Are You Approaching Growth From The Wrong End?

In Brief:
Most growth strategies are financial targets dressed up as strategy. They start with a number and work backwards, followed by more action (more supply). Choice-Led Growth works from the other direction — and that sequence is everything.

Somewhere in the next few weeks, a leadership team will gather in a room and agree that they need 10% growth next year. They will then spend the rest of the meeting — and several meetings after it — debating how to find it. New segments. Better marketing. A sales push. Maybe a pricing review.

None of that is a growth strategy. It is a financial target with a to-do list attached.

The distinction matters more than most leaders want to admit. Because the direction you start from determines almost everything: what you prioritise, where you invest, what you measure, and — eventually — whether the growth you achieve is durable or borrowed.

Here is how most growth strategies actually work. A target is set, typically by a board or a fund with a return model to satisfy. That target is then handed to a commercial team and translated into activity — more reach, more channels, more noise. The implicit assumption underneath all of it is that growth is a volume problem. Do more, reach more, convert more. The machine runs harder. Sometimes the numbers move. Often they don't, or don't move enough, or move briefly before stalling again.

The reason is structural, not executional. The machine is pointed in the wrong direction.

Growth is not created by activity as much as it is created by preference expressed through behaviour. Customers choose you — more often, across more situations, at higher prices — or they don't. Everything else is commentary. Revenue is just the accumulated record of choices that have already been made. Pricing power is just the evidence that those choices weren't purely driven by cost. EBITDA is what's left after you've paid for the system that produced those choices.

Which means growth is fundamentally a demand-side problem. Not a supply-side one.

The question is never "how do we generate more revenue?" It is always "why do customers choose us — and what would make more of them choose us, more often, at greater value?" Those two questions sound related. They are not. The first starts with the number. The second starts with the customer. And starting with the customer forces you to confront things that starting with the number lets you ignore.

Like the fact that your value proposition may not be as clear as you think it is. That the customers who matter most may be choosing you for reasons you've never deliberately engineered. That a competitor you're not watching closely is becoming more relevant to your ICP faster than your marketing spend can compensate for. That your pricing is fragile not because your sales team lacks confidence, but because your differentiation isn't strong enough to justify the premium you need.

None of that shows up when you start from a target. It only shows up when you start from choice.

Choice-Led Growth works from the customer decision outward. Here is how your customers actually choose in this category. Here are the forces shaping that choice — in the market, in the culture, in the competitive set. Here is the distance between what those forces are demanding and what you are currently delivering. Here is where that gap is widening. Here is what it is worth in revenue terms to close it — and what it will cost you if you don't.

That is a growth strategy. The rest is execution planning with a revenue target on the cover page.

The hardest part of this is not analytical. It is psychological. Starting from the customer rather than the number requires accepting that growth is not fully in your control — that you are operating in a system shaped by forces you did not create and cannot fully direct. The board wants a plan. The model wants certainty. The instinct is to project confidence backwards from the outcome rather than reason honestly from the inputs.

But the companies that sustain growth over time — the ones that compound it rather than chase it — have made peace with this. They do not treat growth as a target to be hit. They treat it as the consequence of a system that is working. They invest in understanding how their customers choose, design everything to win more of that choice, and build the engine that converts preference into revenue repeatedly.

Fix the direction of the strategy. The numbers follow.