The Growth Rate Most Businesses Should Actually Aim For

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This is the same framework and numbers I have used over the last 14 years to grow my most successful businesses from SaaS to my education company to my media company. And each of these steps are important, but step 3 is the most crucial if you want to avoid failure creeping up on you and surprising you and making you go out of business. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff, practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Let's start with step 1: measure growth on the right timeline. This is where most people go wrong at the start. If you're early stage, if you're under 7 figures in revenue, monthly growth tracking will mess with your head. Trust me, I know. Why does this happen? Because there's just too much noise and there's too much emotion when you go month to month and there's just not enough data. One slow month can feel like a failure and one good month can feel like you're a genius, right? Neither is true. What you should track instead is quarterly growth. Once you go past $1 million in revenue, then you can go monthly. But at the start, quarterly gives you enough time to see real trends, to see if you're moving in the right direction. It has enough room to, to test ideas for a 3-month period. There's enough distance from the day-to-day chaos for you to actually see if growth is really happening. Quarterly tracking keeps you rational, and not reactive. Okay. You're really starting to understand that, okay, what I'm doing today is going to impact my business in the next 3 months. And we're going to see that in that quarterly growth period. Now, again, once you cross that million dollars in revenue, then and only then does monthly growth really start to matter because now you have small percentages that will equal big dollars. You have more at stake here and you need to have a closer eye month to month and efficiency matters more here. Also, cash flow timing becomes critical when you're at that million-plus mark. So as a rule of thumb, if you're early stage and making less than $1 million annually, then you want to track your growth quarterly. Now, if you're making more than $1 million in revenue a year, then you want to track monthly. This creates a simple, calm, sustainable system for you to track growth. Well, then you might be saying to yourself, well, okay, Omar, but how much should I be growing each quarter? That leads us to step 2. Step 2 is all about the number, the actual number that will move the needle for your business. Now I want to give you a number that actually makes sense. Now every business is different and maybe your number's a little higher, a little lower, but I want to give you something to work with. Okay. So I have found that 10% growth per quarter is a good place to aim for at the start. And then you can adjust, maybe you're blasting past that and then you can adjust your quarterly growth number. But the point here is, is that 10% is actually a good number and you're going to see why, because the math will math. 10% is not flashy, it's not reckless, but it's still good enough of a challenge. And more importantly, you're playing offense. At 10% per quarter, compounding does something powerful. Your business will double roughly every 2 years, which is a good target. So you don't have to wait 5 or 10 years for your business to double. 2 years, 24 months. Now here's why this matters. 10% per quarter in growth roughly equals 46% growth per year. Compounding accelerates fast when you're consistent, and that's why quarter over quarter you're going to start seeing this growth just exponentially grow. So this is what it looks like in real life. Say for example, you're doing $250,000 in revenue a year. In just 2 years, you're going to make half a million dollars in revenue if you maintain that 10% growth quarter over quarter. And this is why I like 10%, because it's achievable to do consistently. You want to do at least 10% every single quarter. Maybe some quarters you're gonna go 15% or 14%, and your numbers will even go higher. But I'd like to go for at least 10%, so I know that that is the finish line for every quarter. I like steady, intentional improvement over drastic improvement, because when you have drastic growth, you have to service that growth, meaning you have to hire, you have to find more supply, you need to build out better infrastructure, whether that's servers or even a physical space. The point here is, is that when you grow steadily 10% quarter over quarter, you predict the growth and the things you will need to service that growth and able to support your business. And here's the part most people miss. 10% quarterly growth is not about doing more and hustling harder. It's about doing things slightly better each time. That means doing a little bit better with converting your customers into a sale, right? Converting a little higher, retaining a little longer, keeping your customers for longer, charging a little bit more. Removing a little bit of friction for your customers when they use your product or service. When you're stacking those gains, time does the heavy lifting for you. What you want to do is you want to create a business that time is on your side, that if you just consistently do what you're supposed to do, as time goes on, your business starts to grow. Just like you're investing in the stock market. This is how serious businesses scale without imploding. Running a business is complicated.

