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