How Thinking Small Can Grow Your Business
One of the most confounding (and interesting?) things about business: Two things can be true at the same time.
On most days, you’ll find me talking to clients about thinking bigger. Things like:
How can we 10x the business instead of 2x it?
How can we build infrastructure that scales instead of breaks as we grow?
Who do we need to hire today to build the company we want to have in three years?
But on other, very critical days, you’ll find me working with clients to “think small.”
How long can we stretch our current team setup before we have to hire?
Let’s focus on what works today, even if it’s a manual or laborious process.
Can we temporarily go with the unsustainable solution?
You have to think big when setting your vision. And you have to think small when running the operations you need to achieve it.
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An example: small operational efficiencies that add up. A client of mine recently focused on water savings inside his facilities. Estimated savings were upwards of $20,000.
Is $20,000 significant? Well, the client does $85 million in revenue.
…but he thought so.
To him, the high water bills were waste in the organization. It’s easy to write off the $20,000 as an expense “not worth fixing,” but as my client artfully put it, “If it doesn’t matter, how about you give me $20,000?”
Perspective, right? And the point, more than the amount of money saved, is that the spending was unnecessary.
Small dollars are small, until they start to add up.
To find the savings, we had to live in the world of these facility operators. Talk with them about how to save money on water, and ask them to come up with the ideas. At first, we got the usual response: “I don’t know.”
But when we said, “Yes, you do,” they opened up. We believed that the frontline employees, not the leadership team, had the solutions to this problem.
And they did. Several of them. An instant $20,000 in savings.
Not a home run. But rack up enough singles, and you can win the game.
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It’s not just cuts and operational efficiencies, by the way. You can “think small” around revenue as well.
Another client of mine is looking for an extra $20 million in revenue for 2026. Their organization is super strong, highly operationalized. It runs like a top.
The team was running into a wall, so we took away the pressure. Stopped worrying about which ideas were good or even how they would get done (Do we have the people? The resources? How would we package it? Who do we sell it to?). We just asked for ideas.
Because the idea that generates $1 million in revenue this year might do $2 million the next year. Even a company closing on $100 million annually should evaluate ideas of this size.
We asked the team to consider their clients, consider the market. Where could we add incremental revenue?
They reflected for 5 minutes, then generated a list of 25 potential options.
We don’t need to execute on every idea. But a few of those options were absolute gems that the team is already taking next steps on.
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Your team isn’t bringing you all these ideas. Why not?
Simple. Nobody ever asked for their opinion.
And, frankly, it’s easier not to rock the boat. The teams in my examples knew their ideas would create additional work for them. But once they saw their opinions were valued, they engaged, opened up, and focused on what would be best for the company.
Helping shape what’s best for the company is deeply empowering. But you already knew that.
Thinking big and thinking small both have a role to play in growing a business. So if zooming out into the big picture isn’t working on a particular problem, try the opposite tactic: zoom way, way in.
