Why Tweaking One Thing at a Time Won’t Fix Your Growth
If you’ve been running a B2B company for any length of time, you probably have a graveyard of “we tried that” ideas:
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The new agency that promised better leads
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The new salesperson who was going to “own” the number
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The new ops initiative that was supposed to make everything smoother
Each one moved the needle a little… for a while.
But the revenue ceiling is still there.
The margin pressure is still there.
And the sense that the business is running you, instead of the other way around, hasn’t gone away.
If that sounds familiar, there’s a good chance the problem isn’t your effort, your people, or even the individual tactics.
The problem is that you’re trying to fix growth by tweaking one thing at a time.
And growth doesn’t work that way when you get to your level.
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The Hidden Problem with One-Thing-at-a-Time Fixes
When you’re a small startup, you can sometimes get away with fixing growth by pulling one lever:
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A better offer
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A better salesperson
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A better campaign
But once you’re above that, your business is no longer a collection of parts. It’s a system.
That means every change you make in one area has consequences in others:
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You improve marketing, and suddenly operations is overwhelmed.
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You tighten up operations, and suddenly sales doesn’t know what they can promise.
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You push sales harder, and suddenly finance is worried about margins and cash flow.
From the outside, it looks like “nothing works for long.”
From the inside, it feels like you’re constantly chasing your own tail.
The truth is: you’re not broken.
You’re just trying to scale a business on tactics that were never designed for growth.
The Cost: Margin Erosion and Owner Burnout
One-thing-at-a-time fixes don’t just fail to solve the problem. They quietly make it worse.
You see it in:
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Margins that erode as you grow, because operations and finance weren’t at the table when marketing and sales made their plans
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Teams that get whiplash from the latest initiative, then become skeptical of the next one
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Owners who are exhausted, because they’re the only ones who can see across marketing, sales, operations, and finance—and they’re stuck translating between them
On the surface, you might be “growing.”
Underneath, the business is getting harder to run and less enjoyable to own.
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That’s the real signal that you don’t have a marketing problem or a sales problem.
You have a growth system problem.
Unfortunately, I've seen it.
When the long-time owners of a local door and window company were ready to retire, a local entrepreneur bought the company thinking he could greatly expand its footprint in the marketplace. It began an all-out growth push for two years. He had some success simply because he hired a few outside sales people and gave them a great compensation package. Unfortunately he wasn't watching the entire business. Processes were built for prior revenue levels. As the company grew operations couldn't keep up. Now he had nothing but problems. At the same time, his margins were rapidly shrinking. He thought more sales were the solution, but all they did was bury him further in problems and debt. By the time bankruptcy came on his second anniversary he found it a relief - financially and mentally.
What a Growth System Actually Is (and Isn’t)
When I say “growth system,” I don’t mean software.
It’s a practical, proven system for how your business lays out, wins, profits and delivers what you sell as you scale.
A growth system is the way your business:​
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Finds and attracts the right opportunities
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Closes and prices those opportunities
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Delivers and supports the work
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Measures and manages the financial impact
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Aligns your people around all of the above.
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(You absolutely will never scale growth without team alignment. But those business that do get this right, on average, will find an almost immediate uptick in sales and profitability of as much as 18 and 23 percent respectively.*)
At The Written Sale, we think about that system in four big capability clusters:
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Marketing Mastery – data-driven and innovative, reverse‑engineering your perfect customer so leads convert into the deals you actually want
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Sales Superiority – responsive leads, faster closes, higher margins, and feedback that informs the entire ecosystem
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Financial Prowess – increased margins, clear ROI across marketing channels, operations, and sales
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Operational Excellence – operations prepared for added growth, with ripple effects headed off before they become fires
When those four are designed and run as one system, growth stops feeling like a grind and starts feeling like something you can actually manage.
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That’s the “aha” most owners don’t get told: It’s not that your last tactic was wrong.
It’s that you were asking it to do a system’s job.
A Real-World Example: The Industrial Machine Manufacturer
Here’s what this looked like for one client.
They were an industrial machine manufacturer with:
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A very robust marketing budget
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A sales team working hard
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Decent operations
And yet… leads and subsequent sales were weak.
They’d already tried:
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New campaigns
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New messaging
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New sales initiatives
All of it moved the needle a bit, but nothing stuck.
When we came in, we didn’t start with “better ads” or “more calls.” We started with the system:
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How marketing was positioning them in the market
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How sales was qualifying and handling opportunities
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How operations and finance viewed “good” vs. “bad” work
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Where the real margin and opportunity lived
Within six months:
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Marketing and sales had optimized spend, messaging, and positioning
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They saw a huge increase in RFPs and sales (It should be noted that their minimum sale price was $100k)
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They did it without any increase in spend
As they put it:
“We knew something was wrong, but we couldn’t figure out what it was. Carl pinpointed the problem right away and we were off to the races 10‑fold.”
The key wasn’t a magic campaign.
It was treating growth as a whole-business system and tuning the parts to work together.
How to Tell If You Have a System Problem (Not a Tactics Problem)
If you’re wondering whether this applies to you, here are a few simple questions:
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Have you tried multiple marketing or sales tactics in the last 2–3 years, with only temporary or modest impact?
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Does growth create stress in operations, finance, or your own schedule—rather than feeling like a smooth extension of what you already do well?
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Do your teams (marketing, sales, operations, finance) seem to be working hard in their own lanes, but not clearly pulling in the same direction?
If you’re nodding along, chances are good you don’t need another tactic.
You need a growth system that aligns marketing, sales, operations, and finance around a shared growth mentality and measurable KPIs—so you can scale with confidence instead of guesswork and headache.
On our homepage, I walk through how we do that in practical terms, and share a few more stories of what happens when the system finally clicks.
If that sounds relevant to where you are, you can take a look here.
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Ready to See How a Growth System Would Work for Your Business?
If you’re tired of tweaking one thing at a time—and want a practical, proven approach to break your next revenue ceiling—I invite you to grab 30 minutes on my calendar.
No pitch. No pressure. Just a focused working session about where you are, what’s possible, and how a whole-business growth system could work for you.