The Growth Cycle

You are now firmly in the growth cycle, a sequence of actions you’ll repeat to reach your growth milestone:

1. Brainstorm growth experiments.
2. Evaluate the top 5 to work on immediately.
3. Execute those experiments and evaluate how they worked.
4. Go deeper and do more on those which worked best.
5. When the experiments plateau, return to the brainstorm list and repeat the cycle until you reach your growth milestone.

This is the growth cycle, and this is what growing your business will likely look like for quite a while. This is the process you’ll use to grow from this milestone to the next and the one after that.

It’s very likely the case that you should stay in this cycle right now, continuing to grow your business, building new products and trying new marketing channels. But there are a few important decisions you may want to make along the way:

• Do you want to grow a team? It can bring a significant layer of meaning and effectiveness to your business. But not without it’s costs.
• Are you ready for the Scale stage? Do you feel you’ve got a really greased wheel in this business, a significant engine of growth? You may be ready for the scale stage, where you’ll invest heavily to rapidly accelerate the growth of the business. Here’s a good conversation about when to scale.

If you continue growing on your own, you’ll simply cycle through this stage again, creating experiments to run, evaluating them, running the best ones, moving the needle, breaking through ceilings, setting new goals, repeating the cycle.

If you choose to grow your team along the way, you’ll focus on growing a team to help you reach your growth milestone, cycling through this stage again (as long as needed to reach your growth milestone).

And if you decide to scale your business, you’ll move on to the next stage of the roadmap. Note: this stage often includes taking on investment, spending lots of money, etc. It’s a very different plan than the more lifestyle business approach we’ve taken so far.

Hit the Milestone

What’s the next milestone for you? You know what to do. Cycle through this growth stage again and hit it!

If you get your business into a repeatable growth model and you want to ramp it up dramatically, you may want to move on to the scale stage.

This is bitter sweet right now. You’ve really graduated into a new stage, but you’ve also just begun your business journey. Can I ask you: if you’ve grown your business through these stages, if this roadmap has helped guide you, will you let us here at Fizzle know either via email or in the forums? We would so love to celebrate your success.

Ok, see you the next time through the cycle, or in the Scale stage 🙂