What Stops This

In this layer

• Part of Your Expansion Number Is Just the Calendar1 build on this

  A customer who joined two months before your base period ended contributes two months to the baseline and twelve to the comparison. The difference books as expansion. It isn't expansion, it's arithmetic, and the faster you're growing the more of it you have.

• “Expansion Doesn't Work Here”1 build on this

  It gets said with confidence, and usually with evidence, because they did try it. What they tested was one specific approach, it failed for reasons that had nothing to do with expansion, and the conclusion drawn from that failure now justifies everything that follows.

• Firing Someone With Arithmeticobservation

  Put someone's whole compensation on the size of their book and wait. It is an exit executed slowly enough that management never has to own it.

• Nothing Here Was a Mistakeobservation

  Four separate failures, in four different parts of a business, all built the same way. Every step in each one was a reasonable decision, and the last step in each one removed the thing that would have shown anybody it was wrong.

• Your Expansion Number Is Two Different Thingsinstrument

  You will not win the argument that a price increase isn't expansion, and you don't need to. Split last year's number into two columns, follow both groups forward, and let the churn and contraction rates settle it. The prediction is falsifiable, which is the point.

• “All I Want Is the Money”observation

  Lay out readiness gates, triggers, orchestration and unbundling and people hear a list of constraints. A reader named the real objection: a gate takes away your ability to force the number. Correct. Forcing the number is the thing making you poor.