How to Find Growth Opportunities for Yourself and Your Business

AVAlexander Volchek

Your goal might be for your company to make a million dollars in annual profit two years from now. Or to reach a steady monthly income as shareholders, earning ten thousand dollars a month. Or you want your company to be worth thirty million dollars and be sold in four years. Or you want to run a small family business that serves as an outlet and a place for your creativity. It's important for everyone to remember: people often say, “Why should I grow? I'm making enough profit, or I have enough of everything that's happening now, enough customers.” The more you sell, the more money you have to create a quality product. The more you sell, the more money you have to pay good salaries. The more you sell, the more money you have to stay in the market and operate under normal competitive conditions. What do you do when you need to make a decision in your business—whether you're a hired director or an owner—about how to scale, how to find the drivers of growth that will bring your business to the goal you need? Hello, everyone! You're on Alexander Volchek's channel. Here, I talk about business, life, and spirituality.

I've spent a great deal of my life in different businesses and different roles, both managing and owning them. I currently own various companies, and today I'll try to share knowledge you can apply quite clearly and quickly in almost any business or undertaking. Again, your role in the business isn't what matters here. This knowledge is useful for leading a company toward scale and development, whatever your role within it. As a result, of course, you'll achieve the personal results you need. The first thing you need to do to find growth drivers—any growth drivers at all—is understand the goal you're moving toward. I talk a lot on this channel about goals, both personal and business goals. You can always find more on the details that interest you. It's important to understand the goal. For example, you want your company to make a million dollars in annual profit two years from now. Or you want a steady monthly income as shareholders, earning ten thousand dollars a month. Or you want your company to be worth thirty million dollars and be sold in four years.

Or you want to run a small family business that serves as an outlet and a place for your creativity. Your goal is the continuity of that business. You've opened a business and want your restaurant, for example, to last twenty years, or to remain in your family and be passed down through the generations. You know the goal. Defining the goal is a separate and rather difficult topic, but let's say you've defined it. Next, you move on to looking for growth drivers. We'll go through this in depth using an education business as an example, because I have extensive experience in education. I once owned and spent a great deal of time managing Business Molodost, one of the largest training companies in the Russian-speaking market. I was CEO of GeekBrains. We brought GeekBrains and Skillbox together to take them public through an IPO. I've been an adviser or an owner at half the leading companies. I own several education companies myself, currently serving as a shareholder. I'll use education companies as examples to give us a focus and show you how I personally, Alexander Volchek, look for growth drivers. We recently had an off-site meeting at LifePractice, an education company and school of psychology, where we discussed various growth drivers.

I'll use different examples to show you what possibilities exist. The first growth driver I'd look at is average transaction value. By the way, I should point out that I'm not about to go through a prepared list of growth drivers. I'll guide you through a methodology so that by the end of the video, you have a fairly clear sense of how to do this for yourself. You know the goal. I say the first growth driver is average transaction value. How does that work as a growth driver? It's very simple. You sell services in an education business. To put this example on a comparable U.S. scale, you sell a course for $1,200. That's a single purchase. The course costs $1,200. At one time, in the Russian-speaking continuing professional education market, companies offering professional programs—for example, training software engineers or designers through yearlong programs—couldn't make a profit and grow. Why couldn't they grow? Because they were selling at an average transaction value that didn't make the unit economics work. As a result, they weren't earning enough money to scale. What does it mean for the unit economics not to work? Suppose you generate marketing leads and, on this same illustrative U.S. scale, each lead costs you $80.

And your conversion rate from lead to purchase is ten percent. That means a customer costs you $800. If you're selling a yearlong course for $1,200, the unit economics clearly don't work. You can hardly spend $800 on marketing alone for a $1,200 course, because besides the marketing lead, there are other marketing costs beyond paying for traffic. There are sales costs too. For example, you might pay a salesperson another $160 per customer. There are management, legal, finance, and administrative costs. Refunds arise, and so on. Besides all that, there's the product itself. Delivering a yearlong program might cost you $800 per person. Even if you put together a group, work online, and provide mass education, you still have $400, $800, or $1,200 in costs, or at least $400. What did some market operators do at one point? This is very important. Take Skillbox, for example, back in 2019, around the transition from 2019 to 2020. Describing that example in comparable U.S. terms, it saw that selling for $1,200 didn't make the unit economics work. If the unit economics don't work, you can't develop.

