is to design a better rhythm of onboarding, value reviews, renewal signals and relevant expansion. Compounding starts when customer success becomes a system rather than a sentiment. Read the article here.
Better work starts by removing operational friction
One workplace analysis argues that the next phase of employee experience will focus less on adding digital capabilities and more on simplifying execution across fragmented tools and workflows. That rings true. Businesses often respond to a performance problem by adding another platform, meeting or reporting layer. Each addition seems reasonable alone, while the combined system becomes harder to navigate. Leaders should treat friction as a measurable operating cost. How many approvals does routine work require? How often is the same information re-entered? Where does ownership become ambiguous? Removing one recurring obstacle can create more capacity than another productivity initiative. Read the article here.
HR is becoming a systems discipline
An overview of workforce trends suggests the future HR function will be part human strategist and part systems architect. That is a useful description because many people problems are also design problems. Confused priorities, duplicated administration and weak feedback loops cannot be solved by encouragement alone. Smaller companies rarely need a grand HR transformation, but they do need someone to examine how work moves through the organisation. Where do capable people wait for decisions? Which processes create avoidable conflict? What information arrives too late? Treating employee experience as an operating system does not make leadership less human. It gives people a better environment in which to do good work. Read the article here.
Customer behaviour is better evidence than opinion
A guide to customer insight recommends linking recurring business decisions to a stable mix of feedback, behaviour, operational data and market evidence. The distinction is useful because dashboards tell us what happened, but rarely explain why. Founders can overvalue direct customer opinions and undervalue observed behaviour. People may say they want more choice while repeatedly buying the simplest package. They may praise a feature without using it, or complain about price while renewing promptly. The best decisions join both forms of evidence: what customers say, what they do and the context in which they choose. Before changing a proposition, look for the behavioural contradiction. That is often where the most valuable insight sits. Read the article here.
AI prompt of the week: find hidden growth
This prompt is designed to identify growth already trapped inside your current customers, processes and proposition. Use real numbers where possible, and ask the AI to separate evidence from assumptions.
Act as an experienced SME growth adviser. Help me find growth that is already present in my business but blocked by friction, weak retention, unclear pricing or founder dependency.
Business: [describe the company, customers, offer and business model]. Current revenue and margin: [figures]. Main acquisition channels: [channels]. Retention or repeat-purchase data: [data]. Team and key founder dependencies: [details]. Current pricing: [packages and prices]. Biggest operational frustrations: [list].
Create:
1. A diagnosis of the five most likely sources of trapped growth, ranked by potential impact and confidence.
2. The evidence I should gather to confirm or reject each diagnosis.
3. One low-cost experiment for each opportunity, including owner, metric, timeframe and stop condition.
4. A 30-day action plan that prioritises no more than three initiatives.
5. A list of seductive but distracting growth ideas I should postpone, with a short explanation for each.
Do not give generic advice. State every assumption, distinguish revenue growth from profit growth and flag any recommendation that could damage customer trust or increase founder dependency.
Drop me a line
If one of these ideas helps you spot friction that has been hiding in plain sight, do reply and tell me what you found. I read every response, and the examples readers share often sharpen my own thinking for the next issue. I hope you find a useful improvement to make this week.
Cheers!
Adam