For a long time, the hard part of growing a business was making more of what it sold. In a lot of markets that is no longer the hard part. AI and cheap software have made reports, campaigns, content, analysis and many services easier to produce than ever, and much of what gets produced is still looking for a buyer. Where supply stops being the limit, growth depends on consumption: how much of what you make customers buy, use and come back for.
That changes where the next dollar should go. A growth plan built on adding capacity assumes the customers are already waiting. In the markets I see, they often are not, and the operation to serve them is already set up to scale quickly once they show up.
Spending turns into growth where sellers have room to sell more
The equation of exchange is the simplest way to see it: the money supply, times how many times each dollar is spent on final goods and services in a year, equals the dollar value of those goods and services. That second number is the velocity of money. The same money spent more often means more spending.
The St. Louis Fed's measure, M2 velocity, stood at about 1.42 in the second quarter of 2026, up from a low of 1.13 in 2020 and still well under its 2.19 peak in 1997. Dollars have changed hands a little faster each year since 2021, so the money is moving, and the question for an owner is where it lands.
You cannot order customers to spend faster, but new spending turns into more output where sellers have room to sell more and into higher prices where they do not. In the services, media and digital products I watch, the room is there: plenty is being made, and the constraint is how much of it people take up.
Most of the gain comes when a customer uses what you sell
Businesses buy a great deal from each other along the way: software, data, research, components, advice. Those inputs make a company better at what it sells, and they pay off only when they end in something a customer buys and keeps using. A better product that customers do not adopt is still sitting on the shelf.
That is why the consuming side deserves the first look. The customer who bought last year and uses half of what they paid for is the cheapest growth most companies have.
Spend on adoption before you add capacity
For a mid-market owner, this is a question of where to put the next growth dollar. I would put it on the customer's side of the sale first.
- Find where customers stall after they buy. Onboarding, training, service and the second order often grow revenue faster than a new product line.
- Watch what customers do. My rule, whether the business is large or small, is to listen to customers, not always their voice but their actions. Actions tell you what they will keep using.
- Make it easier to buy again. Every step between a satisfied customer and the next purchase is a cost on growth.
- Add capacity when demand is visibly waiting on you.
When production is your constraint
Some businesses are still limited by what they can make: a manufacturer with a full order book, a services firm turning work away, a company short of skilled people. For them the classic answer holds: build capacity, hire and fix the bottleneck. The argument here is for everyone whose order book is not full.
Split last year's growth spending in two
Take last year's growth spending and sort it into money spent to make more and money spent to get what you make used. If the first pile is much bigger and growth was flat, move the next dollar to the second pile and watch what customers do with it.
Two related reads: put every growth lever on one page before you fund any of them, and build the marketing plan to outlast its leader. This is the kind of question I take on in growth work with owners and their teams. If you have capacity and not enough demand to fill it, let's compare notes.
John Wyatt · John Wyatt's page · All posts · RSS