The Grow Phase: Make It Strategic
Chapter 3 of Start to Exit: The Bizer Blueprint.
By Build your systems produce numbers. Grow is where you use those numbers to steer instead of guess. This is the band where a business stops merely surviving and starts compounding. Clear Grow across all four pillars and your Bizer Score reaches 400.
Money: Financial Strategy
Look forward, not just back. Keep a simple dashboard of a few key metrics, track your growth rate and both margins over time, and build a forecast so surprises become plans. A 12-month cash-flow view lets you fund growth without a crunch. Break-Even tells you how much new volume a price change or a hire actually needs.
Customers: Customer Expansion
Now optimize the economics. Know what it costs to acquire a customer and what a customer is worth over time, analyze which channels actually pay off, and build a real way to keep customers coming back. The Campaign ROI and Customer Worth skills turn marketing from a cost you hope works into a number you can manage.
Work: Operational Efficiency
Sharpen the machine. Document detailed procedures, create training material, add a quality-control step, and measure operational metrics so you can see the efficiency you gain. This is where the work gets measured and improved, not just done.
Management: Leadership Systems
Grow leaders, not just workers. Run strategic and quarterly planning, hold leadership meetings, set up an accountability system with owners and scorecards, and start delegating real responsibility to managers.
Prove it at altitude
Grow factors are mostly judgment calls, so back the big ones with real evidence, an advisor, or your accountant. That is what keeps a high score credible to a lender or a buyer. Next chapter: Exit: make it run without you.
