USE CASES
Growth problems have patterns. Yours is on this page.
Thirty-six situations we've seen across 200+ mid-market companies. Find yours. See what it takes to fix it.
You run a mid-market industrial or B2B business. Ten to five hundred million in revenue. Real customers, real products, real constraints. The growth question isn't whether you can grow. It's why the system that got you here stopped producing.
Group 01
Performance moments.
Something used to work. It doesn't anymore, and the explanations don't agree.
6 situations
Growth stopped and nobody agrees why.
You grew steadily for years. Then you didn't. The leadership team has four theories and each one is plausible.
Every theory is built from anecdote. Nobody in the room has a way to test one against another, so the argument resolves by seniority instead of evidence.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. Scoring 25 drivers against 200+ comparable companies turns theories into a ranked list.
You've missed plan two quarter running.
The forecast said one thing. The results another. Twice. Now the third quarter is being planned using the same method.
A missed plan is a symptom with dozens of possible causes, and the pressure to act fast usually means acting on the most visible one. Which is rarely the binding one.
Starts with the RevGrowth Catalyst. Two days, whole leadership team, diagnosis and plan in the same room.
Marketing spend went up. Pipeline didn't.
More budget, more activity, more dashboards. The same number of qualified opportunities.
This is the most-fought argument in B2B, and it's usually fought without a shared definition of what good looks like. Both sides are arguing from their own data.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. A neutral read on where demand generation actually sits relative to companies your size.
You launched a product and revenue didn't move.
The product is good. The market said it wanted it. Twelve months in, the revenue line looks the same.
The instinct is to blame the product. Usually the commercial system was never designed to sell it - same channels, same motion, same people, new box.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark, then Architecture. Diagnose whether it's the product or the system, then design the motion the product needs.
You're losing deals to competitors and can't explain it.
Their product isn't better. Their price isn't lower. You're still losing.
You can only compare yourself to what you can see. The difference is almost always in a part of their system you never get to observe.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. This is the case where the comparison set is the answer - you're being measured against companies that solved it.
Revenue is leaking and you can't find where.
Deals stall. Customers churn quietly. Quotes go unanswered. None of it shows up as a crisis, and all of it compounds.
Leaks hide between functions. Each department's numbers look fine because the loss happens in the handoff.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. The 25 drivers cross functional lines by design.
Group 02
Structural moments.
The problem isn't information. It's how the growth system was built.
4 situations
Someone else's salesforce controls your growth.
Distributors, reps, channel partners. They carry your product alongside forty others, and your growth rate is set by how much attention you get.
You have almost no instrumentation on the part of the system that matters most. The data lives with the partner.
Starts with the RevGrowth Architecture. Design the demand you control, so the channel fulfills it rather than determines it.
You added capacity ahead of demand.
New line, new plant, new headcount. The capital is committed. The commercial system to fill it was assumed.
Capacity decisions get made with operating rigor. The demand assumptions underneath them rarely get the same scrutiny.
Starts with the RevGrowth Catalyst. The clock is already running — utilization is measured monthly whether the plan exists or not.
You're losing deals to competitors and can't explain it.
Their product isn't better. Their price isn't lower. You're still losing.
You can only compare yourself to what you can see. The difference is almost always in a part of their system you never get to observe.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. This is the case where the comparison set is the answer - you're being measured against companies that solved it.
Revenue is leaking and you can't find where.
Deals stall. Customers churn quietly. Quotes go unanswered. None of it shows up as a crisis, and all of it compounds.
Leaks hide between functions. Each department's numbers look fine because the loss happens in the handoff.
Starts with the RevGrowth Benchmark. The 25 drivers cross functional lines by design.
Group 02
Structural moments.
The problem isn't information. It's how the growth system is built.
4 situations
Someone else's salesforce controls your growth.
Distributors, reps, channel partners. They carry your product alongside forty others, and your growth rate is set by how much attention you get.
You have almost no instrumentation on the part of the system that matters most. The data lives with the partner.
STARTS WITH
RevGrowth Architecture. Design the demand you control, so the channel fulfills it rather than determines it.
You added capacity ahead of demand.
New line, new plant, new headcount. The capital is committed. The commercial system to fill it was assumed.
Capacity decisions get made with operating rigor. The demand assumptions underneath them rarely get the same scrutiny.
STARTS WITH
RevGrowth Catalyst. The clock is already running - utilization is measured monthly whether the plan exists or not.
The motion doesn't transfer to a new market.
