How to set up compound growth

I've implemented the Solid Growth System at companies ranging from €500K to €5M in revenue. At each scale, the same question comes up: "This makes sense in theory, but what does it actually look like for a business our size?" The mathematics are universal, but the execution looks different depending on your resources, constraints, and current complexity.

A solo founder working from their kitchen table faces different constraints than a €2M company with a team of fifteen. The solo founder has limited time and cash, but complete control and zero coordination overhead. The established company has budget and specialised talent, but coordination challenges and legacy systems. Yet both can use the same framework to achieve compound growth.

This chapter reveals what the Solid Growth System looks like at three different scales: the solo founder or small team (€100K-€500K revenue), the growing company (€500K-€2M), and the established business (€2M-€10M+). You'll see which metrics to focus on first, which tools make sense at your scale, and what "good" looks like when you're starting from your current position.

The core principle remains the same: identify your biggest bottleneck, improve it by 10%, move to the next bottleneck, and let compound growth do the rest. But how you execute that principle changes dramatically as you scale. Let's look at what that execution looks like in practice.

When you're at this scale, your biggest constraint isn't knowledge or strategy. It's time and focus. You're likely wearing multiple hats: founder, marketer, salesperson, product developer, and customer support. You don't have the luxury of running sophisticated experiments or implementing complex marketing automation systems. You need to pick the few things that matter most and execute them well.

The good news is that at this scale, your biggest bottlenecks are usually obvious. You probably don't have a traffic problem (unless you literally have zero visitors). You have a conversion problem, a sales problem, or a value problem. The compound growth framework helps you identify which one matters most.

Let me give you a real example. I worked with a solo consultant doing €200K annually who wanted to double their revenue. When we mapped out their 12 metrics, the bottleneck was immediately clear: they had a 50% win rate from proposals. That sounds decent, but it meant they were spending half their time on proposals that went nowhere.

[IMAGE: Bottleneck chart for solo consultant showing win rate as lowest metric]

We didn't build fancy sales systems or implement CRM software. We simply improved their proposal process by adding more specific social proof, clearer pricing strategy, and stronger next-step clarity. Win rate increased from 50% to 65%. That 15% improvement (achieved over two months with about 10 hours of work) translated to €60K in additional annual revenue.

At this scale, focus on the metric that directly blocks revenue. Usually, it's one of these four:

Booking rate: You're getting traffic and form submissions, but people aren't scheduling calls. Fix your meeting scheduler setup, simplify your booking process, and add urgency. A solo founder I worked with increased booking rate from 40% to 52% by switching from email back-and-forth to Calendly and adding "limited slots available this week" to their confirmation email.

Win rate: You're getting meetings, but not closing deals. Your value proposition isn't clear, your proposals aren't compelling, or your pricing feels arbitrary. Document your best sales pitch, create a proposal template in Google Docs or PandaDoc, and make your pricing transparent. Small improvements here multiply everything that comes before.

Contract value: You're closing deals, but they're too small to be profitable. Package your offering differently, increase your minimum engagement, or add a premium tier. I've seen consultants double their revenue simply by changing their minimum contract from one month to three months. The service stayed the same, but contract length tripled.

Activation rate: People fill out your form, but then go silent. Set up a basic email sequence that sends valuable content immediately, follows up after 2 days, and offers a meeting slot after 5 days. You don't need sophisticated marketing automation at this scale. Three emails in Mailchimp or Brevo will do.

[IMAGE: Simple three-email nurture sequence diagram]

What you shouldn't focus on at this scale: traffic generation, sophisticated attribution, multi-touch campaigns, or enterprise tools. You don't have a traffic problem, you have a conversion or value problem. And you don't need HubSpot when Google Sheets and Calendly will work fine.

Your tool stack at this scale should be minimal: a simple website (built in Webflow, WordPress, or Squarespace), a way to capture leads (native forms work fine), a meeting scheduler (Calendly or Cal.com), and a basic email tool (Mailchimp or Brevo). That's it. Resist the temptation to buy more tools. Your constraint is time, not tooling.

The execution pattern at this scale: pick one bottleneck, spend 5-10 hours over 2-4 weeks improving it, measure the impact, then move to the next bottleneck. You're not running parallel experiments. You're making sequential improvements. Sarah's approach of taking a holiday might not be realistic yet, but her principle of working on one thing at a time absolutely applies.

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At this scale, you've proven product-market fit and you have some team members. Your constraint shifts from time to coordination. You probably have a marketer or marketing lead, maybe a dedicated salesperson, and you're thinking about systems and processes. This is where the Solid Growth System becomes most powerful because you have enough resources to work on multiple engines, but you're still small enough to move quickly.

The challenge at this scale is that everyone has their own priorities. Your marketer wants to focus on content marketing and SEO. Your salesperson wants better sales collateral. Your product person wants to build new features. Without a shared framework, these priorities compete rather than compound.

