What Is a Growth Practice?
Your departments pass their checkups. Your growth doesn't. Here's who looks at the whole company.
Something’s wrong and nobody can say what. You turn to a specialist, then another. Each one looks at their own piece and comes up with their own solution. But nobody looks at the whole patient. You end up with three prescriptions and the same symptoms.
When it’s serious, you stop shopping for opinions. You go to a practice.
A good physician examines you before prescribing anything, has seen your symptoms many times before, and is accountable for the treatment, not just an opinion. The best ones also teach you to manage your own health, so you are not back every month. That is what a growth practice does for a company that has stopped growing.
Most stalled companies have already seen the specialists. A new sales leader. An agency. New software. A conference for the team. Every one was a reasonable call, and every one treated a piece. Nobody looked at the whole company.
Every department passes its own checkup.
The company still isn't growing.
The Old Model Is In Pieces
Most companies grow by department. Marketing creates demand. Sales sells. Finance counts. Operations delivers. Each has its own leader, budget and scorecard. That’s why every department can pass its own checkup. Each scorecard only measures a piece. None of them measures what happens when a lead moves from marketing to sales, and a closed deal moves to operations while the forecast moves to finance and becomes a hiring plan.
Those handoffs are where growth leaks.
The numbers back that up. Bain & Company studied 8,000 companies and found that only one in eight achieves its growth targets over a decade. It also found that 85 percent of the barriers to profitable growth are internal and manageable. Not the market. Not the economy. Inside the building.
The good news? What’s inside the building can be fixed. It just can’t be fixed one piece at a time.
The problem is rarely inside just one department. It sits somewhere between them; in the handoffs nobody owns. Fixing pieces never fixes that.
What a Growth Practice Does
Trifecta’s growth practice is Brian Talbot and Gary Rust, working the same problem from two sides toward one answer. They work inside your company, with your people, on one problem: lack of consistent growth.
Diagnose first. It asks your leadership team the hard questions people inside the building cannot and finds the real constraint wherever it lives.
Use the team you have. Most stalled companies have capable people inside a system that is not working. Fix the system, and the same people deliver more.
Treat the company as one system. Sales, marketing, finance and people win or lose together.
Build to end. Success is your team running it without us.
That work runs about six months. We diagnose the constraint, build the fix with your team, run it alongside them, then hand it over. It’s the most effective and sustainable way of achieving the results you’re looking for.
The Formula Behind It
Growth = [(Pipeline × Conversion × Team Capacity) × Traction] ÷ Drag
Most companies measure only the engine: pipeline, conversion and capacity.
Traction is how much of a leadership decision survives the trip to the customer. It multiplies the growth engine.
Drag is the rework, unowned work, lack of communication, unstable workflows, employees never fully bought into the strategy, decisions made twice and fear. All of it eats effort without producing motion. Drag divides the growth engine.
A growth practice finds the drag and builds the traction across the company, not just in the department that happens to be missing its number.
The Return Is Clear
Consistent growth is the hardest problem a company has to solve. Hiring Trifecta puts senior expertise focused on helping you with the solution, without adding a permanent line to your payroll.
Do the math on your own business.
On a $30 million company, every point of added growth is $300,000 a year, and it compounds.
The inverse is true as well. A forecast that misses by 10 percent on a $30 million plan is creating a $3 million deficit.
In a tight-margin business, you just can’t accept that type of performance very long.
Bain found that the average company loses more than 20 percent of its people's productive capacity, which it describes as more than a day a week. They call it "organizational drag." That is time burned on things like unnecessary meetings, slow approvals, unclear decision rights and work that bounces between departments. People are busy, but that day doesn't move the business forward. We just call it drag.
Recover even a fraction of that, and the math is not close.
The return clearly outweighs the cost. Here's an illustration of the additional benefit of increasing traction and reducing drag:
A company with 50 employees at an average fully loaded cost of $100,000 has a $5 million payroll.
If 20 percent of that time is lost to drag, that's about $1 million a year of capacity paid for and wasted.
Win back just a quarter of it and you've recovered about $250,000 a year, every year.
And the return does not stop when we leave, because the expertise does not leave with us. We build it with your team and make sure your team can successfully run it. Your people, teams and company come out better than before we started.
Run the Whole-Company Checkup
Every department in your company has passed its own checkup. This one checks the whole company.
Before you bring in anyone, Trifecta included, find out which kind of problem you have.
It takes about twenty minutes. Put your leadership team in a room: the owner, whoever leads sales, whoever leads marketing, and whoever keeps the books. Each person writes down their answers alone before anyone talks.
Is the problem inside one department, or between departments? Name where growth is actually getting stuck.
Who owns the whole revenue number? Not sales revenue. Not marketing pipeline. The whole number, from first contact to cash. Write down one name.
Would a new hire walk into the same broken handoff the last one did? Think about the last seat you filled to fix growth. Did the problem leave with the person you replaced, or is it still waiting at the desk?
Then read the answers out loud.
Here’s what usually happens. Question one splits the room, with each leader pointing somewhere different. Question two produces more than one name, a long pause, or “well, all of us.” Question three gets a quiet yes.
How to read it:
If the answers agree and point inside one department, you probably need a hire or a specialist. Go get one.
If they point between departments, name more than one owner, or disagree with each other, another specialist won’t fix it. You need a system.
Pay attention to the disagreement itself. Four leaders giving four different answers to question one isn’t noise. That’s the handoff problem, showing up in the room.
If four leaders give four different answers, you just found the handoff.
What You Should Expect From Anyone You Hire
Leave the team better than you found it. Leave results that keep coming after the invoice stops. Leave a system that keeps performing.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should have for anyone you hire.
The right engagement is one you are glad you paid for. The best one leaves you wishing you had started sooner.
When it's serious, you stop shopping for opinions.
Wherever Growth Is Stuck
Stalled growth can start anywhere: in the pipeline, the message, the forecast, or a leadership team that agrees in the room and drifts apart by Monday. A growth practice finds it, fixes it with your people, and leaves them able to keep it fixed.
If your company has stalled and you cannot point to the one thing holding it back, let's talk.
Find out whether we can help in 30-minutes.
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