New segment, new geography, new channel. What works at home isn't working there.
The existing motion is undocumented and relationship-dependent. It can't transfer because it was never written down - it lives in people who aren't in the new market.
STARTS WITH
RevGrowth Benchmark. This is the case where the comparison set is the answer - you're being measured against companies that solved it.
Every location grows differently.
Multiple sites or acquired units, each with its own way of selling. Some grow. Some don't. No one can say why with confidence.
Nothing in your stack makes them comparable. Financials roll up. Growth systems don't.
STARTS WITH
The full RevGrowth OS. Benchmark for comparability, Architecture for a common design, Engine for the cadence that keeps it common.
Growth breaks differently depending on whether you run the company or own it.
Operator
You run a mid-market industrial or B2B business.
Ten to five hundred million in revenue. Real customers, real products, real constraints. The growth question isn't whether you can grow. It's why the system that got you here stopped producing.
Group 01
Performance moments.
Something used to work. It doesn't anymore, and the explanations don't agree.
Growth stopped and nobody agrees why.
You grew steadily for years. Then you didn't. The leadership team has four theories and each one is plausible.
Every theory is built from anecdote. Nobody in the room has a way to test one against another, so the argument resolves by seniority instead of evidence.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Scoring 25 drivers against 200+ comparable companies turns theories into a ranked list.
You've missed plan two quarters running.
The forecast said one thing. The results said another. Twice. Now the third quarter is being planned by the same people using the same method.
A missed plan is a symptom with dozens of possible causes, and the pressure to act fast usually means acting on the most visible one. Which is rarely the binding one.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. Two days, whole leadership team, diagnosis and plan in the same room.
Marketing spend went up. Pipeline didn't.
More budget, more activity, more dashboards. The same number of qualified opportunities.
This is the most-fought argument in B2B, and it's usually fought without a shared definition of what good looks like. Both sides are arguing from their own data.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. A neutral read on where demand generation actually sits relative to companies your size.
You launched a product and revenue didn't move.
The product is good. The market said it wanted it. Twelve months in, the revenue line looks the same.
The instinct is to blame the product. Usually the commercial system was never designed to sell it - same channels, same motion, same people, new box.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark, then Architecture. Diagnose whether it's the product or the system, then design the motion the product needs.
You're losing deals to a competitor and can't explain it.
Their product isn't better. Their price isn't lower. You're still losing.
You can only compare yourself to what you can see. The difference is almost always in a part of their system you never get to observe.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. This is the case where the comparison set is the answer - you're being measured against companies that solved it.
Revenue is leaking and you can't find where.
Deals stall. Customers churn quietly. Quotes go unanswered. None of it shows up as a crisis, and all of it compounds.
Leaks hide between functions. Each department's numbers look fine because the loss happens in the handoff.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. The 25 drivers cross functional lines by design.
Group 02
Structural moments.
The problem isn't information. It's how the growth system is built.
Someone else's salesforce controls your growth.
Distributors, reps, channel partners. They carry your product alongside forty others, and your growth rate is set by how much attention you get.
You have almost no instrumentation on the part of the system that matters most. The data lives with the partner.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Architecture. Design the demand you control, so the channel fulfills it rather than determines it.
You added capacity ahead of demand.
New line, new plant, new headcount. The capital is committed. The commercial system to fill it was assumed.
Capacity decisions get made with operating rigor. The demand assumptions underneath them rarely get the same scrutiny.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. The clock is already running — utilization is measured monthly whether the plan exists or not.
The motion doesn't transfer to the new market.
New segment, new geography, new channel. What works at home isn't working there.
The existing motion is undocumented and relationship-dependent. It can't transfer because it was never written down — it lives in people who aren't in the new market.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Architecture. Make the motion explicit before asking it to travel.
Every location grows differently.
Multiple sites or acquired units, each with its own way of selling. Some grow. Some don't. No one can say why with confidence.
Nothing in your stack makes them comparable. Financials roll up. Growth systems don't.
WHERE IT STARTS
The full RevGrowth OS. Benchmark for comparability, Architecture for a common design, Engine for the cadence that keeps it common.
Group 03
Leadership and capital moments.
Something changed at the top, or someone outside is now asking.
You're new in the seat and need a fast, honest read.
New CEO or CRO. Sixty days in. Everyone is telling you something different and all of it is filtered.
You need a baseline before you make changes, because you can't demonstrate improvement against a starting position nobody recorded.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Then Catalyst inside the first hundred days, while the mandate is still open.
