How Thinking Too Small is Stalling Your Growth (And How a Summit Vision Fixes It)

A $6 million company. Strong retention. Loyal accounts. And a team convinced they’d already hit the ceiling on their best customers.

They hadn’t. They’d just never looked up.

In this episode, Benno pushes back on conservative strategy and makes the case for a Summit Vision bold enough to actually change how you lead. He walks through the real story of how that same $6M company built an execution system, pursued the right whale customers, and scaled to $32M — not by working harder inside the same frame, but by describing a bigger view and letting that clarity drive every decision.

When you can see the summit, the targets change. The decisions change. The trajectory changes.

What summit are you chasing? Drop it in the comments.

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Always growing.

Benno Duenkelsbuehler 

CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN 

reALIGNforResults.com

benno@realignforresults.com 

Transcript

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Think Big In Strategy

0:00

I think all of us as business executives, owners, CEOs, VPs, we have we make the mistake too often, frankly, to be too conservative, to bite, you know, to eat the elephant one bite at a time, which, yes, absolutely is important in execution. But when it comes to strategizing, do think big, please. Imagine yourself climbing Mount Everest and imagine yourself what will it look like? Uh, what will the world look like when I'm on top of that mountain looking at the world, right? As opposed to having climbed a little, you know, molehill. Um, and you know, I've always wanted in my business to be very meaningful to a few important clients. Uh, to me, that's much more interesting than being sort of a bit player for you know hundreds of different companies. Um, but we need to think bigger. It it uh the payback on that is humongous.

A $6M Company At A Crossroads

1:05

Um, so I'll give you one example of one of my first clients clients actually. Um I was in a conference room with with the owner, and you know, a handful of his um, you know, number two and three guys and gals and and and managers. So it was a it was a fairly small group of you know five or six people of us. And it was a six million dollar company at the time. Uh they had three or four whale customers, what they called whale customers, oh you know, we're doing six hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand, you know, with you know, with with this customer, and oh wouldn't uh but yeah, they're they're not gonna grow any more

Turning Strengths Into More Whales

1:48

than that. And I was like, well, wait, wait a minute. Um let's let's go through you know the SWAT exercise, what are your what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, thoughts, what are you guys really good at? And it I learned that they're really good at spoiling those big whales, those top customers. They're spoiling them for the competition, they're never gonna go to the competition. I said, why can't we find 10 of those instead of three? And why can't we have instead of them doing you know 600, why can't we do 2 million or 5 million with each of them? Um and they were sort of like, well, no, that's not no, uh, but but this, that, and the other thing, and you know, excuses is what I called it. And I said, let's make a key initiative to land three more big whales. And, you know, I even sort of gave defined big whales as you know, $300,000 customers, which was sort of half the size of their big whales.

Base Camp Execution System

2:51

Well, that together with you know that sort of determination to um build it, uh call it a key initiative. We're gonna land, you know, three or five more big whales, um, and then building an execution system around that and hiring a sales manager for that and doing forecasting in the right way and doing reporting and visibility in the right way. Um, you know, I sort of nailed myself to the railroad tracks over this goal of getting them from six million to, you know, certainly seven million and ten million down the road. Well, um, that determination of, well, first of all, describing what their life would be like if they were a $20 million company instead of a six million dollar company and what their profitability would be at that. That was eye-opening for the team. Uh, and then building this sort of execution system around accomplishing that goal uh made all the difference.

From $6M To $32M Growth

4:00

And in the second year of working together, they were at you know 7.4 million, I think, uh, which they were like, ooh, yeah, we haven't grown like this. This is great. And then in the second year, they were at like 8.6 million, and you know, years four and five, they you know got to the 12 million, 15 million dollar range. And after seven years of working together, we reached $32 million, uh, with again 10 or 15 whale customers, but that were now $1 million and $5 million and $8 million whale customers. Um, so I think the the combination of building a summit vision and then an execution system, what I call a base camp execution system, and just going after it, and and that's where the you know do go after it one bite at a time. You're not gonna go from six million to thirty-two million dollars overnight. Um uh is really, really powerful.

Balancing Core Work With Expansion

4:59

Uh, so I I would encourage you to think bigger. Um think of your summit vision and think of the execution around um uh realizing that summit vision while also, of course, going, you know, keeping your core business going. I mean, that's a balancing act, and that's where we come in as Sherpas. Uh we help build that new you know adjacent category, expand the channels, going after you know 10 whales instead of that are much bigger. Um so think through the execution around that. Um, if you want to talk through that, um I'd be happy to you know jump on a call, DM me, comment down below.