A Simple Framework for Structuring a Growth Program

Connecting Revenue Growth and Operational Improvement

At one time or another, many organisations find themselves under pressure to grow revenue. Costs may be rising faster than income, a traditional revenue stream may be declining, or the organisation may have simply recognised that it needs to become more financially sustainable.

When that happens, the common instinct is to look for big, high-profile ideas to turn things around: new products, new services, new channels, new markets or major partnerships.

This is understandable. New initiatives seem to offer a path to new sources of untapped demand. They are also exciting, capture executive attention and tend to generate enthusiasm. However, they also tend to be the highest-risk, highest-cost path to growth. Moreover, making high-profile initiatives work requires a deep understanding of your business and your customers — an understanding that organisations under pressure may not yet possess.

Trying to solve a structural growth problem with a large, unproven initiative can also disrupt what is already working, while committing significant money and resources before there is evidence that the idea will succeed.

For organisations facing such a challenge, there is a simpler, more practical and, I believe, more powerful place to start.

The Three Multipliers of Growth

In his classic book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, growth and marketing strategist Jay Abraham breaks revenue growth down into three fundamental dimensions:

Increase the number of customers.
Increase the average value of each sale.
Increase the frequency with which customers buy.

I came across Abraham’s framework after I had already experienced, in practice, the value of starting with smaller growth opportunities. His model gave me a useful way of understanding why that approach could work.

As Abraham highlights, the real power of the model isn’t just the three separate dimensions, it is the multiplying effect between them.

For example, if an organisation is targeting 20% revenue growth and tries to achieve it entirely through a single large initiative — say, a new product launch or a major push to acquire new customers — that initiative needs to add another 20% to existing revenue. That is likely to be a significant undertaking, particularly for an organisation already struggling with profitability.

By contrast, if you lift each of the three dimensions by roughly 6.5%, the multiplying effect produces approximately 21% overall growth. Achieving a modest lift in each dimension can be much more manageable than chasing a single, high-risk leap.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s continue with our example of an organisation under pressure to deliver 20% revenue growth. Rather than betting everything on a single high-stakes initiative, the target can be broken down into a series of smaller opportunities:

New clients (~5% impact): Improve sales funnel conversion (~3%) and reduce client loss during onboarding (~2%).
Average transaction value (~8% impact): Develop tiered package offerings and targeted upselling.
Return frequency (~6% impact): Launch a premium subscription tier (~5%) and re-engage lapsed clients through targeted outreach (~1%).

The growth across these three dimensions of 5%, 8% and 6% compounds to approximately 20.2% overall growth (1.05 × 1.08 × 1.06 = 1.202).

Crucially, none of these initiatives requires a major product launch or significant capital investment. Most can be scoped, tested and refined within an existing operational budget.

These are illustrative figures, not predictive forecasts, but they show how a large growth target can be approached through a portfolio of smaller initiatives.

The example also assumes that these improvements can be applied across the organisation’s products or services. That may not always be possible. Some initiatives may only apply to particular products, services or customer groups. Where that is the case, the focus shifts to identifying other opportunities across the three dimensions that can be applied to the areas not covered by the original initiatives. The objective is not to find one initiative that works everywhere, but to build a portfolio of smaller opportunities that collectively contribute to the overall growth target.

What Happens When You Start Small

For an organisation operating under tight constraints, the three multipliers can also be viewed through an operational lens. When budgets are limited, risk tolerance is low and major new initiatives are difficult to launch, the ability to identify and pursue smaller opportunities within the existing business becomes particularly valuable.

But the value of this approach goes beyond simply being a lower-risk alternative to a major growth initiative.

1. Learning by Doing

The objective isn’t to find one big idea. It is to systematically identify and test opportunities across all three dimensions, starting with initiatives that are achievable within the existing business.

Each initiative becomes an opportunity to learn.

An improvement to the sales funnel can reveal where prospects are getting stuck. A reactivation campaign can reveal why customers stopped buying. Testing a new pricing or packaging model can tell you what customers are willing to pay. Improving onboarding can reveal what affects retention.

The organisation is not just generating additional revenue. It is learning how its business creates and loses value.

2. Tapping the Operational Coalface

The information needed to drive growth often sits with the people closest to the work. Sales teams know where prospects drop out. Customer service teams know what frustrates buyers. Operations teams know where internal processes create friction.

The point of a structured growth program is to bring these observations into the growth process and test them. Some will lead to useful initiatives; others won’t. Over time, the organisation develops a much better understanding of its customers, its operations and where growth opportunities actually exist.

