In this article, we outline The CEO Strategy’s GrowthOS framework and how you can work with us to supercharge your business’s marketing and sales efforts.
About GrowthOS
Let’s begin by creating a shared definition of Growth and what we mean by “OS”. Growth is the collaborative and cross-disciplinary effort to grow your business. This typically focuses on revenue but can include other growth-related metrics.
While some may debate whether your product or sales strategy is the most important thing, we realize that both are critical and must collaborate to build *and* sell a product that solves a dire pain point for your customer.
If you don’t have a product that solves a real problem that your customer is eager to pay for, you are screwed. And if you don’t have a sales strategy to build awareness, generate demand, and drive sales for your product, you are also screwed - even if your product is 10X better and should “sell itself”.
A growth strategy then brings leaders from different business units together to work together collaboratively by crafting and launching experiments which are the building blocks of growth - more on experiments later in this article.
Now what do we mean by “OS”? An operating system (OS) is a program that manages all of the other application programs in a computer. Our GrowthOS is a way of managing your business model to prioritize revenue growth. We work directly with your team to install a GrowthOS in your business so growth is the foundation of your tactics and strategy.
A Primer on Growth Strategy
Over the years, our team has worked to crystallize our approach into a 4-step process that we call a Growth Loop. These four steps are:
- Identify Risky Assumptions
- Run Experiments to test Hypotheses
- Collect Data & Insights
- Repeat
We will explain each of these four steps in greater detail below:
Identify Risky Assumptions
Whether you are leading an early-stage startup venture or a large-scale established company, you will be running your business on assumptions that need to be stress-tested. The best place to start is by making a list of risky assumptions and ranking them in order by likelihood to kill your chances of success. I’ll include a list of example risky assumptions below.
Startup Risky Assumptions Examples
- Zappos: Will people really buy shoes that they cannot try first online?
- Uber: Will customers really get into a stranger’s car to get to where they want to go?
- iPhone: Will customers really abandon their BlackBerry for a phone without a physical keyboard?
Company Risky Assumptions Examples
- Apple: Will launching the iPhone make our iPod product line obsolete and result in lower company revenue?
- Nike: Will shifting focus away from our retail distribution partners to more entirely on direct-to-consumer hurt our ability to maintain market share?
- NVIDIA: Will shifting our core business focus on building GPUs for the gaming and academic industries to developing chips and hardware for the yet uncreated AI market enable us to be a market leader?
Run Experiments to test Hypotheses
Experiments are the building blocks of your growth strategy. They are tools for figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Think back to when you learned the scientific method. A strong experiment strategy takes the scientific method and contextualizes it to a business setting. Here are the key steps:
- Objective: What are you setting out to do?
- Hypothesis: An assumption that is proposed for the sake of argument so that it can be tested to see if it might be true (or proving it to be false).
- Experiment Design: What are the details of running this experiment? Experiments should measure one variable at a time.
- You want to maximize both learning & speed here. A question you may ask yourself at this step is: Is there a faster, easier, cheaper way to test this?
- Before/After Results: What is the difference between what the metric was before your experiment, what you predicted it would be, and where the metric is post-experiment?
- Learnings: What insights did you gather through your experiment?
- Next Steps: Post-Experiment, what did you learn and what are your next action steps?
Collect Data & Insights
This is where you run your experiment, collect data throughout, and review what you learned post-experiment to generate a list of insights (steps 4-6 shared above).
It’s important to note that you may have the temptation to measure all the things. Don’t do this. It will slow you down and make the insights more fuzzy. Ideally, you pick one metric to measure and analyze at one time, which will allow you to more confidently attribute how much each variable contributes to your outcomes. This will also reduce the potential for multiple factors muddying your results to understand the magnitude of impact.
Repeat
Once you wrap up an experiment, you rinse and repeat. You have two main levers here to maximize learning and revenue growth:
- The quality of the experiments you run.
