I spent Thursday at Retreat 21, just outside Dublin, for the fifth annual OhioX CEO Retreat. The gathering brings together more than 100 CEOs and senior technology leaders from across Ohio for a day of candid conversations about running and growing their companies.
The opening panel explored a choice that runs through almost every growth plan: how far to specialize and how quickly to expand. AI gives leaders reasons to reconsider both. A team can use it to serve more customers with the expertise it already has. Work that once cost too much to take on can become affordable, opening a path into a new service or market.
During the morning, I asked how leaders keep a strategy from leaking as it moves into the daily work of the company. Choosing where to grow commits the business to learning how to sell and deliver something.
These ten growth levers follow that path from choosing the work to building a company that can handle more of it. They’re my takeaways and applications from the day. The retreat follows the Chatham House Rule, so I’m sharing the ideas without attributing comments to participants.
1. Decide where to deepen your expertise and where to expand.
Depth gives a company a better understanding of what can go wrong for a customer. That matters when a mistake is expensive or the work depends on trust earned over years. Repeated engagements also let a team improve its methods, which can make each new customer easier to serve. The risk is that a narrow market limits demand, or a dependence on one technology leaves the business exposed when that technology changes.
Expansion can spread revenue across more customers and create opportunities to solve additional problems for them. AI can lower the cost of entering some of that work. A company still takes on the expense of learning unfamiliar requirements and supporting what it sells. Moving quickly increases the amount of work committed before those costs become clear.
Define the expertise you want to carry into the next opportunity. A company can stay focused on one difficult customer problem while expanding across industries. It can also deepen a customer relationship by adding a service that solves the next part of that problem. For each proposed move, identify what the team already knows how to do and what it will have to learn. Estimate the cost of that learning alongside the revenue you expect the expansion to bring.
2. Get a customer commitment before making a bigger bet.
Once a team can build a working version quickly, it’s easy to keep improving it before learning whether anyone will buy it. The customer still has to decide whether the problem is worth spending money on. Learning that early protects the time and capital available for the next idea.
Use an early version to ask for a commitment that moves toward a purchase. A paid trial is one option; an enterprise buyer might first need to assign someone to test it in a live workflow and agree on a buying decision date. A customer who keeps asking for features without committing time or money is giving you information about the priority of the problem. Put a limit on what you’ll build before that commitment arrives.
3. Test a better offer while the current one still sells.
Healthy sales tell you customers value what you sell today. A new capability can change what they’ll expect next. One discussion at the retreat examined the difficult choice to rebuild a product while the business was still growing because its leaders saw a way to deliver more value to buyers.
Review an offer that matters to your revenue and consider how you’d deliver it if you were building the business today. Find a part of the customer’s work that new tools could remove or improve. Test that change with someone who uses the current offer, including what they’d pay for the improvement. Budget for the parts you can test with customers before committing to a full rebuild.
4. Change how you charge when AI changes the work.
AI can reduce the hours required to do a job. If you sell those hours, faster delivery can reduce revenue even as the customer receives the same benefit. A service sold for a defined fee or on a recurring basis gives the business a way to earn from improving how the work gets done.
That requires a careful agreement about what the customer is buying. Take a common engagement and work through the result with the buyer, including how they’ll measure it. Account for the work their own team has to do for that result to happen. Price the commitment your company can deliver, with room for support and the cost of the tools. You can then judge whether AI creates enough margin to fund better service or reach customers the old economics made too expensive to serve.
5. Keep customer demand from getting lost between partners.
Growth can stall between the business that creates interest and the one that completes the sale. A customer explains what they need in one place, then arrives somewhere else with that context missing. The receiving company has to start the conversation again. The business that generated the interest loses a chance to learn what happened to it.
Follow a recent inquiry through to the purchase, especially where a partner handles part of the process. Check whether the person completing the sale receives the customer’s reason for buying and whether the outcome reaches the business that referred them. Agree on the information each side can share with the customer’s permission. Follow the next set of referred inquiries through to a sale and review where buyers drop out.
6. Get the whole buying team involved early.
A customer’s enthusiasm tells you someone wants the solution. Approval also depends on people responsible for what happens after it’s purchased. A technical leader, for example, needs to know whether a supplier can support the system the business will depend on. Those concerns can stop a deal even after the intended users have secured a budget.
Ask your contact to explain who must approve the purchase and arrange a conversation with anyone whose requirements could change the proposal. Do that before investing heavily in custom solution work. When access is difficult, set a limit on further unpaid work until the approval path is understood.
7. Teach your team how to judge a sales opportunity.
Years spent shaping an offer give a founder a way to judge what’s worth pursuing. They can hear a customer request and recognize how the additional scope would affect the margin. A prospect’s objection sometimes calls for changing the offer, which requires a decision about what the business is willing to sell.
Use the time after a call to explain why a particular question mattered and what justified advancing the opportunity. As the salesperson takes on more of the conversation, agree on the promises they can make. Repeated objections to the value of the offer still need the founder’s attention. Track how far a salesperson can take a qualified opportunity before the founder needs to join.
8. Give experienced people time to learn a new way of working.
The expertise that makes a company valuable also shapes how its people work. Someone who has spent years becoming dependable can be reluctant to use a tool that makes their output less predictable. Asking them to experiment under a client deadline adds risk to a skill they’ve worked hard to establish.
Give an experienced team time to try AI on a contained piece of real work, with a colleague reviewing the result before it reaches a customer. The trial should account for the effort required to produce usable work, including time spent correcting it. Once the team can repeat the result reliably, decide what additional customer work that capacity allows you to take on.
9. Let the team make more of the decisions that move work forward.
When AI helps a team finish work faster, the person approving what happens next can become the bottleneck. A founder who once had time between requests now faces a queue. The company’s ability to grow depends partly on how much judgment other people are allowed to exercise.
Look at the decisions that keep returning to the same leader. Assign responsibility for a recurring decision and write down when it needs a leader’s review. A team might choose how to deliver an agreed feature while the founder stays involved when a request changes the customer promise. Keep a short record of why important calls were made, including the assumptions behind them. People can use that reasoning on the next piece of work and revisit it when the evidence changes.
10. Give a growth choice enough time to produce evidence.
A CEO can tire of a strategy while the team is still learning how to execute it. The next opportunity arrives with a customer attached and feels easier to justify. A series of exceptions follows, consuming the time the original choice needed. Eventually, the business has moved in another direction without making a deliberate decision to do so.
When you commit to a growth bet, agree on a review date and the evidence that would justify continuing it. Paid trials progressing toward repeat business, for example, show that the work is reaching the intended customer. Requests outside the chosen focus belong in that review too, alongside the work they would displace. Someone on the leadership team needs permission to challenge the CEO’s exceptions.
Put One Lever to Work
Take the growth commitment already on your desk and identify what is most likely to stop it. An untested offer needs evidence from a buyer. If work is waiting for the founder, the next useful change involves who can make a decision.
Agree on one change and a date to review what happened. Keep that evidence with the original decision so the next person can see what the business learned. As that constraint eases, examine what the company is ready to take on next.
Thank you to OhioX and the leaders who shared the choices they’re working through. Staying in touch gives us a chance to follow how those decisions turn out and help one another with the work that comes next.
