Growth Strategies for Your Venture or Your Core

Many family businesses I meet are sitting on thousands of contacts in their CRM, yet only a fraction of them are active. Nobody can say which ones are worth nurturing. Webinars have been planned, but not executed. And social selling via LinkedIn has been on the to-do list for two years, but never started.

Underneath it all sits a six-figure tool stack and marketing budget, while the actual sales motion still depends on trade fairs, distributors, and relationships built decades ago.

This is not a diagnosis I wrote from my head. It's precisely what a strategy leader at an industrial legacy firm and I discussed over lunch last week. Within an hour, he had confirmed every hypothesis I’d thrown at him – based on my experience working with family business clients over the past three years.

So I asked my favorite question: how many growth experiments are running this quarter? You can guess the answer.

And after enough of these lunches, I've come to a simple conclusion: legacy companies don't have a growth problem. They have an experimentation problem.

One Insight

Every business has dozens of possible growth plays, and they apply to your core business just as much as to a venture you're building. Existing customers, warm introductions, cross- and upselling, LinkedIn, cold email, cold calling, newsletters, communities, partnerships, events, SEO, referrals. You’ll pass sixty before you have to get creative.

So the problem is never a lack of ideas. The problem is how companies choose.

Someone read an SEO article, someone knows a video guy, the CEO saw a competitor do outbound with AI. The tactic runs for six months with no defined finish line, quietly dies, and everyone concludes the channel doesn't work.

And here's the reveal: all of these plays can work.

I regularly hear "cold email doesn't work" or "LinkedIn doesn't work in our industry."

My answer is usually the same: it works – you just don't know how yet.

Every play behaves a little differently in every business and every industry.

The list that works, the message that lands, the success rate you can expect – different for a machine builder serving SMEs than for a corporate-sized MedTech supplier. That's exactly why you experiment: not to find out whether a play works, but to learn how it works for you.

So stop asking "which channel should we try?"

Ask "which hypothesis should we test next?"

Bezos famously tied Amazon's growth to the number of experiments it runs per year! You don't need Amazon's scale – you need the discipline. Our own growth at Dawn Ventures is built on 15 plays, with nine currently running as live experiments. Our growth system generates around 10 meetings with new prospects each month. For a boutique firm, that's a full top of funnel – without a sales team.

Step 1 → Turn every play into an experiment

Every play runs with five things attached: a hypothesis (who we reach, with what message, expecting what), a KPI, a success threshold, a learning objective, and – the part most companies skip – a decision. Scale it, improve it, or stop it.

The KPI is different for every play, and choosing the right one is half the discipline:

→ LinkedIn outreach: connection acceptance rate
→ Cold email: reply rate
→ Cold calling: meetings booked
→ Newsletter: subscriber growth and click-through rate
→ Customer expansion: expansion revenue

The threshold does the real work. "Cold email gets a 4% reply rate from operations leaders in Swiss manufacturing, or we stop after 300 sends" is an experiment. "Let's try cold email" is a hope. The first produces a decision in three weeks. The second produces a debate in six months.

Step 2 → Run the math

One experiment of that size costs a few days of setup and a few thousand francs, with AI handling the list building, validation, and personalization. Run six to eight in a quarter. A typical result: four die, two come back unclear, one or two clearly work. One channel that reliably books meetings pays for every experiment that died finding it. That's the entire logic: the inexpensive failures fund the winners.

We saw it in a recent client project in MedTech. No structured outbound at all when we started. We cleaned the CRM, built one targeted campaign, and booked 15 meetings in two weeks. Probably the most boring play in the book – but it ran as an experiment: a defined list, one clear message, and a number we agreed on upfront.

Step 3 → Sequence by speed of feedback

Not every play answers equally fast, and the order matters as much as the choice. The fastest feedback comes from warm relationships – and after thirty years in the market, warm relationships are the one asset you have more of than any competitor. So the first experiments run where trust already exists: expansion into accounts you've served for a decade, referrals, introductions, owner-led selling. They cost little, and they answer in days.

Compounding plays – content, newsletters, community, SEO, brand – take months to show anything, and then never stop paying. Big bets – partnerships, ecosystem plays, product investments – move slowest and matter most. Start with warm plays for cash and confidence, move to compounding plays, and tackle big bets once the system is running.

Bottom line

Growth is not a talent, and it's not a budget line. It's a system: a library of plays, a handful of live experiments, and evidence deciding what scales. The same applies whether the thing you’re growing is a 100-year-old core business or a venture that’s six months old.

And in a family business, this discipline does something else entirely. A defined threshold turns "the successor's risky idea" into a bounded test with a budget, an end date, and a kill switch. That's a risk an owner can actually say yes to. And if you hold the growth mandate without the family name, it's even more direct: evidence is what survives a board meeting.

Experiments don't just find growth. They buy you permission to keep going. The advantage comes from choosing the right ones – and stopping the wrong ones early.

One Question

How many growth experiments is your company running this quarter?

One Opportunity

Everything above comes from our internal playbook: over 60 plays, each with its effort, speed, KPI, and the situation where it works best. Built from execution inside legacy and family-owned businesses, not venture-backed SaaS or sales agencies who work with startups. In future editions, I'll open up on individual plays from time to time.

If you don't want to wait: this is exactly what a venture firm like Dawn does – we analyze (e.g. what's in your CRM or which plays are already running), form hypotheses (where the signals are missing), experiment (two or three plays we'd begin with) and learn from it.

Until Thursday in two weeks,

Lisa