3. Compounding across Dimensions

One further advantage of this approach is that a single initiative can sometimes compound growth across multiple dimensions in ways that further enhance growth. For example:

Improving your sales funnel tends to improve client quality, which naturally increases average transaction value.
Product bundling increases average transaction value, and may enable the price anchoring effect to lift sales of core products.
Streamlining onboarding improves customer experience and loyalty, leading to more repeat customers.

A single well-executed initiative can often trigger positive ripples across multiple dimensions.

4. Building Towards Bigger Opportunities

As an organisation works through smaller initiatives, it builds knowledge and experience that can be applied to larger initiatives. Teams become better at identifying opportunities, testing assumptions, measuring results and implementing change.

As the program builds its implementation record, it also builds its capacity to launch new initiatives. New products, markets, partnerships or channels can be launched with less money and resourcing, while the understanding built about customers, economics and the organisation’s ability to deliver increases the chances of success. The objective, then, isn’t to avoid big bets. It is to earn the right to make them.

From Small Improvements to Bigger Growth

When organisations face financial pressure, the instinct is often to swing for the fences with an ambitious new product, market or other major growth initiative.

Incremental improvements may sound less exciting. But by using the three dimensions of Abraham’s Three Multipliers — customer acquisition, transaction value and purchase frequency — an organisation can break a large growth target into a series of smaller opportunities.

And the benefit isn’t just the revenue those initiatives generate. Each one can build knowledge about the business and experience in executing change. Over time, those gains can create the foundation for pursuing larger opportunities with greater confidence.

Incremental doesn’t mean insignificant. Sometimes, it is how you build your way to bigger growth.

July 12, 2026July 14, 2026

Digitization and Limestone Mines (Part 2)

Part 2: How constraints shape efficiency

This is a two-part series taking a closer look at some of the opportunities and challenges of digitizing manual processes, using DOGE’s recommendation to streamline the US federal government’s retirement process as a practical example. In Part 1, we considered the difficulties previous administrations have faced trying to digitize the retirement process and why this time might be different. In Part 2, we explore some of the challenges that may be encountered when digitizing this type of process. We look beyond the technology to explore the organisational constraints that shape existing processes—and why addressing them is often the key to improving efficiency.

Inefficiency or constraints (man trying to fit large square box in round and triangle shaped hole)

The Efficiency Trap

There’s a trap that regularly catches digitization and other efficiency-driving programs. An organisation spots what looks like obvious inefficiencies – in this case, paper forms, manual processes, filing cabinets full of documents – and launches a program to fix it. The business case looks clean. The timeline looks reasonable.

The solution itself is perfectly deliverable – the requirements are well within the system specifications. The business supports the change—they’ve spent years frustrated by the limitations of the existing process. Yet, when it comes time to execute, all manner of issues, challenges and roadblocks arise.

What’s going on? Often those old “inefficient” processes aren’t as inefficient as they first appear. In fact, existing processes have usually been optimised, over time, around the existing organisational constraints. Those constraints aren’t always well understood, in fact they are frequently hidden and hard to map.

Here’s an important thing to remember – realising those efficiency gains in your business usually require you to fix, or appropriately address the underlying system constraints.

No doubt, given the historical difficulties the US federal government’s employee retirement process has a range of system constraints. From the outside, four (and a bit) constraints jump out at me. Let’s take a closer look.

Challenge 1: The document storage contract trap

The first constraint – that really needs to be worked through at the beginning of the program – is the existing document storage contract. These contracts are notoriously messy: long terms, hefty break fees, and per-document handling charges for moving or transferring records. The break costs alone can negate the cost efficiencies you’re seeking to realise. I’ve seen contracts where exiting early still requires paying out the full remaining term.

Getting this right requires careful planning of how, and when, you exit existing arrangements, and what storage looks like on the other side. It may not be as simple as making everything digital. For example, regulatory requirements may mean some hard copy records must be retained regardless or you may determine not to digitize the existing archive. Either scenario would mean, you’re not replacing one storage process with another – you’re managing two.

It’s no coincidence that the document storage industry is actively positioning to profit from exactly this kind of transition.

Challenge 2: The form is more than a form

Digitising a form sounds easy. Sometimes it is – a basic intake form feeding into a CRM can be a genuine quick win. The federal retirement form is not that sort of a form. What appears to be an outdated paper form is actually the front end of a complex, multi-agency process for collecting, validating and reconciling evidence.

Completing a retirement application requires information from several different sources. Employees provide personal details and supporting documentation. The agency they work for contributes employment information. Additional evidence may come from historical records or third-party documents that exist only in paper form. Finally, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) must cross-reference all of this against its own records before a claim can be assessed.