The company said, “Let's increase the transaction value.” It began raising it, to $2,400, to $2,800. At a transaction value of $2,400, the unit economics started to work. The same $800 in marketing costs leaves $1,600. Then, for example, $200 in various other costs, $800 for the product itself, and you start coming out ahead. There's even money left for profit. What's important is that when the unit economics work like this, you can invest additional money in advertising. You put more money into advertising, and everything starts flowing. Customer numbers begin to increase, customer numbers increase, you have more available cash, and you begin improving product quality, and so on. It's important for everyone to remember: people often say, “Why should I grow? I'm making enough profit, or I have enough of everything that's happening now, enough customers.” The more you sell, the more money you have to create a quality product. The more you sell, the more money you have to pay good salaries. The more you sell, the more money you have to stay in the market and operate under normal competitive conditions. So unit economics are an important component, and they need to work within your business.

Average transaction value is a great solution. If you look at it, a huge number of people don't handle pricing personally. The CEO delegates the task, saying it's sales' responsibility. The sales director, someone on their team, starts dealing with average transaction value, then says, “We don't handle transaction value. The product director does.” The product director starts handling it. I've always separated average transaction value and pricing into a distinct area of the business, with its own reporting line and structure, reporting to the CEO. Even if it's just one person, that person reports to the CEO. Then, when the marketing director, sales director, product leader, development leader, or anyone else comes in, they can't simply change the pricing themselves to benefit their own area. Average transaction value is definitely a very significant growth driver within a business. As I look at other growth drivers, I say there's one in finding the right course creators. What does that mean? One of the growth drivers is the right creators. I say: listen, we offer an educational product, and people come to us for our training program offers. We have a strong internal community—for example, at the school of psychology—a strong group of creators, a strong set of programs, and some unique, exclusive creators. So why not make—

Creators our focus and our growth driver? What does a growth driver based on creators mean? It means focusing our company on scaling and developing by finding the right speakers and people, but selecting them in a highly individual way. We'll understand that this is a major growth driver for us right now. In some large companies—take Coursera, an education company—are the creators a growth driver? It's unclear. Are creators a growth driver at Skillbox? No. Are creators a growth driver at Yandex Practicum? No. Are there schools where creators definitely are? If you take the range of educational products known as the information business, the creator is definitely a growth driver. The creator themselves, their partner, or their team is an incredibly significant growth driver. One hundred percent. Without these people, the business would immediately collapse. The growth driver lies right there within it. At the same time, you mustn't deceive yourself here either. For example, when I come into an education company and understand that the growth driver is a properly set average transaction value, or the number of new leads we generate—we'll discuss that as a marketing growth driver—I see that the product is decent, fine, but there's nothing fundamental about that.

Right? Then, without deceiving themselves, they'll put their focus on creators: that by bringing in excellent, expensive creators or excellent speakers, or investing in finding these creators, I'll produce growth. Another growth driver we can identify, since I've mentioned marketing, is a driver within marketing. For example, having the right unit economics for consistently generating traffic. We know how to generate traffic at scale through search advertising or targeted advertising; we generate large volumes of traffic. That's our growth driver. We put even more money into it, create new offers, create new ads. That's definitely our growth driver. Or someone comes in and says, “My growth driver is sales funnels.” In an education business, a fourth example might be marketing and sales funnels. What are they, to make it a little clearer? Instead of attracting customers by directly advertising our final educational product—“Buy our program on how to grow your business with us over a year”—we first create a separate funnel, a lead magnet. The market teaches this everywhere. A huge number of people talk about it. That's not the point right now.

