Focus resources on high-impact business mechanisms where small improvements generate disproportionate results across the entire customer journey.
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In simple terms, a growth lever is any action or strategy that can dramatically boost a company’s growth when applied. Think of a lever in the physical sense – a small move can lift a heavy object; likewise, the right business lever can produce outsized growth from relatively little effort . A growth lever could be something like improving a sales funnel or streamlining customer onboarding – a focused change that leads to significantly more revenue or users. In everyday language, it’s the high-impact move you can make to quickly accelerate your company’s success.
Growth levers matter because they guide resource allocation in environments where everything seems important but not everything drives results. Most organisations spread effort across dozens of initiatives attending conferences, updating websites, launching email campaigns, tweaking product features without strategic prioritisation. Lever thinking forces clarity: which single improvement would most accelerate growth? This focus prevents the common failure mode of doing many things adequately rather than a few things excellently. For B2B contexts especially, where resources are perpetually constrained, identifying and exploiting the right lever can generate 2-3x returns compared to unfocused activity. The financial impact is substantial: improving a true lever (say, reducing customer churn from 15% to 10%) affects every subsequent year's revenue, compounding gains, whilst improving a non-lever (say, adding a minor product feature) generates minimal lasting impact. Lever thinking also accelerates experimentation: rather than testing random tactics, you design experiments specifically targeting your identified levers, ensuring even failed tests generate insights about core growth mechanisms. Research shows high-growth companies consistently demonstrate lever discipline they identify their primary growth constraint, invest heavily to address it, then move to the next constraint, whilst slower-growing competitors pursue scattered initiatives. Organisations that systematically identify, prioritise, and pull growth levers report 30-50% efficiency improvements in growth spending.
Applying the concept of growth levers in your marketing or growth workflow involves a few key steps: identify potential levers, prioritise the most promising ones, and take action to execute changes. It’s both an analytical and creative process, combining data insights with strategic thinking. Here’s how to put growth levers to work:
Start by mapping the buyer journey and reviewing data for bottlenecks or missed opportunities. Combine quantitative clues conversion drops, churn spikes with qualitative feedback from customers and front-line staff. List three to five candidate levers that, if improved, could unlock significant growth.
Score each candidate for impact, confidence, and effort. Choose one or two with the greatest expected return for the resources available. This focus prevents dilution and ensures the team’s energy targets the most promising levers first.
Build a clear plan: what will change, who owns it, and which metric will prove success. Run small experiments around the chosen lever, measure results, and iterate quickly. Document learnings so the knowledge compounds even if an experiment fails.
When a lever delivers, bake the change into routine processes and dashboards. Move to the next priority lever and restart the loop. Over time, successive lever pulls create a step-change in the firm’s growth trajectory.
The cockpit that sits above your four growth engines. Individual teams can excel at their own metrics, but without orchestration they're musicians playing different songs. This is where everything comes together and where improvements in one engine amplify gains in another.
The wrong tools create friction. The right ones multiply your output without adding complexity. These are the tools I recommend for growth teams that move fast.
Small improvements multiply. A 10% gain across twelve metrics doesn't add up to 120% - it compounds to 3x growth. This is the mathematical engine behind systematic growth.
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Four decisions that shape everything else. When growth feels harder than it should, the problem is usually here. Get these right and execution becomes much easier.
Without rhythm, effort becomes scattered and progress invisible. A consistent operating cadence keeps your team aligned and your growth system continuously improving.
Mike Michalowicz
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A decision tool for prioritising growth work. Diagnose where to act, then pick a small change that unlocks progress now.
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Small improvements across 12 metrics multiply into exponential growth. Learn how engines connect, why improvements compound, and where leverage lives.
Capture specific user actions in your product or website to understand behaviour patterns and measure whether changes improve outcomes or create friction.
Focus your entire organisation on the single metric that best predicts success at your current growth stage, avoiding distraction and misalignment.
Calculate the total cost of winning a new customer to evaluate marketing efficiency and ensure sustainable unit economics across all channels.
Track predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions to measure business scale and growth trajectory in B2B SaaS and recurring revenue models.
Apply disciplined experimentation across the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage through rapid testing and data-driven iteration.
Identify what you do better or differently that competitors can't easily copy to defend margins and win customers consistently over time.
Scale through partner relationships where other companies distribute your product to their customers in exchange for commissions or reciprocal value.
Drive acquisition and expansion through product experience where users discover value before sales conversations and upgrade based on usage.
Cultivate belief that skills and results improve through deliberate effort, treating setbacks as learning opportunities rather than fixed limitations.
Organise customer and prospect information to track relationships, communication history, and next steps without losing context or duplicating effort.
Interpret experiment results to understand the probability that observed differences occurred by chance rather than because your changes actually work.
Build distribution through your personal brand and network where your expertise and story attract customers who trust you before your company.
Define pipeline progression steps to standardise how reps advance opportunities and give managers visibility into where deals stall or convert unexpectedly.
Distribute conversion credit across multiple touchpoints to recognise that customer journeys involve many interactions and channels working together.
Credit the channel that introduced prospects to your brand to measure awareness efforts and understand which top-of-funnel activities start customer journeys.
Focus resources on high-impact business mechanisms where small improvements generate disproportionate results across the entire customer journey.
Deploy fast, low-cost experiments to discover scalable acquisition and retention tactics, learning through iteration rather than big bets.
Focus effort on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of results, systematically eliminating low-yield work to maximise output per hour invested.
Block extended time for cognitively demanding tasks requiring sustained focus, maximising valuable output whilst minimising shallow distractions.
Structure experiments around clear predictions to focus efforts on learning rather than random changes and make results easier to interpret afterward.