This is where the real complexity lies. The challenge isn’t designing a digital interface—it’s creating a process that seamlessly collects information that sits across multiple organisations, systems and formats. Agencies maintain records differently, some of the supporting information exists outside structured databases, and critical information such as identity, service history and entitlements must be verified across multiple sources. A digital form can streamline data input, but collecting supporting information and evidentiary data that sits across multiple organisations and databases is a much more complicated design.

Each design decision has implications for cost, delivery complexity and user experience. Choices made early in the program can shape the architecture of the entire solution, and reversing them later is often expensive. That’s why effective digitisation starts with understanding how the process actually works in practice. User research—engaging with employees, agency staff and OPM case workers—isn’t simply a nice-to-have; it’s essential to designing a process that can be successfully digitised.

The “and a bit” – incomplete data collection

One of the biggest bottlenecks in the existing process is chasing outstanding information. This makes sense given we are dealing with a complex data collection process. Workers can reportedly spend months pursuing a single missing agency signature. As part of efforts to streamline and improve the data collection process, the program will also need to consider how to address scenarios dealing with incomplete information. Done well, the knowledge the program builds about the process can streamline collection and non-compliance processes. Handled in isolation, there’s a risk the process becomes more inefficient.

Challenge 3: Bureaucratic complexity

It’s tempting, in any transformation program, to treat existing bureaucratic rules as noise – legacy overhead to be swept away – to “start from scratch”. This is a mistake.

Those rules have been put in place for a reason, before you can dismiss them, you need to understand what is driving them. Failure to do so will create all sorts of headaches (and costs) later down the track.

In this case, the key rules appear to govern two things: what information and evidence is required to establish entitlement to benefits (covered in above), and how benefits are calculated.

The benefits calculation is genuinely complex. Federal retirement rules are the product of decades of legislation, amendments, and agency-specific provisions. Under the current system, calculations can take between one hour and two days. Getting this right digitally requires rigorous analysis, extensive edge-case testing, and – critically – a design that can absorb future rule changes without needing to be rebuilt from scratch.

Challenge 4: The legacy archive problem

We touched on this problem with the storage contract. A major challenge with the digitization process is the archive itself. There are 2 related problems here:

Does the new process require digitization of hard copy records and if so, how will that be achieved? This will be further complicated if those hard copy records must be maintained after digitization.
What should be done with the existing archive?

We know that much of the database has been digitised. As of 2014, approximately 85% of applications could be processed using already-digitized records. No doubt, the percentage has increased in the subsequent period. The remaining applications require physical retrieval from the OPM physical archive.

We also know digitizing the archive is expensive. In 2019, OPM ran out of funding to digitize the remaining hard copy archive.

Figuring out the appropriate solution here – will likely be a pragmatic decision. Based on both the newly designed form and information collection process and the costs associated with digitizing the remaining database compared to the ongoing costs of storage. Just like back in 2019, it is possible that the perfect “digitization” solution is not the pragmatic one.

The real lesson

Back in early 2025 DOGE raised the prospect of addressing inefficiencies with the federal government employee retirement process. Four decades of failed attempts and more than $100 million spent suggest the retirement process isn’t fundamentally a technology problem. It’s a systems problem.

Successful digitisation isn’t about replacing paper with software. It’s about understanding the constraints that shaped the existing process—and deciding which of those constraints need to be redesigned, which need to be managed, and which simply have to be accepted.

The organisations that succeed don’t ignore complexity. They make it visible, work through it deliberately, and build solutions around the realities of how the business actually operates.

Published by Aidan McShane on 12th July 2026

July 10, 2026July 13, 2026

Digitization and Limestone Mines (Part 1)

This is a two-part series taking a closer look at some of the opportunities and challenges of digitizing manual processes. The article has been framed around DOGE’s recent recommendation to streamline the US federal government’s retirement process. In Part 1, we consider difficulties previous administrations have faced trying to digitize the retirement process and why this time might be different. In Part 2, we explore some of the issues and challenges that may be encountered when digitizing this type of process.

Part 1: An Old Problem & New Opportunities

DOGE and the Government Retirement Process

If you have been following the work of Elon Musk and his team at DOGE, then you have probably heard about the old limestone mine in Pennsylvania where federal government employee retirement documents are processed and pensions calculated. Back in February, DOGE flagged this as a prominent example of government inefficiency, posting on X:

“Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”

It is fair to say the work of DOGE is controversial. Elon Musk has established a high-profile team that includes founders and executives from Silicon Valley and investment banking, tasked with the mammoth enterprise of identifying $1 trillion in cuts to US government spending. Democrats tend to view the work of DOGE with suspicion, an excuse to cut services and cull staff. In contrast, Republicans tend to believe DOGE is unearthing all manner of bureaucratic waste, abuse and inefficiency.