For example, at GeekBrains, a growth driver for our continuing professional education products in IT was the sales funnel. We had an event called “The Path into IT.” My partner and right-hand man, Alexander Tsygun, and I would spend two, three, or four hours running the event about how to enter the world of information technology. That was the funnel. We brought customers into free registration in large volumes: fifty, seventy, eighty, or a hundred thousand people a month. Then we sold paid products to those customers. That was our growth driver. In what sense? The more registrations we brought to the event, the more people watched it, and the more people watched to the end, the more people stayed with us by buying our long programs. We told ourselves that this was our growth driver at that moment. There were various factors and details, of course, but it was a definite growth driver. Creators, for example, weren't a growth driver for us. Again, it's important to see whether something is a growth driver for your company, your business, right now. We'll discuss separately, and definitely in today's video—watch to the end—how to apply and use these growth drivers and how to choose among them.

The next growth driver you can choose is progress and growth through PR. For example, we say our company will grow in the market, in customer numbers, and in every respect if it has a particular reputation, or if a large number of professionals in the market know about it. Or if people who aren't even our customers know about it. Or if every graduate recommends our company. Or everyone who has started studying with us recommends it. Or every instructor who teaches for us recommends it, if we have many instructors. PR is a strong growth driver for many businesses, many businesses. I mentioned a restaurant or a cafe, or perhaps you provide services such as video production, sell furniture, or run an education business. It doesn't matter. PR can be a strong growth driver. It isn't a quick one. Not quick. In many businesses, you can change average transaction value instantly. In many businesses, you can at least begin spending on marketing, perhaps not enormous amounts. Average transaction value is usually much easier to change. Sales funnels can generally be created quickly, tested, and fed traffic. But PR will, of course, take time.

With PR, it's important to identify and clearly understand the structure. Again, later in the video I'll explain how to work with these growth drivers: once you've identified them, what steps do you take next? Another growth driver is the region you work in and the customers you work with. Of course, we can separate them: region on its own, customers on their own. You work within one country, in regions of one country, in a particular city, in a neighborhood within that city, or in certain territories or unions. For example, you work in Europe, in European Union countries, and clearly state that people there can move around in a particular way, that certain rules and a certain framework apply. Or you work in a region with a particular currency or a particular language. You might say the Russian-speaking population, or Russian speakers in the Republic of Belarus. Or you work in the Republic of Belarus plus Kazakhstan. Or you say, “We work in Russia plus the Republic of Belarus.” Choose the specifics. You say you work in the Asian market. Which market, exactly? Malaysia? Thailand? Which particular country?

You say, “I work in India, in this region,” or “I work in the United States, in this state.” For example, I have a mortgage lending business in the United States, and we're licensed in certain states. We don't operate in every state, because each state—not to mention the need for licenses in each state for different types of activity—is also unique in terms of ads, offers, and our offline opportunities. We might say we want to operate and grow in every state, or in the top ten, fifteen, or twenty. With what audience? In which languages? Which language do we want to work in? English? English and Chinese? English, Chinese, and Korean? Or English, Chinese, Korean, and Russian? Which specific languages do we want to work in? In education, it's very important, incredibly important, to state quite clearly and calmly which region you're working in and who your customer is within it. Many people confuse this.

They say that because the internet exists now, because everything is online, what difference does it make? If I make an online product, supposedly the whole world buys from me. You hear that phrase everywhere: the whole world. But you need a clear focus and understanding of the region, a clear focus and understanding of your customer. Why is this called a growth driver? It doesn't seem like a marketing tool. How can understanding my region and my customer help me grow quickly? The thing is, once you've defined and very clearly drawn the boundaries, you begin making every decision based on those boundaries. For example, you say your growth drivers are the region plus PR, and you know you need to do PR in this neighborhood because your restaurant is in this neighborhood. Or you say your restaurant serves all the tourists coming here. Or, for example, tourists coming from Germany. My restaurant is in Los Altos, in Silicon Valley, and I want Germans to learn about it before they leave for here, include it in their travel plans, and come here. That's a clear, understandable focus on a region.

