I sat down this week with the owner of an eight-figure engineering services business.
Established, respected - the kind of company you’d assume has this stuff nailed down.
“What’s your sales target this year?”
The answer came back in under a second.
“How did you get to it?”
A pause. Then a smile. “If I’m honest… it’s a guess.”
That’s not a small business winging it. That’s a company with a board, a finance function, and two decades of trading - running on a number nobody could defend.
Most owners can name their number. Far fewer can defend it. And an undefendable number quietly runs your business for you.
Here’s how: You need a key hire in March, but you’re not confident the revenue’s coming, so you push it to June - and your capacity arrives long after the demand. Marketing gets funded in good months and cut in slow ones, which is precisely backwards. You end up reacting to the business instead of driving it.
A forecast is what you think will happen.
A target is what you’ve decided will happen - worked backwards from.
So stop asking what feels achievable. Start with where you want the business to be, and ask the more useful question:
"What would have to be true for that number to happen?"
Then follow the chain:
- Lead Volume: How many enquiries do you need?
- Conversion Rate: How many turn into proposals and wins?
- Average Deal Value: What is each win worth?
- Account Growth: What do existing clients buy next, and who else can you serve inside those accounts?
Why the chain matters more than the target
These aren’t things you simply add together. They multiply.
Take a business running 200 enquiries a year, converting 25% of them, at £200k per client. That’s £10m.
Now, move each lever by just 10%:
- 220 enquiries
- 27.5% conversion rate
- £220k average deal size
Nothing dramatic. A tightened follow-up process, a better-qualified pipeline, presenting proposals instead of just emailing them.
That business is now at £13.3m. Same team, same market, same year.
Add a fourth lever - 10% more revenue from existing clients - and you’re suddenly at £14.6m.
Nobody had a heroic breakthrough. Four unremarkable, 10% improvements multiplied into a 46% growth year.
Do that again next year, and it compounds. Three years of quiet, systematic improvement and the business has roughly tripled - without a single burnout-inducing quarter.
The Caveat
The arithmetic is cleaner than reality. These levers aren't completely independent.
If you push lead volume too hard, conversion often drops because you’ve traded quality for quantity. That’s precisely why you monitor the whole system together, rather than obsessing over whichever metric caused panic last month.
Confidence doesn’t come from blindly hitting every target. It comes from knowing which levers move your revenue, tweaking each one intentionally, and watching your team execute whether you’re in the room or not.
So look at your calendar and your dashboard from this past week: Could someone tell what you’re actively building towards? Or would they just see you being busy?
If your targets feel more like educated guesses than defensible systems, I'm always happy to help you map out the chain.
Drop me a message or book a Free Growth Strategy session below - let's take a look at how to make your numbers work for you.
PS: If you want to see the visual proof of how small 10% levers compound into massive results over time, check out this 4-minute clip on The Power of 1% Marginal Gains. It’s the exact math that takes a business from £10m to £14.6m without needing a single "heroic" breakthrough. 📈
