How To Grow So Fast In 2026 It Feels ILLEGAL

If you ask any founder what their goals are for next year, most are going to say that they want to at least double their sales. I know just this last week, for example, I was in a strategic planning session with one of our portfolio companies. Now, this company is going to finish at about $5 million in revenue. So I wasn't surprised when they said, well, we're planning to double our sales and get to $10 million in revenue. And look, it's a reasonable goal. Spoiler alert. It almost never does. So in this video, I want to give you an actual step by step playbook for how to actually double your sales. Now, in case you don't know who I am, my name is Ryan Deiss. My partners and I operate a portfolio of companies that together do over $200 million a year in revenue. So the playbook that I'm about to give you, it isn't theory. It is the same decision sequence that we actually use to double revenue without blowing up our company's cash flow, without blowing up our company's culture, and without driving our CEOs insane. All right, now just for context, the business that we're looking to double, they're doing approximately, like I said, $5 million in revenue. As far as customers are concerned, they have right at, you know, around 1,000 customers, which means if you do the math, their average customer value is right at around $5,000. And again, they want to double that from 5 million to there we go to 10 million by the end of the year. So step one, can we double our inputs? Now, inputs are those top of funnel levers. They're things like your ad spend, your outbound email volume, your content and social post frequency partner outreach, stuff like that. Now here's the reality. Doubling sales almost never comes down to doubling just one thing. And you've probably experienced this, maybe you've tried doubling your ad budget, assuming that it's going to double your leads and double your sales. Only discover that when you expand your audience by doubling your ad budget, well, your traffic quality drops, it falls off a cliff, which means that your conversion rate drops, which means you don't get as many leads as you thought that you would get. And well, the leads that you do get, they wind up kind of sucking and they don't even convert, which means that you wind up spending a lot more money just to build a larger list of crappier leads that no one even wants. This is what is known as the law of diminishing returns, which is an economic principle that states that as you add More of one input, like advertising spend or leads to a fixed input, like your landing page conversion rate or your sales team's conversion rate, the output, that is your sales, will eventually decrease. In other words, with each additional increase in input, you're going to yield less and less output over time. Now, the law of diminishing returns, it is very real and it is not your friend. That said, you should still seek to increase your inputs as long as you can do so when you without running up against the law of diminishing returns. So for this company, the input that we chose to start with was ad spend. But instead of doubling our ad spend, we modeled a modest 20% increase and only on the one channel that had consistently produced qualified leads and customers. And our assumption was simple. We believe that we could increase spend by 20% without degrading lead quality or conversion rates. In other words, without seeing those pesky diminishing returns that I just talked about. But with this plan, we didn't need to test new channels. We didn't need to build out any new funnels. We didn't need to reinvent anything new at all. We just needed to send a little more volume through a path that we already trusted. Now, if these downstream numbers hold, and we believe that we will, if we can get a 20% increase in ad spend, we believe that that will yield a 20% increase in the number of customers, which means we get go from 1000 customers to 1200 customers. 1200 customers at a $5000 average customer value means that we go from 5 million to 6 million in revenue. We're still not at our $10 million mark that we want to get to. We're still quite a bit away from that goal. But fortunately we have three more steps to go through. So let's move on to step two. Now, can we double our average customer value? And this is where leverage really starts to show up. As you' to see now, average customer value is only going to move. It's only going to be impacted in three different ways. Number one, customers can buy more of what you already have to sell. Number two, customers can stay longer. And number three, customers can buy new higher value offerings, Upsells, cross sells, things like that. Now, as of this planning cycle, the business that we were talking about already had a handful of AI related products and service offerings and ranging from $2,000 to $10,000. Again, the average customer value was around that $5,000 mark. Now, we talked about raising prices, which is generally when you're thinking about raising acv. That's where I'm going to encourage you to start. Can we raise prices? If you can raise prices just a little bit, it's the easiest thing you can do that's going to have an immediate impact on average customer value, effectively getting them to spend more on what you already have to sell. But in this case, everyone felt that we were already at a premium for the typ and services that we were offering. So we said, nah, that's not really the best place to go. We also discussed adding a subscription component to the business. Could we get them to stay longer? Could we enable reorders? But unfortunately, this is the kind of business that once the service is delivered, once the client kind of has the thing, they don't really need us anymore. So if price increases are out and if repurchases and subscriptions don't really make sense, then the next way that we're going to look to double our average customer value is by creating a 10x for 10% offer. Now, the idea behind a 10x for 10% offer is simple. We want to build a premium solution priced meaningfully higher than our core offer. Ideally 10x, the price of our core offer that only needs to convert with a small percentage of our best customers. Again, ideally around 10%, hence the name 10x for 10%. And the reason that 10x for 10% is matters is because if you can get 10% of your customer base to spend 10 times as much, run the numbers, you've effectively doubled your average customer value. Now, for this company, we didn't feel like we could go 10x, the current average, you know, we're currently