And who, specifically, are the customers? Who are these customers at all? Another focus, for example in an education business, is whether I have an online or an offline presence. Suppose I understand that if my business goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars a month, I'll be online, or only offline. Perhaps I have a school and I'll be entirely offline. Or I sell psychology courses online and I'll stay entirely online. But when I understand that we want to make a million dollars a month, or three million dollars a month, I'll probably say: you know, to make three million dollars a month, it might be worth starting to think about an offline presence. And to make ten million dollars a month—

Or fifteen million dollars, an offline presence will most likely be very useful and could become a strong growth driver. Why? Because it can improve PR, increase average transaction value, increase purchases per customer, reduce cancellations, improve the experience of the education itself, and so on. A growth driver in your business, using education as an example, could simply be, “Let's put money in.” This is a very interesting growth driver, and when you mention it, people may have a strange reaction. What do I mean by putting money in? Imagine we have an education business making a hundred thousand dollars in monthly revenue. We know we'll make $1.2 million this year, but we want to make five million dollars this year. Is that possible? Very difficult. But we could put in another five million dollars and get five million dollars in revenue. Someone will say, “Why do that? That's nonsense: put in five million dollars to get five million dollars in revenue.” I'd say, “How is it nonsense? By generating five million dollars in revenue, we'll acquire an enormous number of customers.”

With those customers, we'll focus on PR and referrals. They'll buy from us in the future. We'll create a business that's worth money. It will probably lose money in the first year, but our main goal is to make money from the company's value. The company's value might even be slightly negative, or our unit economics will normalize later. Or let's put in a million dollars for advertising now, instead of five million. We know our unit economics work now and that with twenty percent invested in advertising, we can grow fairly quickly. We'll generate five million dollars in revenue. With five million dollars in revenue and a million dollars invested in advertising, our unit economics work. But if we don't raise that money, we won't be able to put a million dollars into advertising because we don't have it; we're currently making a hundred thousand in revenue. The system won't get going. Notice how, for a great many people, these growth drivers are very strange and hard to understand. Others will say, “That's completely normal. We always do that.” We put money into something and then go on to earn more from that money.

If you look at it, the biggest fortunes in the world are usually made by moving money from one pile to another. Say someone borrows a hundred million dollars from a bank, puts that hundred million into buying a new company, and pledges that same company to the bank as collateral for the hundred million, because it contains assets and properties. Then they develop the company. As it grows, it pays off that loan out of its profits. Then they sell it for a hundred and fifty million dollars and keep, say, forty or thirty million, paying a small difference toward the loan. With larger amounts, even larger numbers arise. No matter how much you read or watch, enormous fortunes are made this way. Not through funnels, not through lead generation. But we're talking about growth drivers for you right now. Once you've identified them—I've outlined a set of growth drivers—what's important to do next? Choose two or three main ones and give them a very strong, serious priority so you don't keep debating and arguing. If someone comes in and says, “We need to work on search optimization; our SEO is poor”—

You tell them, “That's not our growth driver at all. Our growth driver is putting advertising on television,” or, “Our growth driver is handing out flyers and leaflets on the street.” Or our growth driver is regularly hiring forty salespeople every month, with each salesperson bringing us money. When we understand and recognize this in terms of priorities, we make decisions with a completely different focus. At the same time, after prioritizing two or three growth drivers, you still know, remember, and monitor all the others. How should you monitor them? For each growth driver, you need to define very precise, understandable, real criteria for how you'll record it, assess it, and get a sense of it. Take the PR example I gave. You might say you'll check how your PR system is working by surveying every customer after they finish studying. You say that, out of eighty customers who bought from you, at the end of their studies customers must answer the question, “Overall, how do you feel after the course: good or bad?”

