Your Best Source of Business Growth Is Right Under Your Nose
Don’t lose sight of your most valuable marketing asset.
In 2013, I learned the most important lesson of my business career. I was working for a start-up-turned-market-leader in the automotive industry and the independently-owned company was approaching 70% market-share (totaling 12,000+ clients) for its flagship product.
There were constant rumors about an IPO or a potential acquisition, but for any of those things to happen, our company needed to show continued growth in a market we had all but completely capitalized on.
Our then-CEO gave a company-wide presentation and delivered a piece of advice that ultimately contributed to the company’s $1 billion acquisition about 1 year later:
“We have to fish off of our own pier.”
While this saying isn’t unique or revolutionary, it’s something that the company was undervaluing as a strategic tactic to grow the business. The rocketship-level growth we experienced had given us a mind-set that heavily favored new customer acquisition, despite the fact that new customer acquisition is expensive and selling into a new base is much more difficult than selling into your existing base of customers.