[IMAGE: Team structure showing marketing lead, sales lead, and founder with different priorities]

I implemented the Solid Growth System at a B2B software company at €1.2M revenue with a team of eight. We set up a dashboard tracking all 12 metrics and held a weekly 30-minute growth scorecard meeting. The entire team could see which metrics were moving and which were stuck. This created natural alignment.

The biggest bottleneck was engagement rate. They had decent traffic (12,000 engaged sessions per month), but only 45% of visitors were actually engaging with the site. The marketing lead owned this metric and ran three experiments over six weeks: simplified navigation, clearer hero section, and faster page load speed using Google Tag Manager optimisation. Engagement rate increased from 45% to 54%.

Meanwhile, the sales team was working on offer rate. They were qualifying meetings well and closing decent deals, but only making offers to 60% of qualified prospects. We discovered this was because they didn't have a good mid-tier package. They had a basic offering and an enterprise offering, but nothing in between. Creating that middle package increased offer rate from 60% to 72%.

[IMAGE: Pricing tier structure showing basic, professional, and enterprise packages]

Here's what made this work: both improvements happened in parallel because different people owned different metrics. The marketing lead wasn't waiting for sales to finish before starting their work. They were both working on their respective bottlenecks simultaneously, guided by the same dashboard and framework.

At this scale, you should distribute ownership of the 12 metrics across your team. Who owns impressions? Probably marketing, through SEO, content creation, or paid advertising. Who owns click rate? Marketing, through ad copy and A/B testing. Who owns booking rate? Could be marketing or sales, depending on your setup. Who owns win rate? Definitely sales. Who owns contract value? Could be sales, product, or the founder.

The key is making ownership explicit. Use project management tools like Notion, Asana, or ClickUp to track experiments, document learnings, and maintain visibility. Set up a Looker Studio or Databox dashboard that everyone checks weekly. This isn't bureaucracy, it's alignment.

Your tool stack at this scale should be more sophisticated but not overwhelming. You need a proper CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Folk), marketing automation (HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, or Customer.io), analytics (Google Analytics plus Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity), and collaboration tools (Slack, Notion, Miro for planning).

[IMAGE: Tool stack diagram showing integrated CRM, marketing automation, and analytics]

The execution pattern at this scale: identify the three biggest bottlenecks, assign each to a different owner, run experiments in parallel over 4-8 weeks, review results in your weekly scorecard meeting, then identify the next three bottlenecks. You're creating a rhythm where multiple improvements compound together without creating chaos.

The risk at this scale is over-complicating things. You have enough budget to buy every tool and enough people to run every experiment. Resist this temptation. The framework keeps you focused on bottlenecks, not on every possible optimisation. Sarah's discipline of working systematically applies even more at this scale because the opportunities for distraction multiply.

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At this scale, you have specialised roles, established processes, and meaningful revenue. Your constraint is no longer time or coordination. It's complexity and legacy systems. You probably have a marketing stack that's grown organically over years, data scattered across multiple platforms, and processes that "just evolved" rather than being designed.

The Solid Growth System at this scale isn't about finding new tactics. It's about identifying which of your many activities actually drive growth and cutting everything else. You're likely doing 50 things that generate marginal improvements, when you should be doing 12 things that compound together.

I worked with a €5M B2B services company that had this exact problem. They were running paid ads on five platforms, had three different lead capture systems, and their sales team used a combination of Salesforce, Google Sheets, and memory to track deals. Everyone was busy, but growth had plateaued at 15% year-over-year.

[IMAGE: Complex tool ecosystem with overlapping systems and data silos]

We started by setting up a unified dashboard that pulled data from all their systems. This took four weeks and required some custom Zapier integrations and API work, but it revealed something crucial: 80% of their leads came from two channels (organic and referrals), but they were spending 60% of their marketing budget on the other three channels (paid social, paid search, partnerships).

The bottleneck chart showed that their biggest constraint wasn't traffic at all. It was qualification rate. They were getting plenty of meetings (about 120 per month), but only 55% were genuinely qualified. The sales team was spending half their time on calls that would never close, which meant they didn't have capacity to nurture the good opportunities properly.

We implemented a qualification system using lead scoring in HubSpot. Marketing added three qualifying questions to their form. The booking confirmation email included a short video explaining what to expect on the call. And the sales team created a BANT-style qualification checklist they used in the first five minutes of every call.

[IMAGE: Lead qualification workflow showing pre-call filtering and scoring]

Qualification rate increased from 55% to 71% over three months. This meant the sales team had 35 extra hours per month to spend on qualified opportunities. Win rate increased from 42% to 48% because they had more time to nurture good prospects. The compound effect of these two improvements generated an additional €600K in annual revenue without increasing marketing spend or hiring more salespeople.