Your sales leader left and took the motion with them.
The pipeline was in their head. So were the relationships, the qualification standard, and the reason the forecast was ever accurate.
Hiring a replacement transfers the problem. The next leader will build their own version of the same undocumented system.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Architecture. Design the system before you hire the person who runs it.
You inherited a function with no documented system.
New commercial leader, no playbook, no definitions, no cadence. Just whatever survived from whoever was here last.
Reverse-engineering the current state from institutional memory takes months and produces a description, not a design.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark, then Architecture. Then Catalyst inside the first hundred days, while the mandate is still open.
The next generation inherited relationships they didn't build.
The business was built on the founder's relationships. The successor is capable and has none of them.
Family succession plans cover ownership and governance thoroughly. They rarely cover how growth actually happens, because the founder never had to explain it.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Architecture. Transferable growth is the part of succession planning that usually gets skipped.
The board or the bank wants a defensible growth plan.
Someone external is now asking for evidence, with a date attached.
Internal plans are built from internal logic. They hold up in the room where they were written and nowhere else.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. External deadline, external audience, quantified output.
You're considering outside capital for the first time.
Minority recap, growth equity, first institutional money. You want to know what a sponsor will see before a sponsor sees it.
Buyers underwrite the growth system, not last year's growth rate. Most owners have never had theirs examined that way.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. See your position before someone else prices it.
A step-change target has been set and nobody knows how to reach it.
The number is on the wall. Doubling in three years, or the equivalent. The plan to get there is last year's plan with bigger numbers.
You're running a $30M ambition on a $10M operating system. Incremental improvement to a system built for a smaller company doesn't close a gap that size.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. Two days to quantify the gap and build against it.
You're 18 to 36 months from selling.
You want to know what's suppressing the multiple while there's still time to do something about it.
Value creation late is expensive. The things that move a multiple - repeatability, diversification, transferable growth - take eighteen months to build and one diligence process to expose.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Then Catalyst, if the list is long enough to need sequencing.
Not sure which one you are?
Most companies are two or three of these at once. The Simulation sorts it out in an hour, using your numbers.
One hour. Your data. Zero cost.
Private Equity
You underwrite growth. Then you have to produce it.
Financials, operations, customers, legal - all diligenced. The growth thesis is the one part of the model that stays unfalsifiable until after the wire clears. These are the moments where that becomes a problem.
Group 01
Before the deal.
The growth thesis is the only part you can't diligence.
Everything else in the model gets tested. Growth gets a market study and a management presentation.
You are underwriting the one assumption nobody has a method for. Benchmarking makes it testable before close, against companies the target actually resembles.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Pre-close, on the target's own data.
The add-on's growth may not survive the seller leaving.
Founder-owned, founder-sold, founder-grown. The question is what's left twelve months after the earnout.
Platform diligence asks whether the thesis holds. Add-on screening asks something narrower and more frequent: is this growth motion structural, or is it one person's relationships?
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Scoped to the drivers that predict transferability.
The platform thesis needs testing before IC.
Growth is the central case and it has to hold across a five-year hold.
A thesis that depends on the target's current growth continuing is a thesis with no mechanism. The mechanism is what benchmarking exposes.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Then Catalyst post-close, to operationalize it.
The growth number in the model has no external basis.
Fifteen percent a year for five years. Management's projection, adjusted by feel, defended in IC because nobody had a better number.
Every other line gets triangulated against something external. A growth target with no external reference isn't conservative or aggressive. It's untested.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Position the target against 200+ comparable mid-market companies before the number becomes a covenant.
You need third-party growth evidence for your capital partners.
Independent sponsor. Deal in hand. Capital partners want more than your conviction.
Your read on the growth opportunity is the thing being priced. An external, benchmarked position is a different kind of evidence than a deck.
WHERE IT STARTS
Group 02
During the hold.
The VCP's growth section is three bullets and a hope.
Operations, procurement, pricing, working capital — all specified. Growth says "expand sales coverage" and "improve marketing."
Growth is the largest line in most value creation plans and the least specified. Not because it matters less, but because there's no standard method for specifying it.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. First hundred days, whole management team, typically 20–30 quantified opportunities instead of three bullets.
Twelve companies, one operating partner's calendar.
You need to know where your attention earns the most. Right now that decision is made on reporting noise and whoever called last.
Financials roll up and compare. Growth systems don't. There is nothing in the standard portfolio stack that makes growth capability comparable across holdings.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark, run across the portfolio. The value isn't any single score - it's the ranking.