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And with AI-powered shortlisting, you can get matched to the right freelancer in under 6 hours. No endless searching required. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, upwork.com. If this episode's resonating with you, you wanna make sure you subscribe to the show, cuz I have an upcoming episode that I'm working on that's all about the debate of remote work versus office work. I'm doing this research right now. We find out the real reason CEOs in big companies these days hate remote work and want everyone back into the office and why I'm doing the same, why I'm building a local office here in Sydney. Subscribe so you don't miss it so that you get it immediately in your feed when it comes out. Step 3, and this is the most crucial step, and this is the part that people don't like to hear, but it is critical. And that you need to remember that if your business is flat quarter over quarter, that means 2 quarters in a row, 6 months in a row, flat, no growth. That's not stability. That's decline in slow motion. At this point in your mind, in your business, you should be firing the alarms, right? Everything should be red alert right now because this is the beginning of the end if you don't do something about it. Trust me, I know I've seen businesses go down. My own businesses when I first got started, started out where things are just flatlining. They're not growing, they're just the same. And I didn't take different types of actions to really address this issue. And therefore the business tanked. Now you might be saying, why does this happen? Omar, it's just flat. I'm not like declining. I'm not getting less sales. Well, let me tell you why. Because costs go up over time. Competition improves. Customer expectations start to rise as time goes on. Technology keeps moving. Standing still is losing ground. You have to be gaining ground just to stay afloat. And I'm telling you right now, I don't want you to get it twisted. Growth doesn't always mean, you know, running more ads or creating more content or adding more stress on your plate, right? No, it often in my experience means you just need to have better retention to keep your customers coming back for more, better pricing, better offers, better focus with you and your team. In my opinion, if you have 2 quarters in a row that it's flatlined, you have no growth, you need to call all hands meeting with all your team members and say, guys, we're at war. It's wartime right now. We need to do everything we can to have a growth quarter next quarter, and we need to grow back at 10% minimum. Let's do what we need to do. What are some things that we can do so that we can get more customers, retain more customers, improve our product or service, improve our awareness? Have better customer support. You really got to focus and make something happen because a third quarter of flatlining could be a death sentence. Listen, I'm not here to make it all doom and gloom and depress you. No, but I'm giving you a warning that I never got when I got started. And I wasted a lot of time and money in businesses that failed. And I didn't see the early warning signs and the numbers don't lie. This is why it's so important to track your growth because when you track your numbers, you can see in black and white if you're doing well or not. And if you're not doing well, You know, you need to take action. And remember, the goal isn't just revenue here. You want to make sure that you're profitable. You want to make sure that you have a great team that you love working with every day. You have a great culture that is sustainable, that you're building a great product that your customers love, that you're actually making an impact on the world so that you're enjoying what you're doing. And the reason why I say 10% and now you should be growing 50% month over month. Now, a lot of people will say that, and I think that's actually bad advice. Sustainable growth. Gives you time to think. It gives you room to breathe and margin for mistake, so that if you make a mistake, if you make a bad choice, it's not disastrous. And that's how real businesses last. I want you to do an experiment after this episode. Go on ChatGPT, go on any AI app you want to use, and do a little research on companies that are over 100 years old, okay? Companies have been around for a long time, or around that time. Let's say, for example, like Coca-Cola, and ask the AI, how much has this company grown on average month over month or quarter over quarter or year over year? And you could do the math. The point here is that you're going to notice that it's not exponential growth quarter over quarter or month over month. You're going to find out it's small growth over time. And the reason why they're able to sustain themselves is because of that. Plenty of businesses boomed and grew exponentially in a short period of time and are gone now. They're ancient history. So you gotta be wary of the fact that I need to grow, but I need to grow in a sustainable way. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: you don't need explosive growth. You need consistent growth and you just period need growth. Okay? No Stacys. There's no Stacys in life and in business, right? You don't stay the same. You're either growing or you're dying. So make sure you're on the offense and you're growing. Small gains. Applied relentlessly every single quarter or every month will beat big swings every day of the week. The bottom line is no growth is the real danger. So make sure you're always in the plus column. If you want to turn what you learned today into action, you need to check out an episode that we published earlier this year called 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Take Action, because in that episode I show you step by step how to get off your rear end and make things happen in your business. Because growth doesn't come from knowing, it comes from doing. Thanks so much for being a subscriber and being a part of our community here at The 100 Day MBA. Keep growing deliberately. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

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