A growth case asks how does the client get bigger? Usually there's a stated amount ("we want to grow revenue 50% in three years"), and sometimes it's open-ended ("where should our next ₹500 crore of growth come from?"). A shapeless brainstorm of ideas is the usual failure. What works is a growth tree that's MECE, sized, and screened for return.
How do you build a growth tree?
Start from the identity and branch it. Revenue = customers × revenue per customer, and revenue per customer = purchase frequency × average order value. Every business also grows along axes you can cut cleanly:
- Existing vs new customers. Sell more to the customers you have, through frequency, cross-sell, up-sell, or retention and churn reduction. That's usually the cheapest growth and the first place to look. Acquiring new customers is the other route. It costs more, and it's only worth it when unit economics hold. For that you'll reach for CAC/LTV from the Finance galaxy's unit-economics work.
- Volume vs price vs mix. Grow units, grow price (the pricing format is a growth lever), or shift the mix toward higher-value products and customers. Each of these is distinct, and you can act on each one separately.
- Core vs adjacency vs new. Grow the existing business in its existing market. Or extend into an adjacency, such as a new geography, segment, channel or related product, which is the Ansoff logic you'll meet in the strategy work. Or build or enter something entirely new. That carries the highest risk, so hand it to the market-entry format.
- Organic vs inorganic. Build it yourself, buy it (the M&A format, and the deal work later in the galaxy), or partner and license. Choosing the mode is a decision of its own.
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How do you screen the growth options?
The tree is only half the job. Two screens make up the other half, and they turn a list of options into a recommendation. Screen 1 sizes each branch against the target. How much of the ₹X can this lever plausibly deliver, and by when? Sized properly, most branches are too small or too slow to matter, and that's itself the insight. Screen 2 checks return and constraint. Ask which lever earns the highest return on the capital and management attention it eats. Remember that a new store or a new geography earning below the cost of capital is negative growth, however much revenue it adds. Then ask what the binding constraint is, the thing that actually caps growth. It might be the real-estate pipeline, sales capacity, working capital, or a supply bottleneck. A great growth answer says where the growth comes from and in what proportion, which constraint gates it, and which highest-return lever goes first. It's a less exciting answer than a brainstorm, and a far more useful one. Worked Example 2 builds and sizes a full growth tree to a stated dollar target.