Growing our impact or profit usually involves maximizing something that’s valuable. And things that are valuable are often scarce.
Finding the one thing that is at the heart of your value/scarcity matrix makes it much easier to focus your energy on strategic decisions.
If you own a single store, you need to maximize the profit per square foot. Everything in your growth journey revolves around this.
On the other hand, Subway didn’t care about that at all, and instead focused on having as many sandwich franchises as they could. The resource they scaled was their franchise model.
If you own a factory, the slowest, busiest part of your assembly line is the critical path that has to be identified and optimized.
If you are a music teacher with 30 hours to spend with students a week, your growth is going to be about using each of those hours to maximum effectiveness (perhaps with more engaged students, or in developing digital assets or investing those 30 hours more carefully or profitably).
If you have a brand that consumers trust, you might be able to scale it by offering other products with that same brand name.
If you have a strong relationship with Target or Wal-Mart, you can scale that by bringing in new varieties to gain more shelf space. That’s why successful record labels got more successful by signing more artists. Studio time is easy to scale, access to DJs and rack jobbers, not so much.
If you have a permission relationship with 1,000 great customers, you can maximize the value (to them and to you) of each interaction you have.
And if you’re seeking to change the culture, you could focus on how to get your one precious and scarce agenda to become a movement.