You're new to the portfolio and need one common diagnostic.
New operating partner. Companies built by someone else, reported on differently, each with its own narrative.
You can read twelve board decks and still not know which growth problem is the real one.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. One instrument, one scale, twelve comparable results.
Two companies, two growth motions, one entity.
Post-acquisition integration. Somebody has to design the merged commercial system, or it defaults to whichever side is louder.
Integration plans cover systems, facilities, and org charts. The growth motion is usually left to sort itself out, and it sorts itself out badly.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Architecture. Catalyst if the integration deadline is inside ninety days.
Year three, growth is behind, and the window is closing.
Operate, replace, or exit early. The decision needs a basis better than the last four board meetings.
Time-remaining shrinks the value of getting it wrong slowly. The diagnosis has to be fast and it has to be defensible to your IC.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. Two days beats a quarter of debate.
The team looks capable. The growth doesn't.
Good operators, credible plans, disappointing results. Is the shortfall the market, the system, or the people?
Most answers here are opinions delivered confidently. Benchmarking answers a narrower question: is the growth system well designed, or is a capable team running a system that can't produce the result?
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. We score the system, not the people - a low score with a strong team is a design problem, and those are cheaper to fix than leadership changes.
Every unit in the roll-up grows differently.
Multi-site or buy-and-build. Each unit was built differently and sells differently. Synergy assumptions rest on a common commercial motion that doesn't exist yet.
Comparability has to come before standardization, and standardization has to come before the cadence that holds it.
WHERE IT STARTS
The full RevGrowth OS. This is the profile where no single component does the job.
Budget is allocated by last year's budget.
Commercial spend gets set by precedent and negotiation. Nobody can say which part of the growth system is over-funded and which is starved, because there's no reference for what right looks like.
Reallocation is cheaper than new spend. It almost never happens, because it requires evidence. Benchmarking against comparable companies produces it — including which drivers separate top-quartile performers from bottom-quartile ones.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark, then Architecture. This is the profile where no single component does the job.
The growth case has risks nobody has named.
The plan has a number and a list of initiatives. It doesn't have a statement of where the growth system is weak enough to put the number at risk.
Downside cases get built from market and execution assumptions. Concentration, transferability, channel control, acquisition capability — the growth system itself is rarely examined as a source of risk until one of them produces a miss.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. Low-scoring drivers are the named vulnerabilities.
Group 03
Approaching exit.
You need a growth story a buyer will underwrite.
Twelve to twenty-four months out. The question isn't what to fix anymore. It's how to evidence what you built.
Buyers discount growth narratives they can't verify. A benchmarked position is verifiable in a way that a management projection isn't.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Catalyst. Assembles the growth case as a documented system with quantified headroom.
Something is suppressing the multiple and you don't know what.
Thirty-six months out, or thereabouts. Enough time to fix things if you know which things.
Multiple compression from growth quality shows up in diligence, not before. By then it's a negotiation, not a project.
WHERE IT STARTS
You want to hold longer and need to justify it.
Continuation vehicle or GP-led secondary. New capital is being asked to underwrite growth that the original hold didn't fully deliver.
The case for holding has to be made on remaining headroom, and headroom is exactly what a benchmarked position quantifies.
WHERE IT STARTS
Your LPs are asking how you know the growth is real.
Fundraise, annual meeting, one pointed question. The evidence available is a growth rate and a management narrative. Both self-reported.
A benchmarked position is external and comparable. It answers with a scale instead of a story.
WHERE IT STARTS
RevGrowth Benchmark. One run, one point-in-time position.
Bring one company. One hour.
The fastest way to see whether this holds up is to run it on a real target or a real portfolio company, using their numbers.
One hour. Your data. Zero cost.
Four situations that we turn down.
Naming them protects the ones we don't.
Not enough system to instrument. The 25 drivers assume a business with parts.
Wrong tool, wrong timeline. Measurement is a luxury when payroll is the question.
The RevGrowth Simulation runs on your data. No data, no diagnosis.
Different growth physics - and the part that actually matters, our dataset is mid-market industrial & B2B. Benchmarking a company against a comparison set it doesn't belong to produces a confident number that means nothing.
The RevGrowth Simulation
Find out which one you are.
The RevGrowth Simulation is a one-hour working session using your own numbers. You'll see where your growth system sits against 200+ mid-market companies, and what the gap is worth.
60 minutes - built on your data - CEO level - no obligation