Inflection

Inflection Field Guide · Edition One

You know where you want your business to be. This is about what's getting in the way.

Most owners can describe it in detail.

Their dream team.
The kind of work they'd take.
The work they'd finally turn down.
What they'd stop doing themselves.

The distance between that vision and today usually comes down to seven things. This guide covers all seven and gives you a check for each one, so you can find out which is holding you.

Get The Field GuideFree. Twelve pages. About ten minutes.
Where Momentum Gets Lost: seven places growth quietly slows down, and how to spot yours

How it works

  1. 01

    Download the guide

    It's in your inbox in about a minute.

  2. 02

    Run the seven checks

    A couple of minutes each, using information you already have

  3. 03

    Start with the one that hurt to read

    That's almost always the right place to begin.

Lori, founder of Inflection

Why owner-led businesses can stall

A business gets built on something that works. Usually it's the owner being excellent at the trade, plus word of mouth. That combination takes a company a long way, and then it takes it exactly as far as it goes.

After that, growing means doing things the business has never had to do. Most owners have nobody to ask about that part.

I spent twenty years running growth marketing across 30 industries. The work I led drove more than a billion dollars in revenue. I found that all companies hit the same seven problems. Fortune scale to solopreneur.

Guest lecturer, University of Delaware Horn School of Entrepreneurship.

Any of this sound familiar?

  • You could name the number you want to hit next year. You've been able to name it for a while.
  • The work is good, the customers are happy, and growth still depends on who happens to send you someone this month.
  • You've been told you need AI, or Instagram, or a new website, and you can't tell which of those is real.
  • Somebody asked for a quote in March and you never heard back, and nothing happened after that. This happens often.
  • You're spending time or money promoting your business and you'd have a hard time saying what came back
  • You've got a website, a social account, maybe an email list, and none of them seem to know about each other.

Every one of those is a sign your business has outgrown the way it was built. That's a normal place to be and a fixable one

The seven patterns

Each one gets a page: the question to ask yourself, what's happening underneath it, and a check you can run without hiring anyone.

  1. [01]Your difference doesn't survive the retelling.
  2. [02]Demand arrives on someone else's schedule.
  3. [03]Attention comes in, belief doesn't follow.
  4. [04]Interested people go quiet.
  5. [05]Marketing runs in pieces.
  6. [06]The time or money spent has no payback number.
  7. [07]New tools arrive before the job is named.

Here's one of the checks you'll see in the guide:

Momentum check, pattern 02

List your last ten customers. Next to each one, write where they came from.

Count how many trace back to someone you already knew or a source you don't control.

Most owners already know roughly what that list looks like. Seeing it written down is different. If eight of the ten trace back to someone in your circle, you've found your ceiling, and pattern 02 is where to start.

The other six checks are just as quick.

What happens if you need to step back?

Not much. That's the trouble with it.

You keep working, keep taking care of customers, keep getting by on the business that comes to you. Next year looks like this year. The goal doesn't move closer and it doesn't move away. It sits exactly where it is while you keep doing everything right.

Owners rarely lose a business to one of these seven.
They lose years to them.

This is for you if:

  • You run the business, or you're the one who decides what to spend
  • The work is genuinely good and the growth doesn't match it
  • You'd rather understand what's happening than be handed a generic solution

And honestly, not for you if:

You want tactics to execute this afternoon.

This guide is about finding the right problem first. Tactics come after, and they work better in that order.

See what's holding you back.

Seven patterns. Seven checks. Ten minutes.

Where should we send it?

Which of these sounds like where you are? Select all that apply. *

No cost, no call, no card.

FAQ

Is it really free?

Yes. No card, no call scheduled, no trial. You give an email, you get the PDF.

How long does it take to read?

About ten minutes. It's twelve pages, and each of the seven checks takes a couple of minutes using information you already have.

My business is doing fine. Is this still for me?

That's most of the people it was written for. These seven show up in businesses that are working. They're the reason a good business stays the same size.

Do I need to know anything about marketing?

No. The guide was written specifically to avoid that. There's no jargon in it and nothing you'll need to look up.

I am a one-person business. Does this apply?

Yes. Several of the seven hit hardest at one and two people, especially patterns 02 and 04.