As a business owner and former marketer, I always put business growth into two main buckets: Organic and Paid.
Most of you who have done any amount of marketing for your business will have heard of these terms.
Organic marketing being the 'free' stuff you can do to attract eyeballs, and subsequently, sales, to your business - such as creating content.
Paid marketing is the eyeballs that you pay for - facebook advertising, radio/tv, you name it.
When I first started working with my acquisition mentor, he unlocked a paradigm shift for me when it came to these little words. Over time, the deeper and deeper I got into the M&A world, I found a thread. The M&A guys also use this term, "paid" and "organic", but in a different context.
You see, when it comes to business growth, these guys think much bigger than growing a company by x% every year, even if that x is a big number. They think about growth in multiples - because this is possible through acquisition.
To them, organic growth is the growth a single stand-alone business does every year, regardless of wether that growth is through paid ads, door to door sales, etc.
A business that grows on its own, over time, is considered to be growing organically.
On the flip side, paid growth is buying REVENUE (not ads!). Yes, literally paying to add revenue straight onto the top-line (and profit to the bottom-line). This is done by buying other companies - competitors, other guys up/down your supply chain, etc.
This unlocks quantum growth - allowing one to multiply their business many times over. This paid growth can quickly compound into a very large company (9-10 figures), which otherwise is very slow and tedious to achieve.
So I challenge you - have you thought about this type of paid growth for your business? What's stopping you from buying another company, to double your size overnight? Or is this a thought that doesn't really ever come up for most business owners?
Drop a comment below, I'd love to hear where people's heads are at, and what their limiting beliefs are, that are holding them back from quantum growth via acquisitions.