The OhioX CEO Retreat has become one of my favorite events of the year. This was my second time attending, and the fifth annual gathering brought together more than 100 CEOs and entrepreneurs at Retreat 21, just outside Dublin.
Many of the leaders in the room have built successful companies several times. They’re willing to share what they were weighing when they made a decision, including where they needed help. I appreciate the chance to invest time with people who understand what it takes to build something significant and examine the choices we’re making now.
The conversations kept returning to decisions that reach across a company. Committing to a market changes the expertise a team needs to build. Taking on more customers tests how well people can apply that knowledge and make decisions together. Those connections run through the six principles I’m carrying forward from the day.
I’ve drawn on my own experience and ideas from the Tuesday Growth Brief to work through what these principles mean in practice. The retreat follows the Chatham House Rule, so I’m sharing the substance without identifying participants or attributing their comments.
1. Choose How You’re Going to Grow
Every leader has to decide where to put the company’s effort. Going deep means committing to an area where you can become exceptionally good. You learn enough about your customers’ businesses to see problems they’ve struggled to solve and take on more valuable work. Building that expertise takes time, including turning down opportunities that would pull the team away from it.
There are also seasons when faster expansion makes sense. A repeatable acquisition strategy can bring in expertise and customer relationships that would take years to build organically. You need a clear view of which businesses fit and a way to bring them into the company successfully. Before pursuing the next acquisition, the leadership team has to show that it can handle what’s already been added. Partnerships can also open up opportunities when another company brings something you need.
AI makes this choice more pressing. If your main offer is a general capability that customers can increasingly get from widely available tools, your business is vulnerable. Deep knowledge of a customer’s problems gives you a basis for doing work they’ll continue to value. That knowledge should shape what you acquire or which partners you bring in as you expand.
Be specific about the growth you’re pursuing now and why the business is ready for it. Your team needs to understand what that choice means for the work it takes on.
2. Understand Your Customer’s Business
The assignment a customer gives you is shaped by what they already believe your company does. If you learn just enough to complete that assignment, you can miss a bigger opportunity to help them.
If a customer asks for faster research to support a product launch, spend time understanding the decision behind the request. The team needs enough confidence to commit money to an idea. Learning how they reach that decision can reveal gaps in the way they test demand or determine what customers will pay. Your opportunity to help grows as you understand more of the work.
Regardless of how you choose to grow, get close enough to your customers’ businesses to understand what they’re trying to accomplish and why it’s been difficult. Follow the problems that keep coming up. A recurring problem with a meaningful cost deserves attention, particularly when customers have accepted it as part of doing business.
Use that knowledge to shape what you offer and which capabilities you build. It can also give an acquisition strategy a clearer purpose: bringing together the expertise needed to solve a problem you already understand.
3. Get Paid for the Value You Create
When AI makes a capability cheaper and more widely available, customers gain new options for getting that work done. Your own delivery costs can fall, improving margins under existing agreements. Those agreements can also delay when a change in the market shows up in revenue.
Pay attention to what customers are beginning to do themselves and what competitors are including in their offers. Work you’ve charged a premium for can become something buyers expect as standard. Leaders need to understand which parts of the business are exposed and where customers still need substantial help.
That shift can open up more valuable work. A customer who can generate an analysis quickly still has to decide whether to act on it. Applying that information to a consequential business decision requires an understanding of the company and what’s at stake. Deep expertise gives you a way to help with that responsibility.
As the work changes, revisit how you earn from it. An hourly agreement can reduce your revenue when you finish faster. An ongoing service makes sense when customers need continued help and the price supports what you’re promising. Keep the commercial model in the conversation as you develop the offer, including how the economics hold up when customers have more alternatives.
4. Invest the Capacity You Create
When AI gives your team more capacity, revisit the opportunities you’ve set aside because they would have taken too long or cost too much. The assumptions behind those decisions deserve another look.
A customer segment that needed more support than your business could afford to provide can become attractive under a different way of delivering the work. A team that can investigate demand faster has room to explore a market it previously couldn’t get to. Work through the new economics before carrying the old limits into the next growth plan.
This is a decision about where the company puts its resources. Daily demands will absorb available time, so pursuing a new opportunity takes a deliberate commitment. Give it room in the budget and agree on what the team needs to learn before you commit further.
Include the people closest to customers in that decision. They know where demand has been waiting for the company to catch up. Their understanding should help determine which opportunities receive the capacity you’ve created.
5. Prove Demand Before You Scale
A working prototype makes an opportunity feel more tangible. As building gets faster, teams can get further into developing an offer before they’ve learned enough about what it would take for customers to buy it.
A customer who likes a demonstration still has to fit the offer into an existing business. Someone needs to fund it. The people expected to use it have to make room for a different way of working, often with support from colleagues who weren’t part of the initial conversation.
Use the ability to build quickly to learn about those conditions earlier. Put the offer into real work and understand what happens. A paid pilot gives you evidence of willingness to spend; continued use helps you judge whether the offer earns a place in the customer’s business.
Before funding expansion, agree on the evidence the investment depends on. If customers need extensive help to adopt the offer, include that work in the cost of serving them. What you learn should change how you sell and deliver it, with further investment tied to the progress customers are making.
6. Give Your Strategy Time to Work
A leadership team can spend months discussing a direction before sharing it with the company. By then, leaders are ready to see progress. The people doing the work are beginning to understand how it changes their decisions.
As a trailblazer, this is something I have to pay close attention to. I get excited about what’s possible and where we could go next. That curiosity affects the team’s priorities, especially when I bring forward an opportunity while people are still learning how to deliver on the direction we’ve chosen.
Building expertise takes repeated work with customers. A repeatable acquisition strategy requires time to learn how to bring businesses together successfully. People need enough consistency to develop the judgment you’re counting on.
Attractive opportunities will keep arriving. Agree on how you’ll evaluate them against the direction you’ve chosen, and give your team room to challenge an exception you want to make. Regular conversations should connect the work underway to the progress you expect. When the evidence supports a change, share what you’ve learned so people understand why the business is moving and can adjust their work.
Carrying the Work Forward
The retreat gave us space to have that kind of conversation with people who understand the responsibility of building a company. Many have lived with the consequences of their decisions for years and are willing to share what they’re still learning. I value being able to draw on that experience while working through choices of my own.
I’m grateful to OhioX and everyone who shared so openly. I look forward to continuing these conversations over the coming year and hearing how the decisions we discussed develop as people put them to work.
