This episode, I explain what a growth trap is, why so many firms face a bottleneck in their ability to grow, and what business owners can do to avoid their professional services firm falling into a growth trap.
Sean Boyce has run his own consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years and has founded multiple other companies at the same time. He’s extremely experienced in working with B2B SaaS product businesses and is well-known for having a big impact on the businesses he’s worked with. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:
- What a growth trap is and when it starts to affect businesses.
- Why so many firms fall into a growth trap.
- What a healthy growth trajectory looks like.
- The issue of focusing on the wrong set of metrics.
- Why profit is more important than revenue.
- How to avoid your professional services firm falling into a growth trap.
Resources:
- Blog post: How to avoid the growth trap when trying to scale your professional services business
- Blog post: Scaling services starts with the bottleneck
- NxtStep
- Podcast Chef
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 04:52 – “You need to make significant upgrades to your capabilities, and the sophistication that you have available, in order to compete at the next level.”
- 08:55 – “I would put revenue in the category of vanity metric, I know it’s what the industry uses to measure everything, but what you really need to keep your eye on is profit, because if your revenue’s going up at the same pace of your expenses then your profit hasn’t budged and your operations have only grown more complex.”