Principle 3: Smart Growth: Fix Your Bottom 5%, Back Your Top 5%
TLDR:
Trying to fix everything in a business at once creates the feeling of momentum, but usually just makes everyone busier without moving the business forward.
The fastest path to growth is picking your two weakest points and your two strongest, and giving those your full attention before moving to the next two.
Fixing a small, persistent problem frees up capacity across the whole business. Backing something already working well is often faster and cheaper than launching something new.
This isn't a one-off fix. Once you sort today's weak spot and strong spot, a new pair shows up, so it becomes an ongoing habit rather than a project with an end date.
We've seen businesses with big ambitions - launch a new product line, increase hiring, migrate their CRM, rebrand, push into a new market. Not over years, but within a quarter. It feels like momentum but in reality it's just busy. Fixing everything at once isn't growing smartly.
Take your best people and split their attention across 10 things - do you get 10x the business growth or are your best people so stretched that nothing actually moves. Time and time again we see this play out in businesses, and the latter is normally what happens. The business ends up exactly where it started, just more tired.
Smart Growth is our fix, and it's almost annoyingly simple: pick two things, focus on them then move onto the next two. Not ten at the same time, not a quarter of momentum that becomes a year of unfinished initiatives. .
Instead of spreading the effort evenly across the business, start by identify the the bottom 5%, and top 5% - fixing these two will move the needle in your business faster than the ten will. .
Find the leak first.
It's rarely the problem that comes up in every meeting, the one everyone already has opinions on. It's smaller than that. Maybe it's the pricing error nobody's corrected, the onboarding step that loses a customer every month, the report that takes four hours to build by hand every week. It's a small change that's never felt urgent enough to focus on but it has a flow on effect. The pricing issue is revenue left on the table, the manual report is time that could be spent elsewhere in the business. Your bottom 5% might not seem like a big problem, but it's persistent enough that it's been costing you the whole time. Fix it, or cut it out completely, and the rest of the business gets noticeably easier to run.
Then find what's already flying.
You're already great at it, but it's usually the one that always gets skippedbecause it doesn't ask for attention. It's working as it is, so it gets left alone while everyone deals with the fires elsewhere. But the thing already succeeding on its own is usually your fastest and easiest path to accelerate growth. Give it the time, attention, resource, or the marketing spend it's earned, and it'll often repay you faster than anything new you would launch from scratch.
That's Smart Growth. Focus on two areas and lift both your bottom 5%, and top 5%. You don't need a whiteboard session, the business already has the answers. Just real focus on the two spots that actually move the dial, and permission to leave the rest alone for now.
Why these two areas?
Smart growth is all about working smarter, not harder. So why these two spots specifically. They're the ones that will give you the biggest returns, with the least effort. Effort spread across the middle of the business, the stuff that's fine, ticking along, neither broken nor brilliant, gets you very little back for the time you put in. It's already close to as good as it's going to get without a lot more extra work. The bottom 5% and the top 5% are where a small amount of effort buys the biggest possible return. Fixing the leak removes a drag that's been quietly capping everything above it. Backing the strength adds growth on top of growth that's already proven it compounds. Pound for pound, hour for hour, nowhere else in the business will your effort go further. That's the whole reason to look there first.
Once both shift, don't stop there. Find the next 5% at the bottom. Find the next 5% at the top.
Smart Growth is't about the most glamourous work, it's about growing your business by focusing on the right things. And it works. We've seen it across industries, and across business stages or sizes. businesses [examples]
The businesses that grow the fastest aren't working harder than everyone else. They're aiming better, and working smarter.
Want to learn more about Smart Growth? Get in touch about Business Growth School and see how we can help you grow your business, smarter.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I actually find my bottom 5% if it's not the obvious problem?
Ignore what's loud for a second and look for what's persistent instead. The obvious problem already has everyone's attention, which usually means someone's already working on it. The real bottom 5% is the thing that's been sitting there for months, never quite bad enough to fix, always just bad enough to cost you. Ask your team what they quietly work around every week. That's usually it.
Won't focusing on my top 5% mean neglecting everything else?
No, and this is the bit that gets missed. You're not pulling resource away from the rest of the business, you're adding a bit of deliberate attention to the one thing already proving it deserves it. The best-performing product, channel or person usually gets left alone because nothing's on fire there. Backing it properly is usually the cheapest growth sitting in the business right now.
Is this a one-off exercise, or something I keep doing?
Ongoing. Fix today's bottom 5%, back today's top 5%, and a new bottom 5% and a new top 5% will show up. That's not the framework failing, that's it working as intended. Smart Growth is a habit of where you point your attention, not a project with an end date.
How is this different from just fixing whatever feels most urgent?
Urgent and important aren't the same thing. Fixing the loudest fire keeps the peace for a week, but it doesn't guarantee you're working on what's actually holding the business back or what's actually carrying it. Smart Growth forces you to separate what's shouting from what's actually true, and it's usually a different list entirely.
Doesn't the top 5% just stay the top 5% forever, and the bottom 5% just get replaced by whatever's next in line?
Yes, and that's the design. Fix today's bottom 5% and something else becomes the new one, hopefully something smaller than what you just dealt with. Back today's top 5% and it lifts the baseline for the whole business, which means the next top 5% has further to climb from. The list is meant to move. If it stayed still, the business would be too.