At this scale, the most important principle is ruthless prioritisation. You have the resources to improve everything, which means you'll be tempted to improve everything. Don't. Use the bottleneck chart to identify the one metric that's truly constraining growth, put your best people on it, and ignore everything else for 8-12 weeks.

Your tool stack at this scale should be enterprise-grade but integrated. You need HubSpot or Salesforce as your CRM, proper marketing automation with workflows, data warehouse capabilities, attribution modelling, and business intelligence tools like Looker Studio or Databox. But more importantly, these tools need to talk to each other. Data silos kill compound growth because you can't see the system clearly.

The execution pattern at this scale: quarterly planning cycles where you identify the top three bottlenecks, assign cross-functional teams to each one, run structured experiments with clear hypotheses and success metrics, and review results monthly. You're slower to start experiments because you need stakeholder buy-in and technical implementation, but you have more resources to execute them well.

The biggest risk at this scale is organisational politics. Marketing wants to be measured on leads, sales wants to be measured on revenue, product wants to be measured on features shipped. The Solid Growth System cuts through this by measuring what actually matters: the 12 metrics that multiply together to create revenue. When everyone's looking at the same dashboard, it's harder to argue about whose metrics matter more.

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The pattern across all three scales is consistent: identify bottlenecks, improve them systematically, let compound growth multiply your improvements. But the execution looks completely different at €200K versus €2M versus €5M.

At €200K, you're a solo operator working on one bottleneck at a time with minimal tools. At €2M, you're coordinating a small team working on multiple bottlenecks in parallel with integrated systems. At €5M, you're orchestrating cross-functional initiatives with enterprise tools and quarterly planning cycles.

[IMAGE: Three-scale comparison showing evolution of complexity but same core framework]

What doesn't scale is Random Rick's approach of jumping from tactic to tactic. It doesn't work at €200K, and it gets worse as you grow because you have more people jumping in different directions. What also doesn't scale is Specialist Steve's approach of mastering one channel. You might build a traffic generation machine, but you'll still hit a ceiling when the other engines become the constraint.

What does scale is Sarah's systematic approach: measure all 12 metrics, identify the biggest bottleneck, improve it, move to the next bottleneck. This works at every scale because the mathematics are universal. 1.1 × 1.1 × 1.1 = 1.33 whether you're generating €10K per month or €100K per month.

The tools change. The team structure changes. The implementation complexity changes. But the framework stays the same. This is why I've used the same system at companies from €500K to €5M revenue. The principles are portable even though the execution evolves.

The key insight is that hard work alone doesn't scale. You can work 80-hour weeks at €200K, but you can't work 160-hour weeks at €400K and 320-hour weeks at €800K. Your personal effort has a ceiling. But compound growth doesn't have a ceiling. The mathematics work the same at every scale, and they work whether you're working 40 hours per week or 80 hours per week.

This is why Sarah could take a holiday and still win. She wasn't relying on heroic personal effort. She was relying on a system that works with or without her constant attention. As you scale, this becomes even more important because you physically cannot oversee every detail. You need a framework that creates alignment and lets people work on the right things without you micromanaging every decision.

Whether you're a solo founder at €200K, a growing company at €1M, or an established business at €5M, the Solid Growth System applies to your situation. The mathematics of compound growth don't care about your revenue scale. Ten 10% improvements still compound to 214% growth regardless of whether that growth takes you from €10K to €31K per month or from €100K to €314K per month.

What changes is how you execute. Solo founders focus ruthlessly on their single biggest bottleneck and use minimal tooling. Growing teams distribute ownership across multiple bottlenecks and implement integrated systems. Established businesses run cross-functional initiatives with enterprise tools and quarterly planning.

But the core principle remains constant: you cannot outwork compound growth. Random Rick tried and burned out. Specialist Steve tried and plateaued. Solid Sarah understood the system and won with less effort because she let the mathematics do the heavy lifting.

If you recognise yourself in this article, you have three options. You can continue doing what you're doing and hope for different results. You can try to figure out this system on your own through trial and error, the way I did over 15 years. Or you can learn the system systematically and start applying it immediately.

The Solid B2B Growth Course walks you through implementing this exact system at your scale. You'll learn how to set up your dashboard, identify your bottlenecks, design experiments, and measure what actually matters. You'll get the tools, templates, and frameworks that I use with my consulting clients, without the consulting price tag.

If you'd rather have me implement this with you, that's what my consultancy is for. We'll audit your current metrics, identify your biggest bottlenecks, and work together to systematically improve them. Either way, the system works. The only question is whether you'll use it.

The choice between Random Rick's chaos, Specialist Steve's plateau, and Solid Sarah's compound growth isn't about capability. It's about having a framework that turns effort into exponential results. The framework is here. The mathematics are proven. The only variable left is your decision to use it.