For my part, I’m fascinated with the work of Musk and the DOGE team. In general, I am supportive of efforts to improve government efficiency – I believe the more effectively government money is spent, the better outcomes it delivers. In my experience, however, reining in expenditure and driving efficiency can be complex. Identifying the inefficiency is often the easy part, actually delivering the savings can prove much more complicated.

Revisiting an intractable problem

The US government has been trying to automate their retirement process for over 40 years. All told, across multiple US administrations, more than $100 million has been spent with limited success.

As explained in a recent Wired article:

Automation was first recommended back in 1981 and the first automated system was launched in 1987. This system was eventually shut down after failing an independent review.
Another attempt to automate the process began in 2001 (with contracts awarded in 2006). This system, RetireEZ, launched in 2008, before being shut for quality issues.
In 2013, the system was partially digitized, enabling government retirees to receive 80% of their pension quickly, but with the residual 20% payment requiring manual processing. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Office of Personnel Management, who runs the system, had ran out of money to finish digitizing the system.

What this history makes clear is that, it’s not for lack of trying that the system has not yet been automated. Significant time, effort and, not least of all, money has been spent to streamline the process. While important progress was made in partially digitizing the system in 2013, the digitization process has proven more challenging than anticipated on prior attempts.

Cause for optimism

Despite the issues faced in previous automation attempts, I am optimistic that further digitization the process could be successful this time. The key 3 reasons for my optimism are:

Benefit of previous Partial Digitization – Based on the Washington Post’s 2014 feature story, “Sinkhole of bureaucracy”, significant headway appears to have been made in 2013, with approximately 85% of documents digitized into the digital archive.
Evolution of cloud computing – The cloud computing landscape has evolved significantly since 2013. The next round of digitization will be able to leverage substantial improvements in cloud infrastructure, applications, integrations and workflows.
Ability to leverage AI – As part of the digitization process, there may also to be an opportunity to leverage Artificial Intelligence to streamline some of the more manual data entry tasks currently in the system.

The failure rate of digital transformations can be high. It has been estimated that between 70-95% of digital transformations fail to meet their original objectives. In order to realize the efficiency benefits the DOGE team (and prior administrations) have anticipated from automation, the digitization program will need to be successfully implemented. In Part 2, we will explore some of the issues and challenges that may be faced in digitizing this type of process.

Originally published by Aidan McShane on LinkedIn, April 2025

July 10, 2026July 13, 2026

Communication and Team Effectiveness

The first place I ever learned about the importance of communication on team dynamics was the football field. Growing up, I loved team sports. One factor I had always been aware of was that, on the most successful teams, communication flowed freely and effectively. You knew where your teammates were and where they were going to be, they told you if you were in trouble (about to be tackled) or stepped in to help and you knew how they would react if there was a mistake. On the less successful teams – things were more confused, communication tended to be stunted, success went unnoticed or unrewarded, trouble was an individual team member’s problem and errors devastated team momentum.

I never thought that much about why communication was so much better on strong teams. It made sense to me that better teams had better players. I figured that, when a team is winning, everyone is happy and locked in. So, it stood to reason, people were more likely to communicate positively. Then, I played on a team where the coach actively embedded positive communication behaviours. More than just the standard platitudes all coaches repeat about the need to “talk”, expectations were set and enforced – rules for communication around the ball, celebrations after an impactful play, picking your teammate up and encouraging them after they were knocked down. The impact was immediate and significant – an already successful team went to the next level, and I became a convert to the importance of team communication.

Over the years, I have learnt that communication is just as important for team effectiveness within a professional environment. I am a strong believer of the Agile value of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and Principle 6 (the effectiveness of face-to-face conversation). Whether I am setting up a new initiative, managing a team or stepping into an in-flight project, I like to take time to ensure team and stakeholder communication is working well. I find that the investment in establishing team dynamics and getting communication flows right, can make a big impact later down the line on the quality and significance of the outcome.

When stepping in to a troubled project, one question I have found serves me well is “What do you do if an issue arises?”. The answer will tell you a lot about how the team handles communication, collaboration and conflict. It can provide invaluable insight into what is working and where and how things might be going wrong.

Getting team communication right is often more art than science. Expectations can vary by company, industry and function. For example, there tends to be differing expectations, for external consultants than for internal resources. Similarly, some tech or operational teams, prefer what they consider more “efficient” communications approaches (often email or chat) over more context rich mediums – such as face-to-face meetings. This may or may not be appropriate, depending on circumstance.

Nevertheless, in my experience, effective communication is one of the key drivers of team efficiency. As a general rule of thumb, more, richer and more open communication is likely to serve a teams well, especially if that team has not yet got its communication level right.

Originally published by Aidan McShane on LinkedIn, March 2025