Growth by Subtraction

Most growth strategies are lists of things to add: new products, new markets, new initiatives, new hires. Very few say what the business is going to stop doing. Yet in my experience, the most useful growth decision an organisation makes is often a clear no.

I call this “the cost of yes”. Every initiative a business says yes to spends something scarce: leadership attention, the time of its best people, delivery capacity and the patience of its customers. Organisations accumulate initiatives because starting things is rewarded and stopping them feels like failure. Each one has a sponsor, a sunk cost and a reason to continue. Over time the portfolio fills up, capacity spreads thinner, and nothing gets the focus it needs to succeed. The business is busy, and it isn't growing.

I learned this most directly working near the top of a listed fintech that had grown too quickly. Its product estate had sprawled out from a mobile banking core into offers and loyalty, charitable giving, life and pensions, and even venue management. Each extension had made sense to someone at the time, and each had its own team, roadmap and champions. Together they meant the business was doing a great many things, few of them well enough to win.

My job, in partnership with a new leadership team, was to cut it back to the core. We focused on one thing: mobile banking services that would let smaller banks compete on customer experience with the largest ones. Everything else was stopped, sold or wound down. It was a difficult process, because every product we stopped had people who believed in it. But the focus changed the business. It reached EBITDA profitability and went on to a trade sale. The lesson I took from it is simple. Doing one thing very well is almost always better than doing many things adequately.

Subtraction is hard because nobody is rewarded for it. There's rarely a champion for stopping something, and there's always someone who will defend what exists. The way through is to make stopping a deliberate, visible part of how decisions get made rather than an admission that something failed. That means agreeing kill criteria before an initiative starts, reviewing the portfolio for things that survive only because nobody has asked whether they should, and keeping a not-to-do list alongside the plan, so that ideas that have been decided don't come back every quarter.