Doubling Your Business in the Roaring 2020s

McDonalds has 38,000 stores around the world. They are in 120 countries, and serve 68M customers a day. That sounds insanely huge and impossible to replicate until you break it down to it’s “Doubling Speed”.  

If you divide 38K in half 15 times you arrive back at just one store. McDonald’s has doubled in size 15 times in 64 years - on average, it’s doubled its footprint every 4.2 years (approximately 51 months). That sound’s way less impressive and way more achievable.  

Nike has revenue of $32Billion per year. Another way of looking at it, it’s doubled its revenues 22 times from $7500 in 1964 to what it is today. At 54 years of age, It’s had an average doubling speed of 2.4 years. 

By the time Facebook celebrated its 13th birthday it had 2Billion users. Again that is a number the human brain can barely comprehend. Another way to look at it is that it’s doubled 22 times since the first couple of hundred Harvard Students joined the platform. On average, Facebook has doubled users every 29 weeks since it began.  

Let me bring this back to earth. I know a company that is looking exit. The owners are frustrated that the company hasn’t performed as well as they had hoped. In year 1 the business did about ￡500K and it’s grown to ￡4M over 7 years.  

The owners had hopes that it would be a ￡10M+ business, but it hasn’t even achieved half that number. The conversations they have about the business are terrible - “this is a pig”, “what a waste of our time and energy”, “we picked a shitty industry to get into” are just a few things that were said in a meeting I attended.  

Then I got them to look at things another way. I said, are you aware that your business has doubled exactly 3 times in the last 7 years, on average your business is doubling every 28 months and that is faster than the speed Nike grew and almost twice as fast as the speed McDonald’s grew. If your business continues at this doubling speed, you will have a business doing ￡32M in 7 years from now and ￡250M+ in 14 years. Would that be so bad?  

“Are you sure you want to go off and start something new?” I asked. Their mouths hung open for a second and they shook their heads.  

The key question for them is simple - How to we maintain the same consistent doubling speed? 

The problem with starting small and growing is that the first 5 doubles seem fairly inconsequential. The second five doubles, however, are life-changing, 

We are less than 18 months away from beginning the 2020s. This will be the most transformational decade in history. This decade will begin the largest transfer of wealth and power in human history - from baby boomers to millennials and from the West to the East. Technology will continue to be a hugely disruptive force as it takes over more and more jobs that previously required humans. 

The 2020s will be a decade of giddying wealth for some and harsh desperation for others. Never has there been so much opportunity for wealth creation or wealth destruction depending on the strategy you adopt.

One thing is for sure, in this decade ahead there will be ample opportunity to double a business 3-5 times if it’s set up right. This means a business doing ￡1M in revenue at 2020 would be doing ￡8M-￡32M by 2030 depending on how fast it could maintain doubling speed. 

In my next book, I have developed the 10 traits of businesses that double fast and have fun doing it.