One of the most overlooked strategic questions leaders face is deceptively simple: Are you building for sustained long-term growth, or for a future event such as acquisition, investment, or recapitalization?
Most assume the answer changes everything. But the truth is, the fundamentals required in either scenario are nearly identical. Whether you’re compounding growth over years or preparing for a transaction, the market rewards the same things: consistency, predictability, alignment, and a scalable operating model.
What does change is the urgency and discipline needed to operationalize them.
Below are the issues every leadership team must stay on top of – regardless of the destination.
The Two Paths: Sustained Growth vs. Event-Driven Growth
1. Building for Sustained Growth – If you’re aiming for steady, compounding growth, your focus must be on predictable revenue, consistent sales performance, and operational discipline. Profitability funds what matters most: product innovation, new market expansion, stronger marketing, and the development and retention of high-performing teams. Without profitable, repeatable revenue, growth becomes hope – not strategy.
2. Building for an Event – If you’re targeting an investment or exit, buyers reward the same things – predictable revenue, verifiable pipeline, efficient acquisition, and a clear path to profitability. A growth story without proof points becomes risk, and valuation drops accordingly.
Different paths. Same fundamentals. The real difference is whether you’re optimizing for the next few quarters or the next decade.
Four Issues Every Leadership Team Must Master
Issue 1: Quality and Consistency of Your Go-to-Market (GTM) Model
A strong GTM engine drives clarity – who you serve, why they buy, how you position value, and how your teams execute. Both paths require disciplined ICP definition, buyer-journey mapping, a sharp value proposition, and repeatable demand generation. If you can’t clearly explain your growth engine, no one – investor or employee – will believe in it.
“It’s often appropriate to adjust resource allocation to favour near-term revenues or sustained growth. Though, you cannot completely ignore one in favour of the other. Have a plan for deliberate modifications to your resource allocation strategy as you grow. Neither goal will be achieved without a disciplined approach to executing GTM fundamentals.”
– Neil Gray, Founder, Refractive Concepts – Fractional CMO & B2B marketing expert
Issue 2: Operational and Financial Discipline
Revenue without profitability is noise. Profitability without scale is limitation. Leaders must stay on top of CAC payback, unit economics, sales productivity, pipeline health, retention metrics, and forecasting. In sustained growth, these fuel reinvestment; in event-driven growth, they determine valuation.
“Most pipeline problems aren’t actually pipeline problems – they’re diagnostic problems… If you can’t see what’s breaking, you can’t fix it. If you can’t fix it, you can’t scale it.” – Matt Earle, Founder, The Selling Collective, sales effectiveness expert
Issue 3. The Importance of Data
Too many teams build strategy on assumptions instead of reality. Winning companies diagnose before they prescribe, and they benchmark their performance against the companies they compete with, not the companies they aspire to be like in theory. They know their numbers, spot patterns early, benchmark rigorously, and treat data as a living discipline – not an annual exercise.
Issue 4: Talent, Leadership, and Coaching Culture
Even the best strategy fails without the right people. Organizations that invest in leadership development, coaching, and capability-building outperform those that rely solely on hiring their way out of performance gaps. In an event, talent strength becomes a major due-diligence signal. In sustained growth, it’s the backbone that keeps momentum alive.
“The growth agenda is inseparable from the talent agenda. Markets shift, products evolve, and strategies change – your people are the only competitive advantage that compounds.”
– Eric Hachmer, Managing Partner, HighFive Advisory Inc. – Fractional CRO & B2B Growth expert
The Conclusion: Two Destinations, One Set of Fundamentals
So, whether you’re building for long-term value or preparing for a future event, the fundamentals don’t change:
• A predictable revenue engine • A disciplined GTM foundation • A financially sound operating model • And a talent and leadership culture that enables consistent performance
The companies that win treat these as non-negotiable. They build clarity into their model, align Sales and Marketing, use data as their operating system, and coach their teams to perform.
Because whether you’re building for tomorrow or the next decade, the market rewards the same things: predictability, discipline, alignment, and repeatable execution.