Deeper, Not Wider

There are two ways to grow. You can add: more offers, more audiences, more channels, more of you. Or, you can go further into what you already have. The first feels like progress, because there is visible motion. The second can feel like standing still, right up until you notice it is the only one that compounds.

(Compounding usually starts slow — ergo most people today can't tolerate that initial trough).

Under perceived pressure, most founders widen. It is the obvious move. For example, if revenue is flat, you add a second product, a new segment, another way in. It also therefore meets the need for 'growth'.

Each addition is defensible on its own. Together they spread you thin across a surface too large to tend, and the original thing, the one that is working and could carry more, gets less attention.

Depth works differently. You get in at one point, usually the highest one you can reach, and instead of casting around for the next prospect, you follow the doors as they open in front of you. One conversation reveals the next. A problem solved at the top exposes the one sitting beneath it. You are not hunting. You are being led further in.

I have had engagements that began as a single question and, once we went far enough, became a map of the whole business, not because I went looking for more, but because depth keeps opening rooms.

Another person literally had an offering which had value, from the top all the way down in an organisation, if it were deployed slightly differently at the different levels. One thing, with a Swiss Army knife-type capability. If he just looked at it as 'a blade' he'd only see one or two levels of practical application.

That's the trouble with 'offers'; they tend to become very rigid.

A fixed offer is a potential trap. It pins you to one room of a house you could have had the run of. Name the thing too tightly and you have told everyone exactly where you are permitted to stand. Hold it open — a way of seeing, rather than a packaged service — and you can move to wherever the real problem is.

The same is true of who you work with. Ten relationships, each gone fully into, will carry you further. In revenue, in referral, in the work itself as opposed to fifty held at arm's length.

Depth is not the slow road to breadth. It is the only road to the kind of breadth worth having. In physics, the lever is most effective driven into a single deep point.