They should answer, “Good.” The remaining customers can answer, “Bad.” You need to formulate this clearly and very deliberately. Or you say, “Our growth driver is PR, including online PR. It's important for us to have recommendations and reviews online.” No problem. There are ten top platforms where people post reviews. You say, “On each platform, our rating must be at least 4.5 out of 5, or 4.7. Or on nine out of ten platforms, it must be at least 4.7. Each platform must have at least a thousand reviews.” How else could you measure PR and get a sense of where things stand? You say, “We find out whether each new customer came through a recommendation, and we want seventy percent of our customers to come through recommendations.” We don't check referrals with technical tools; we simply ask, “Please tell us, did anyone recommend us to you?” It's enough for someone to answer, “Yes, an acquaintance once told me about you,” or “A relative told me,” or “A woman on the street told me.” It doesn't matter.

The idea is for seventy-five percent of customers, or forty percent, to say, “Yes, someone recommended you.” Or you say, “For me, a measurable PR indicator is that when we survey ten thousand people on the street in any city, nine thousand of them say they know our brand.” Absolutely any city within the region where you operate. If ninety percent say they know the brand, that's a measurable result for you. Once you've identified, say, ten or fifteen growth drivers for your business, chosen two or three main ones, and written measurable indicators for each—roughly thirty indicators for fifteen growth drivers—you need to take one very important step: begin recording these indicators every week. Keep recording them. The point isn't to see growth drivers for scaling just here and now, today. It's to keep tracking these parameters and these growth drivers over a long period as part of your work, your business, your team, your department at work, or whatever project you're working on.

When you check these thirty, forty, or twenty parameters once a week, your thinking will begin to work completely differently a year from now. Again, it doesn't matter whether you manage a company with five thousand employees or have a video production business where you're the only person working. This mechanism starts an entirely new way of thinking. People often say something that contains some truth but also a major mistake: “Focus on one main thing,” or “Focus on two or three indicators.” I always repeat that, of course, it's very important to know your goal. If you don't know your goal—what you're doing in your professional work, how much you want to earn in salary or dividends, whatever it is—you need to know it very clearly. On the other hand, as you live and develop in business and your professional work, you need to keep reflecting on a large number of parameters. The more parameters there are, the more differently you'll begin to think about how to develop and scale. Because, to me, something about the modern world is destructive.

We live in a world with an enormous amount of information. Everyone is constantly scrolling endless feeds, watching huge numbers of movies and series, attending a huge number of events and training programs. People constantly talk about endlessly learning and developing. You have to keep developing, keep developing, keep reading books, developing, always developing. Yet as soon as it comes to a simple, regular, ongoing action at work or in business, one based on monitoring a broad range of things, people say, “That's not a priority for us. We won't do it. It doesn't particularly interest us right now. We won't do it. It's probably not important to us. We won't do it. We heard at another training program that tracking one parameter is enough. That's more important.” But the broader your perception in business, the broader your perception at work, the more opportunities you have, far—

More opportunities, far more, to truly scale and grow, to scale and develop into areas you can't even imagine today. If you're at one particular point and supposedly want to move to another, and that other point is an illusion to you, you have no idea what your life will be like there. Because you're a unique person. To reach that point in a state of joy and happiness, or even to reach some point at all, even an illusory one, and be in a state of expansion and development, you need broad, strong perception, a wide frame, a broad layer of information and knowledge. Your business goal, your growth drivers, the parameters focused on those growth drivers—and most importantly, recording them once a week. This will give you a very powerful, substantial, enormous result in your business or your work. Please write a comment now. You can simply write, “Fire!” “Great!” or “Thank you.” If you didn't like it, write, “I didn't like it.” When you like something, try to express that emotion. And it would be great if you shared which growth drivers became apparent to you during the video.

I recommend watching this video again in two, three, or four weeks, and generally watching it to keep your own engagement with growth drivers in focus. Because engaging with your own growth drivers takes work, but it's also your scale and your strong, genuine development. See you soon! Alexander Volchek's channel, about business, life, and spirituality.