Wrong Market, Wrong Message · Manufacturing · Midwest
The company that was printing money and didn't know it.
5 min read
$390K
when we walked in
$6M
after
20 months
timeframe
A ten-employee manufacturer doing $390K a year. Good people. A good product. And two founders who were exhausted.
They had forty markets written on a whiteboard. Forty. Every one of them a maybe. Every one of them pulling a little more attention away from the thing that was actually working.
I spent a few days inside the business. Not in a conference room. On the floor, in the numbers, in the way they talked about their customers. And it became obvious pretty fast that they were already winning in one market. They just couldn't see it, because it was buried under thirty-nine others.
In February the founder looked me in the eye and said we have to shut the doors. I told him to give it sixty days for cash to arrive. The rest is history.
We changed one word in how they described what they did. One word. It reframed the whole company around the customer who was already buying.
Then we built a pipeline. Ninety days later that pipeline was bigger than their previous three years of sales combined.
In February the founder looked me in the eye and said we have to shut the doors. I told him to give it sixty days for the cash to arrive. He did. The rest is history.
Twenty months after we started, the business was doing $6M. Same product. Same people. Same building. A different lens.
The Pattern
This is what happens when a company can't see its own market clearly. The product was never the problem. The lens was.
The answer to what's holding this business back exists somewhere inside this company. It's just not visible yet from the outside. That's what BYLD finds.
This is what we see from the outside. If you want help seeing the inside and building a plan to fix it, that's the conversation we should have.