Three Ways to Grow - TGO

The growth strategy you’ve trusted for years might be the very thing keeping your business stuck.

Most companies default to a binary choice:

• Organic growth (get better, faster, cheaper with what you’ve got), or
• Acquisition (buy your way to scale, and hope the integration sticks).

But both come with real headaches—breaking down internal silos, aligning teams, post-merger chaos... Sound familiar?

There’s a Third Growth Option—and it’s driving results that traditional methods miss. I’ve seen it add $26M in revenue by expanding a lighting company into furniture, and double a factory’s revenue just by fixing how they go to market.

This approach focuses on three high-impact levers:

1. Expanding into adjacent product categories
2. Tapping new distribution channels
3. Sharpening your go-to-market execution

The beauty? You can build this engine without burning out your core team—because it runs alongside your day-to-day ops, not instead of them.

If your business is plateauing—or if growth feels like pushing a boulder uphill—this might be the framework you’ve been missing. Let’s talk about what’s getting in your way and how this Third Growth Option could unlock your next leap.

Always growing.

Benno Duenkelsbuehler

CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN

reALIGNforResults.com

benno@realignforresults.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Challenging Traditional Growth Frameworks
• 1:01 The Complexity of Organic Growth
• 2:05 Introducing the Third Growth Option
• 3:29 Success Stories and New Perspectives
• 4:29 Invitation for Discussion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

it's tough to get growth right if you're operating under the wrong framework. Right and in this season three growth climbers toolbox, I want to share all the things that I've learned over the years that can help you right. And I've learned that this framework of you know, the most used framework in business growth framework is organic growth or acquisition. It's binary, it's organic or it's acquisition, and I've been thinking about this. Actually I've been thinking about this since I was a kid, for crying out loud Because in the 1970s my dad's business got stuck and I've watched him painfully. I watched him be stuck in sort of the wrong framework, I think.

Speaker 1: 1:01

And in the first 20 years of my career I've been in plenty of Monday morning financial reviews or yearly budgeting meetings and we're always talking about, you know, there's always this sort of pressure and anxiety around the complexity of driving organic growth or doing acquisition. Complexity of driving organic growth or doing acquisition, which, by the way, organic growth is very complex because it forces you to use current resources to go better, faster, cheaper. That's what organic growth is and does. And there's lots of complexity in getting different departments, lots of complexity in getting different departments to play well with each other. Silos you break down silos and make collaboration happen, and what's good for one department is very challenging for another department in all of that, so just sort of the tyranny of running today and making, you know, making the month and making the year in organic growth is very, very difficult. It's very, you know, challenging, and acquisition has its downfalls. You can find the right target and buy it at the right price and then it falls apart in integration. Right, integration goes away.

Speaker 1: 2:21

But the framework that we use that I encourage you to think about in your business, is the third growth option. So you've got organic, you've got acquisition, and then the third option is adding new, adjacent categories. You know you're selling apples, oranges on your food stand, accessing new channels of distribution, you're on the East Coast, not the West Coast, or you're in the US, not in Europe, or you're online but not offline, or the other way around. Accessing new channels of distribution, which requires a tweaking of the go-to-market process usually, or you just stay in your act. Third growth option can also be just remaining in your core categories and your core channels, but fixing the market process, which is usually this eight-cylinder engine that sputters on five and um backfires on three cylinders. Uh, so fixing the go-to-market process can have huge implications. I've seen, you know.

Speaker 1: 3:29

I'll give you two examples of third growth option success stories. One we added a furniture category to a lighting company, went from zero to $26 million in three years. The other we doubled the revenue of a of a factory, um, by just fixing their go-to market process. Um, and there are and, and. The reason we've been able to do that and you can do this, um, the reason you can make the third growth option work for you, is because it is about understanding the framework from a different perspective, applying resources to building adjacent categories, fixing the go-to-market process, adding new channels of distribution and applying resources today to make that happen, while the rest of the team under your payroll continues running the business today. Right, what are some things holding you back? Love to hear about it, love to talk about it and see if I can help. Thank you.