In working with dozens of founders I've noticed a pattern. Right around the $500K- $1MM mark in annual sales revenue is where founders leave their early struggle kitchen table phase and begin to manage a proven brand, yet operate a more complex business.
At each growth plateau there are new challenges, learning and more bumping your head against the ceiling of your current capability or capacity.
For many founders, it’s at this point in their growth they begin to realize the truth in the cliché “what got you here, won’t get you there”.
Here’s where many founders get stuck.
To scale, they struggle with the dynamic tension between the priorities of operational efficiencies (doing things right) and customer intimacy (doing the right things).
Like a rocket against gravity, they experience more friction, resistance and drag in achieving desired outcomes. They lose clarity and confidence in their strategic and creative focus. And because investors and the marketplace are so unforgiving, they can ill afford to waste precious time and money barking up the wrong tree or climbing their way to the middle.
In an effort to transform their circumstances for the better, some founders will choose to experience the slow frustration of do-it-yourself-self-diagnosis and navel gazing. Not knowing what they don’t know and making little progress at great cost.
Others turn to expensive PR, marketing, advertising and branding firms to produce more marketing stuff with little to no guarantee of success. Truth is most marketing is ignored. This may explain why less than 20% of new food and beverage brands, and less than 15% of new non-food brands will exceed the 7-figure revenue threshold.
It's a high bar.
It’s at this critical growth stage that many founders (perhaps you), have finally reached the point where the pain of spinning your wheels becomes unsustainable.
If you want a way out and up, you’re going to need to increase your understanding and application of a disciplined brand strategy as the foundation on which your bigger future will rest, and a blueprint for how you’ll get there. If you’re committed to converting this blueprint into day-to-day reality, your business will reap these transformative benefits:
• attracting a bigger base of loyal, advocate customers
• increased productivity and retention of talented employees
• attracting the right investment growth partners
• support for premium pricing of your offerings
• greater distribution with strong velocities in sales channels
• more attention from earned social and trade media
• less dependence on advertising and promotion
The result will be a quantum leap in your progress toward breaking through the elusive 7-figure revenue barrier and beyond, and onward to building an influential brand more people love and can’t live without.
If your consumer brand is stuck below or near the 7-figure sales threshold, and you would like to explore how you can develop a strategy to transform your brand to the next level, learn about the Quantum Leap Brand Transformation Strategy Program.
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