sitting at around 5,000. We didn't really feel like we could go all the way up to 50,000. So we modeled a $30,000 premium service. And while we wish that it would convert at 10%, we didn't feel like that was reasonable either. So we felt like 5% was more of a conservative. Bit more of a conservative estimate. But do the math. If we can get that $30,000 service to convert with just 5% of our customers, we're going to effectively increase our customer value by 30%. So we're going to take our $5,000 customer value, we're going to get that increased by 30%, which means that instead of 5,000, it is now worth 6,500. And if we had 1200 customers times 6,500, well, now we're getting up to $7.8 million. Not too shabby. But we're still not to our $10 million goal. So let's move on to step three can are conversion rates. Now, most founders think that conversion is all about persuasion. It's all about being the best marketer, or it's about building a team of just stone cold closers. A always BBC closing, always be closing. In reality, it's not about any of those things. If you want to increase your conversion rates, what it's actually about is about eliminating all of the little, often invisible bottlenecks that are in your customer journey. So when we think about ways that we can double our conversion rates, we don't start by testing new sales scripts or God forbid, by rebuilding the company homepage. Please don't do that. The number of companies who say, oh, this year we need to redesign our company homepage is through the roof. Don't do that. Instead, what we do is we start by mapping our company's growth engine. So what is a growth engine? I'm going to show you what you're looking at right here. This is a growth engine. It is a simple flowchart that visualizes how customers happen from the initial point of awareness to when they become a lead, to how that lead is nurtured and when that lead finally does become a customer or a client. And again, when you do this for yourself, it's going to look something like this. And the way that we go about mapping this is pretty simple. We're just going to say, okay, where does this start? How do we create awareness? So we're going to put some sticky notes for that. You can see in the case of this company, they're running, you know, Facebook and Instagram ads and Google Ads. You know, we're going to go to the purchase and we're just going to say, what are all the things that happen between the point of awareness and purchase? Once we have that mapped out, amazing. Congratulations. You have mapped your growth engine. Now, once this has been visualized, then we're simply going to ask, where in this step, where in this process is the system slowing itself down? Where is it getting bogged down? Where are the bottlenecks? And we identify small, practical improvements. Now, in the case of our portfolio company, we realized that we needed clear qualification rules. We had a lot of leads that were getting gummed up in the process because we didn't quite know how to qualify certain leads versus other leads. We also realized that we needed simpler pricing. We also realized that we needed faster handoffs between the setters and the closers. There were no heroics, there were no silver bullets, and it didn't require us to rebuild any major assets. Now, we estimate that the changes that we put in place are going to increase the conversion rate by about 25% across the board. But instead of getting the 1200 customers that we were getting before, this new growth engine should produce 1500 customers. Now, let's do the math. 1500 times this. 6500. If you run that math now, what you get is 9.75 million. Now, this step almost got us to our $10 million goal, but we're still not quite there yet. Fortunately, there is one last step, and it should more than put us over the line. So for the last step, step four, we're going to ask the question, can we double our audience size? Now, audience expansion is without a doubt the riskiest lever of all, which is why we save it for the very end. It is expensive, it introduces a ton of unknowns, and it's frankly where shiny object syndrome can really take over. I mean, when it comes to audience expansion, you could pretty much do anything. You could try a new channel, you could launch new products. You could do dang near anything. So we wanted to be careful. Instead of trying to double our audience through some massive repositioning and category redesign exercise, we're simply going to test a slightly broader market. Now, currently, this particular business offers AI products to marketing agencies and small marketing teams. But starting next year, we're going to broaden it out to include sales teams. Ooh, big breakthrough, right? No, in reality, it's the exact same story. We're saying that you can leverage the power of AI to grow your sales. We're promising the same outcome to double your sales using AI. We're making the same basic positioning that we're experts in sales and marketing, and now we're making our AI bots and agents available to you. The only difference is it's just a slightly bigger pond because sales teams are generally larger than marketing teams. Now for Right. That modest expansion could add another 10 to 25% in volume. If we're wrong, it should easily get us another, you know, 5 to 10% in volume. That this is kind of like worst case scenario. Either way, if we take this like, let's say kind of 10% and you add that to the 9.75%, well, we're easily going to be north of our $10 million goal, right? It's pretty safe to say that we're going to be well above that. We didn't have to double ads, we didn't have to double our staff, we didn't have to double our stress we didn't have to double really anything in particular. The best part is because we're leveraging four levers and not just one. We could be a little bit wrong on any one of these or heck we can be a little bit wrong on all of them and we can still hit our goals because none of these moves are dramatic on their own but stacked in the right order they compound and that is how doubling actually happens. Look, if you like this and you want more practical tips on how to scale your business without sacrificing your soul, be sure to subscribe. And if you want our help implementing anything that I talk about on this channel, be sure to check out the description for a link with more information about how we work one on one with business owners just like you to help you go from where you are to where you want to be. Scale a lot faster. Achieve your ideal exit. Love to work with you till next time. See you in the next one.