Business leaders should focus on multiplicative strategies, not additive ones. A 1-10% improvement on a large company's revenue base means millions of dollars, while building a new app for a small firm adds far less value. Find the leverage points already inside your organization.
Use multiplication for considering how to work with large companies. A small company doesn't have that much of a base, right? So increasing its value about 20% isn't going to be all that much. But if you go into a really large company or even what we might call a medium-sized company, something has millions of dollars at stake, being able to affect them by 20%, forget that, 10%, forget that, even just a few percentage points is going to have a significant impact on their value and on their bottom line, especially if there's any leverage inside the company. So consider how you can be increasing that multiple that you provide, how you can be shifting from a mode where you are just adding value to where you are multiplying value. Now, the really weird thing about multiplication is that those initiatives can look smaller than the additive initiatives that you might do for a small company, right? For a small company, you might be building an app, but for a large company, you don't need to add an app. You take something and make it better. You unlock value. Focus on where you can multiply. It can be easier than you think.
