How to Grow Revenue Fast: What Scaling a Company 10x Taught Me

I get asked fairly often how we grew revenue tenfold on our core brand, and I think people expect me to describe a growth hack or a brilliant market bet.

The truth is that most of what made the difference would sound almost too simple on a slide. We decided early that the people inside the company mattered as much as the clients outside it, we promoted leaders the team already trusted, we listened hard to our customers, and we gave our sellers a common way of working. Along the way we were ranked #3 on the Inc. Regionals list of the fastest-growing companies in the Midwest, we were named one of Fortune’s Best Workplaces, and Uniti Med, as part of GQR, now appears on Staffing Industry Analysts’ list of the largest staffing firms in the United States.

I want to share what I learned in the order I would want someone to have told me, including what got harder as we grew, because I think the hard parts are where most of the useful lessons live.

What is the fastest way to grow revenue?

The fastest sustainable way I know is to build a place where good people want to work and then point them at customers you genuinely help. That sounds slower than buying leads or cutting prices, and for a quarter or two it might be, but it compounds in a way that tactics do not. Good people bring other good people with them, they stay long enough to get great at the work, and clients can feel the difference within the first conversation.

When growth stalls, it is tempting to treat it as a marketing problem or a pricing problem. Sometimes it is. Far more often, when I have looked closely, it has been a leadership problem wearing a revenue costume. The pipeline was fine, but the team was tired, or the managers were stretched thin, or nobody owned the follow-through. I talked about this on the Catalytic Leadership podcast, and the conversation is summarised in why growth fails without leadership, ownership and culture.

Why does culture come before revenue?

Because culture is what your people do when nobody is checking, and in a fast-growing company nobody has time to check very much. If the culture is strong, people make good decisions on their own and treat clients the way you would. If it is weak, every new hire dilutes it a little further and growth starts to feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

I wrote about this for Forbes in a piece on building culture first, and the short version is that you cannot bolt culture on later. Once you have a hundred people, the culture you have is the one you allowed while you were small. Being named one of Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the same stretch that our revenue grew so quickly is, to me, the clearest evidence that the two belong together rather than competing for attention.

The other side of culture is how you keep people. A lot of leaders respond to turnover by building fences, things like retention bonuses, restrictive agreements and slow-vesting equity. I argued in Inc. that leaders should stop building fences to keep their employees and instead build the kind of place people do not want to leave. A fence keeps someone physically present. It does not get you their best work, and their best work is what grows revenue.

How do you choose leaders when you are scaling fast?

This is the decision I think matters most, and it is the one I see companies rush. When you are growing quickly you need new managers constantly, and the easy move is to promote whoever has the best numbers or whoever interviews the best. Both can go badly.

I have interviewed and promoted a lot of people into leadership roles, and I genuinely enjoy those interviews. I like learning what someone wants and why they want the role. But I have come to believe the interview does not decide the promotion. The last year does. The question I care about is whether that person already made the team better without a title.

So before I decide, I ask the team, without telling them who applied, who they think the next leader should be and who makes the people around them better. If the team already trusts someone and sees them as their leader, that person has earned the role, and the title just makes official what is already true. In one round, the team named someone who was fairly new to the organization, and she was promoted. They also named a woman who had not applied at all. I sat down with her and told her how her teammates saw her, and she is now in a leadership role at another company.

For the people who are not chosen, I help them build a development plan for next time, and it centres on developing the people around them, because that is the one leadership skill that needs no title. When leaders are chosen this way, teams follow them willingly from the first day, and in a fast-growing company that saves months you do not have.

How does customer experience drive revenue growth?

Your happiest clients are the cheapest sales team you will ever have. They buy again, they buy more, and they tell people like them about you. In a crowded market where everyone claims great service, the only proof that counts is what your clients say when you are not in the room.

We took client feedback seriously from the start, and it showed up in our Net Promoter Score. I talked with ClearlyRated about how Uniti Med achieved a world-class NPS in its first year. What I would underline from that conversation is that the score was never the goal. Listening was the goal, and the score reflected it. When a client tells you something is not working, that is the most valuable sales information you will get all month, because it tells you exactly how to keep them and how to win the next one.

What sales discipline does a fast-growing company need?

When you are hiring sellers quickly, you cannot rely on each of them figuring it out alone. You need a shared language for where a deal stands and what to do about the concerns that come up, so new people ramp faster and managers can coach without reinventing the wheel every time.

The two frameworks I teach came out of that need. LOCKS names the five conditions a buyer has to meet before a deal closes: they love the product, they have their own belief that they can succeed with it, they have confidence in you, they can see the kickoff plan, and they feel the stakes of doing nothing. LAARC is the method for handling the objection that shows up when one of those is missing: Listen, Acknowledge, Ask, Respond, Confirm. Neither is complicated, and that is the point. Simple tools get used, and used tools are what turn a growing team into a consistent one. I wrote a longer playbook on how to increase sales if you want the detail.

What breaks when a company grows fast?

Nearly everything bends at some point, and it is better to expect it than to be surprised. Here are the places I would watch most closely, because they are the ones that strain first when revenue climbs quickly.

Communication. What used to travel naturally across a small office now has to be said on purpose, more than once, in more than one place. If people are learning about decisions secondhand, trust erodes quickly.

Your first managers. The people who were excellent individual performers are now being asked to lead, often without much preparation. They need coaching and patience, and they need to know it is fine to ask for help.

Service quality. Volume rises faster than the processes that support it. The clients who chose you because you were responsive will notice first if that slips, so watch your feedback closely while you grow.

The founder’s or executive’s own role. What got the company here was your personal involvement in everything. What gets it further is letting go of most of it. That is uncomfortable, and it is necessary.

Strategy versus spending. Plans multiply when money is coming in. I wrote in your strategy is whatever you are actually funding that the real strategy is wherever your time and budget go, so check that it matches what you say matters.

Is there a shortcut?

I wish I could say yes. What I can say is that the work compounds. A team that trusts its leaders, a customer base that recommends you, and sellers who share a simple discipline will grow faster each year than the year before, because each of those things makes the others easier. Most of what slows a company down is not a lack of opportunity. It is the friction of people who do not feel led, clients who do not feel heard, and sellers working without a common playbook.

I have talked through more of this on the Killer Growth podcast and on Culture From the Heart, about scaling fast by investing in people. If there is a thread through all of it, it is that the companies that grow fastest and keep growing are the ones that take care of their people while they do it.