How to Double Your Revenue
Growth doesn't
add up.
It multiplies.
Most owners hunt for the one big thing that will change the year. There usually isn't one. But there are forty small things — and because growth rates multiply instead of adding, forty small things is more than enough.
Forty tactics, two percent each
0 of 40
Two points on every tactic in the guide. Nothing heroic. Nothing expensive.
1.00×
The mistake is adding when you should be multiplying.
Ask most people how to double revenue and they start listing big swings. Land a whale client. Hire three salespeople. Raise prices twenty percent. Each one is a single bet, each one is expensive, and each one can miss.
Here is what that thinking misses. Improvements to different parts of your business don't add together — they compound. If you get five percent more leads, and you close five percent more of them, and each order is five percent bigger, you didn't grow fifteen percent. You grew 15.76 percent. That extra bit looks like rounding error on three tactics. On forty, it's the whole ballgame.
Move the two dials below and watch the gap open up.
The difference is 0.41× you would never have counted on. On a million dollars of revenue, that's $408,040 that only exists because the tactics multiply each other.
Every one of the forty tactics pulls one of four levers.
There are only four ways a business makes more money than it made last year. More customers. Bigger orders. More frequent orders. Customers who stay longer. That's the entire universe. The forty tactics are just the specific ways to pull each lever.
17 tactics
Create more customers
More leads, better-targeted leads, new markets, new geography, more salespeople, a higher close rate, partners and referrals selling on your behalf.
Take the risk out of buying and more people say yes.
10 tactics
Sell more per transaction
Change the pricing model, bundle, up-sell the deluxe version, cross-sell the add-on, price on value instead of cost, aim at the segments that spend more.
The customer is already buying. Ask a second question.
5 tactics
Increase sales frequency
Recurring revenue, more occasions to buy, staying in front of people so you're the one they think of, and turning every contact — including support — into an offer.
Recurring revenue is the holy grail: you stop starting at zero every month.
8 tactics
Keep clients longer
Community, world-class support, switching costs, real relationships, standing for something, win-back programs, and fans who refer.
People don't leave what they helped build.
Where to start
Almost everyone starts at lever one, because “we need more customers” is the reflex. Keeping the customers you already have is far cheaper than going out and finding new ones. If you already have a solid customer list, start at lever four and work backwards. The compounding is the same either way — the cost of getting it is not.
Seven rules for filling in the sheet honestly.
The calculator holds all forty tactics with the explanation of each one. It does the multiplying for you. Your only job is to put an honest number next to each line — and honest is the hard part.
- 01
Start with your last twelve months of revenue
Actual, not budgeted. Everything downstream is a multiple of this number, so an optimistic starting point makes an optimistic answer twice over.
- 02
Read each tactic and ask one question
Not “is this a good idea” — they're all good ideas. Ask: what could I realistically move this by, in the next twelve months, given who I actually have and what they actually have time for?
- 03
Express every percentage relative to total sales
This is the rule people get wrong, and it's the one that turns a good sheet into fiction. A tactic that improves one slice of the business does not move total revenue by that same amount.
You can lift close rate by 20%New-customer business is 1/3 of revenueRelative to total sales, that's 20% × 0.33 = 7%Enter 7%, not 20%. - 04
Be stingy
Two to five percent on something you will genuinely do beats thirty percent on something you won't. The whole point of the exercise is that small numbers are enough — so you never need to inflate one to make the total look good.
- 05
Leave the rest at zero
A blank line costs you nothing. A tactic at zero percent multiplies by one, so it passes the total through untouched. You are not supposed to fill in all forty.
- 06
Watch the total, not the rows
No single row will look impressive, and that's the lesson. The number that matters is the compounded multiple at the top and the revenue figure beside it.
- 07
Pick the handful you'll start this month
The sheet gives you potential, not a plan. Choose the few you can implement immediately, test them so you know what each one actually delivered, then come back and re-dial the sheet with real numbers instead of guesses.
One warning
This is a model of potential, not a forecast. It tells you what's mathematically available if the changes land. It does not know your capacity, your cash, or your market. Treat the output as the size of the prize — then go argue about which tactics you can actually execute.
Now go run your own numbers.
All forty tactics, live. Put in last year's revenue and start dialing — the sheet multiplies as you go and shows you the year you could be having.
Open the Revenue Doubling Machine →