If you doubled 3 numbers in your business, revenue wouldn't just double. It would grow by 700 percent.
The 3 numbers: how many paying customers you have, how much they spend when they buy, and how often they buy.
The revenue is those 3 multiplied together. That's the whole trick - improvements don't add, they multiply. Double all 3 and you get 2 x 2 x 2: 8X the revenue you have today.
Of course, nobody doubles all of them - but that's not where this is going.
Where it's going is more useful: the same multiplication that makes 700 percent possible makes much smaller numbers surprisingly powerful. And 2 of the 3 levers are ones that many businesses are reluctant to touch.
Why everyone pulls the same lever
There are good reasons why this happens. New customers are highly visible. You can count them, you can celebrate winning a new contract, or put their logos in an investor presentation. A new logo feels like progress in a way that a pricing review never will.
Look around you. Where is most of the focus? Marketing agencies sell customer acquisition. Sales hires are measured on new business. Every growth conversation you've ever been invited into has really been a customer-acquisition conversation.
So most of the effort generally concentrates on this first lever - and budget follows the effort. Meanwhile customer order value and frequency take a back seat.
Most businesses don't necessarily need more activity. They often need better decisions - and this is one of the clearest examples I know.
A quick dose of reality
Let's come back down to earth for a minute. Here's what the multiplication does with more achievable numbers.
Scenario #1 - customer acquisition, customer order value, and buying frequency each increase by just 10 percent - and revenue grows by 33 percent.
Scenario #2 - leave customer acquisition alone. Lift order value by 15 percent and buying frequency by 15 percent, and those two compound to 32 percent - without winning a single new customer.
Same outcome, but scenario #2 needs no extra marketing spend, no new salespeople, no months of nurturing prospects. It's built entirely on relationships you already have, with people who already trust you.
And it carries a bonus that customer acquisition rarely offers: gains in order value arrive with almost no cost attached, so most of the improvement lands on profit, not just revenue.
Where the 15 percent actually comes from
You might say to me - in my market, I can't just put prices up 15 percent.
Agreed, and that isn't what I'm saying. Order value isn't one number; it's the product of dozens of decisions. Pricing by product, by segment, by contract. The add-on at the point of sale. The upgrade. The longer agreement. The service layer around the product. Somewhere in that mix are customers underpaying for value they'd never walk away from, and offers you've never made to people who'd take them. Stack a few of those together and 15 percent stops looking overly ambitious.
Order frequency works the same way. Adjustments to business models. Service agreements that turn occasional buyers into contracted ones. Staying properly in touch with existing customers, and reviving the ones who've gone quiet. None of it needs a bigger budget - it needs somebody to deliberately own the number.
In most businesses I work with, nobody actively owns either metric. Someone might be responsible for the metrics, but their performance and their remuneration are almost never measured against it.
The same maths works on your valuation multiple
One more thing worth knowing. These levers compound your revenue and your profit - but your valuation is positively impacted too.
A higher EBITDA means a higher valuation, which also increases your personal wealth. Business owners who work both sides of that equation are multiplying a multiplication.
But that's a newsletter for another week. Today's is about the levers already sitting inside your business.
Why not try this…
Write down 3 numbers: customer count, average order value, buying frequency.
Most owners know the first one off by heart, but have to go looking for the other two - which tells you something in itself.
Then ask yourself one question: which of these have we never deliberately worked on?
That's where your easiest gains live. And now you know what they compound into.
All the best,
Gavin
P.S. We have practical tools for moving all 3 of these levers - finding the customers, lifting the order value, building the structures that bring buyers back more often. If you want to know what that would look like in your business, reply to this email with the word LEVERS and I'll show you where I'd start.
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