Growth comes in two kinds. One fills the diary, strains the team and adds very little at the end of the year. The other pays the firm and the partners back several times over. Telling the two apart, before you chase either, is most of the job.
What if every new client the firm won was one the partners would have chosen?
What if the work that strains the team and barely pays could be declined with a clear conscience, because better work was arriving?
What if growth showed up in the partners' drawings as well as in the turnover line?
What if the firm became known for the work it most wants, because that is what it went looking for?
Which of last year's new clients would you win again, knowing what you know now?
Most firms can name the client they wish they had never taken on. The fee looked fine, the work was awkward from the first week, the team lost evenings to it, and the margin had gone before the final invoice. They can also name the client they'd clone: the one that pays on time, trusts the advice, sends introductions and comes back for more. Both were growth. Only one was worth having.
The difference is rarely about size. It is about fit: the kind of problem, the kind of relationship, the kind of client, and whether the work makes the firm better at the thing it wants to be known for. A firm that chases any growth gets a book that looks like its last ten years of phone calls. A firm that chases the right growth gets a book that looks like its plan.
Here's how I take that off your plate
The first thing we settle, in the room, is what the growth worth having looks like for your firm: the services with the best margin for the least strain, the clients that are a pleasure to act for, the work the best people want more of. That is the direction the whole department points at. From then on, every list that reaches a partner has been chosen against it. The names worth calling are the ones that fit, and the reasons to call are the ones that lead to the work you want.
Saying no gets easier too, because there is something to say yes to. When a partner can see the right conversations arriving each week, the awkward enquiry that would once have been accepted out of nervousness can be sent kindly somewhere else.
Picture an accountancy practice that has grown on compliance work for years and wants more of the advisory work its partners find interesting. The department points at the clients already in the book who are about to need it: a sale, a succession, a second site. One opener, from the partner who already does their audit: "I know a succession plan is on your mind from what you said in the spring. We've guided three family businesses through it in the last year and I'd like to talk through what tends to work, before any decisions get made." The growth the firm wants, from people who already trust it.
Any growth fills a diary. The right growth builds a firm.