THE GROWTH DILEMMA

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

—Tony Robbins

e traditional benchmark of business success is growth. Sales, customers, profits, and increased likes, subscribers, and so forth— these are the traditional metrics that feed the hungry appetite of growth, and so businesses do whatever is necessary to keep these numbers climbing. But can they sustainably continue to grow?

anks to the Internet and digital platforms, the world is more connected than ever before, creating more opportunity to get in front of your chosen audience—but competition for a ention is fierce. Opportunity for you is also opportunity for everyone else. e typical way to stay relevant (and therefore afloat) is through aggressive marketing tactics—such as doubling down on digital ad spend to o er inflated incentives that elbow out the competition. It’s a marketing arms race. is is the current marketing climate.

Unfortunately, most businesses that chase growth with aggressive campaigns typically create only a quick temporary uptick in sales. When the campaign is over, sales fall back to baseline. And when measuring success based on numbers alone, this shortterm growth spike doesn’t tell the whole story. Chasing these growth numbers is the extent of the brand’s vision—to grow for growth’s sake. e pa ern repeats itself, and they simply have the marketing/sales group prepare and launch the next aggressive campaign to generate another spike. e speed of change is remarkable. Remember pop-up ads? Maybe not. anks to pop-up blockers, that form of advertising has all but disappeared. Not too long ago we couldn’t imagine paying for TV. Now we will gladly pay to opt out of ads, giving rise to commercial-free TV, radio, games, and web pages. How do you market to your audience if you can’t advertise? Sharing social posts isn’t going to cut it. What happens when the digital platform you’ve been investing all your marketing e orts in becomes too expensive?

Growth has become such a high priority that a science of innovative testing resulting in rapid growth has emerged; it’s called “growth hacking,” and I spent many years learning and deploying this methodology via expert guests on my podcast like Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth.

Like many others, I have been obsessed with growth. It wasn’t until later that I identified that the real dilemma is in the kind of growth. Not all growth is the same.

Don’t get me wrong—growth hacking is a very rational, strategic, intelligent discipline. It is a science and can work wonders, especially if you can impact product design. I established my career leveraging a singular focus of rapid growth. What I am referring to instead is “hack-tics”: looking for shortcuts, chasing trends, and chasing opportunities for rapid, immediate growth. ere is a missed opportunity in pursuing only immediate growth. We love to play the hero: create an aggressive campaign to unlock massive growth that is as rapidly visible as possible. ere was a time when growing slow felt like failure because I was obsessed with measuring speed with increased growth numbers. I have to be honest: my actions were extremely short-sighted. I unknowingly, like so many others, was fixating on revenue at the expense of relationships.

O en, we hear stories in the trade publications of brands that deploy the well-known growth tactics and gain a flood of new sales and customer acquisitions. ey may appear to be growing, but behind the scenes there tends to be a di erent story, like customer service failing or operational systems crashing. e influx of growth is overwhelming their infrastructure, which in turn impedes quality service and ultimately damages relationships. So, while they are gaining new customers on the front end, they are simultaneously losing them on the back end. Even if the company is fortunate enough to gain more than they lose, there is li le doubt that this growth strategy is not sustainable. And it’s all because they can’t deliver on their promises long-term.

In fact, it has become clear that not only are the strategies themselves not sustainable, but neither are the marketing channels used to deploy them. Nearly every business today is unknowingly handcu ed to a marketing channel they have become reliant upon that may or may not be around in the future.

If you’re building your entire marketing platform on Facebook or Instagram or Twi er or TikTok, or if your entire store is on Amazon, they own you. ey can jack up the prices, take a bigger cut, or adjust the algorithm to ensure that no one sees your content unless you pay more. If your strategy only has one lane—if the growth you seek is at the mercy of someone else, another company—and if you’re chasing the algorithm, you are sabotaging your potential and sustainability.

I experienced frustration with tyrannical online platforms firsthand. A er investing several years into Facebook, I built up a page with sixteen thousand followers. Now I can barely engage organically with my audience on that platform because Facebook requires that I pay to be seen by my own followers. All the energy I spent building that platform was easily exploited by Facebook when they changed the rules. I soon realized that I have li le or no control over what happens on these platforms. at experience deepened my resolve to identify and create new ways for brands to diversify and create a sustainable and sovereign capability to grow.

Beyond the challenges of being subject to social platforms’ limitations, we need to pay close a ention to the changing ecosystems and how audiences voluntarily move. In the digital era, they move fast. I call it cross-channel migration, like a seasonal migration of a herd moving from one area to another. What happens when your audience moves to another channel? What if the channel disappears? Remember MySpace and Google Plus? How will you pivot?

Most brands are scrambling to adapt, get back out front, and stay in proximity to audiences’ eyes and ears when this happens. What will this cost you in time, money, and momentum? And what about new businesses? How does a business get o the ground if it can’t compete with the huge ad spend of already established companies? Or do they have an advantage?

How many well-meaning brands fail because they build their expectations, business predictions, and infrastructure around a rapid-growth model? And on top of a channel or platform that they don’t control?

How many marketing executives get swept away by hype, focusing on amassing followers and subscribers, rather than nurturing relationships?

How many strategists repeatedly invest all their proverbial eggs in platforms they can’t control and then, when change inevitably comes, have to start over?