- The number of experiments you run.
The best growth-oriented businesses find a way to balance both of these levers as they can be at odds with one another.
Startups will need to have a higher tolerance for accepting what they don’t know. Larger companies will be able to unlock more calculated experiments since they will have more historical data, a larger pool of customers, and the ability to split test.
At this stage, you will still have imperfect data. You are looking for signals instead of definitive answers. You’ll never be 100% confident. Your goal is to be confident enough to take action that is informed by data.
What our Clients have to say about GrowthOS
We’ll include snippets of testimonials from clients of ours below in this section and will also provide a short list of example case studies in the section to follow:
“Max helped us identify and serve key industry customers through a pivot to unlock 4 and 5-figure deals while building out our new business development playbook.” - Biotech CEO
“Max worked directly with our leadership team to identify growth channels. Together, we chose one that Max worked to scale to $1M+ in annual revenue within 8 months. Not only that, but he also fully trained our newly hired channel manager to take that growing channel over without any issue.” - Hardware CEO
“When I started my business, I had what felt like an impossible-to-reach revenue goal. Max told me to think bigger and worked with me to put together a strategic plan for our first year of operations. Our end-of-year revenue was 4X what my initial revenue goal was.” - CPG Founder
GrowthOS Case Studies
- Worked with founding team of a dating app startup to secure 2,000+ app downloads within 48 hours of launch through a low-cost marketing strategy that included email, social media influencers, and PR.
- Worked with post-seed round raise consumer electronics startup to double monthly revenue during 6-month engagement.
- Launched a new revenue channel with life science company to unlock initial 4- and 5-figure service contracts in the pharmaceutical industry within a 12-month engagement.
- Secured 25+ media mentions in target geographic markets to drive thousands of app downloads for technology nonprofit.
GrowthOS for Your Business
If you are looking to identify Predictable, Repeatable, Scalable Growth Strategies with an expert that can embed and train your team so you can build growth capacity internally, please reach out to us through our contact us form on our homepage. Our engagements start on a 6-12 month timeline with a starting monthly retainer typically around $7,000-$10,000/month.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are so many growth channels, where do I even start?
We see too many growth leaders trying all the channels instead of systematically testing one channel at a time. As philosopher Ron Swanson said, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
If you are running an early-stage startup, you only need one channel that is working and being optimized. This will get you a long way in the early lifecycle of your company.
We’ve simplified most channels into six groups below:
- SEO & inbound: Intercepting relevant prospects who are looking for help
- Paid advertising: Buying ads
- Organic social & influencers: Building an audience with engaging content
- Outbound: Reaching out directly to prospects
- Viral or product-led: Customers bring you more customers
- Partners or resellers: Someone else sells your product as part of their business
I am a business leader at my company, when does it make sense to engage you?
We can plug into a company in many different ways and believe there is not a bad time to start the conversation. Our best work is done when we have leadership buy-in that growth is the top priority for the organization. Some examples of when we are brought into a company:
- You are considering adding a new product line or looking to tap into a new market.
- You want to shift words like growth and innovation from buzzwords that get tossed around into clear actions that drive your business forward.
- You are looking for a third-party review of your current marketing/sales mix.
I am the founder of my own startup, when does it make sense to engage you?
We plug in best when you’ve cleared the first few hurdles in your startup journey:
- Achieved early signals of product-market fit.
- Have begun generating revenue with some early data on what is and isn’t working.
- Have raised an initial round of investment (typically your Seed Round).
If you have cleared the three hurdles above, please reach out. If you have cleared some or none of them and are looking for advising, we do offer 1:1 advising sessions that are more budget-friendly for earlier startups.
A note on growth in the context of startups
Context is crucial when coming up with a strategy. Let’s break down some key context that will most likely apply to your startup:
- Your startup is high-risk.
- You don’t have historical marketing, sales, and product data.
- You don’t have validated product-market fit.
- You are running out of time, energy, and money.