Growth isn't usually about doing more. It's about understanding what needs to change, and making better decisions about what to do next.
There's no shortage of advice out there. Invest in marketing. Build your personal brand. Post more content. Improve your SEO. Start advertising. Automate everything. Use AI. Hire a salesperson. Launch something new.
Some of it's good advice. Some of it might even be exactly what your business needs. The problem is that very little of it starts with the business itself.
We've worked alongside independent businesses at very different stages, some looking for their next group of customers, others with plenty of customers but not getting enough value from those relationships, and others who've grown quickly and found their website, marketing or internal systems haven't kept up. What we've learnt is that businesses rarely grow because they discover one brilliant marketing tactic. They grow because they get better at understanding what's happening, working out what matters most, and making good decisions about what to do next.
Growth rarely follows a straight line
Independent businesses tend to grow in stages. Something works, momentum builds, and the business moves forward, then somewhere along the way the things that helped create that growth start to become constraints.
The website that was perfectly adequate when you were smaller starts to undersell what you've become. Marketing that once happened naturally becomes reactive. The founder who could keep everything in their head becomes the person everybody's waiting on. A service that worked brilliantly with twenty customers gets much harder to deliver with two hundred.
None of this necessarily means something's gone wrong. Often, it just means the business has changed.
That's why we're wary of talking about growth like it follows a formula. What works for a £300,000 business may be completely wrong at £1 million. What works for a retailer with one shop may start creaking when they open a second. And a founder trying to build something bigger has different priorities to someone who wants a profitable, resilient business that gives them a good life.
The useful question isn't "How do we grow?" It's "What needs to change for this business to move forward from where it is today?" That tends to produce much better answers.
Marketing is rarely the starting point
A lot of businesses come to us because something visible isn't working. They need a new website, more enquiries, their social media's gone quiet, email isn't generating enough revenue. Those can all be legitimate problems, but we've learnt not to assume the thing somebody asks us to fix is the thing that'll actually make the biggest difference.
A business asking for more leads might already generate enough interest but convert too little of it. Another might acquire customers well but do almost nothing to bring them back. A company considering a new website might actually have a positioning problem a new design won't solve on its own.
There's an entire industry built around giving businesses more things to do. We're more interested in working out which things are worth doing.
That means starting with the business, not the marketing. What's changed? Where's the money being made? What are customers responding to? What's becoming harder? Sometimes the answer is a new website. Sometimes it's stronger positioning or better retention. Sometimes it's stopping something altogether. The activity comes after the understanding, not before it.
There's always something else you could be doing
A new platform appears. Somebody recommends paid advertising. Competitors start producing more video. AI changes another part of the landscape. An agency tells you SEO is the answer. Someone else tells you it's email. Meanwhile, the business still has customers to look after, people to manage, invoices to pay, and whatever unexpected problem showed up at 9.17 that morning.
The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas, it's deciding which ones deserve your limited time, money and attention.
The strongest businesses aren't necessarily doing more than everybody else. In our experience, they're often doing fewer things, with much greater clarity about why they're doing them. And those decisions compound: a better customer experience makes marketing work harder, clearer positioning makes the website easier to understand, better retention makes acquiring customers more valuable. Growth starts becoming less about individual activities and more about building a business where the parts reinforce each other.
Being close to the business is a strength and a weakness
Independent businesses have something larger organisations spend enormous amounts of money trying to recreate: the people making decisions are often remarkably close to their customers.
Founders know why the business exists. They remember the customer who changed how they thought about a product. They can sense when something isn't quite right long before it shows up in a report.
That closeness is incredibly valuable. It can also make some decisions harder. When you've spent years building something, it's difficult to look at it without all the history attached. You know why the website says what it says, why a particular service was introduced, that one customer asked for something three years ago and it quietly shaped a whole part of the business.
An outside perspective doesn't replace any of that knowledge. What it adds is a bit of distance and the confidence to question assumptions that have gradually become "just how things are done." Often the most valuable conversations aren't the ones where somebody arrives with an answer, they're the ones where a question makes you look at something differently. Why do customers really choose you? What's actually driving profit? Why aren't customers coming back? Is the problem really a lack of enquiries, or are the wrong people enquiring?
Understanding the problem properly has a habit of making the eventual answer much simpler.
Independent growth matters
Successful independents don't exist in isolation. They employ people, buy from other businesses, support local organisations, and put money back into the places they operate. They create businesses with character and relationships that are hard to reproduce from a head office hundreds of miles away, and they make places more interesting. We don't particularly want every high street to become a slightly rearranged version of the last one.
Yet independent businesses are often expected to compete with larger organisations on a fraction of their resources, while much of the infrastructure around business growth gravitates towards start-ups, technology companies and businesses chasing rapid scale.
There's nothing wrong with supporting those businesses. But they're not the whole economy. There are thousands of established independent companies employing people, serving customers and building businesses that matter to the places around them, not chasing unicorn status, just trying to grow from £750,000 to £1.2 million, open another shop, employ five more people, or build something worth passing on. Those businesses deserve serious commercial thinking too.
Growth doesn't have to mean becoming something you're not
There's a danger that growth gets confused with scale. For some businesses, getting bigger is the ambition. For others, success might mean becoming more profitable at roughly the same size, creating more time for the owner, or becoming less dependent on a handful of customers.
The point isn't to pursue growth for its own sake, it's to understand what a stronger version of your business actually looks like.
That matters especially for independents, because the things that make them valuable can easily get diluted in the pursuit of scale. Personal service, specialist knowledge, relationships, local connection, the personality of the people behind the business, these aren't quaint extras to tidy away as the company grows. Very often, they're the reason customers chose the business in the first place. Good growth should strengthen those things, not erase them.
Growth is built over time
There's a natural temptation to look for the one intervention that changes everything: the new website, the campaign, the hire, the launch. Occasionally one of those does create a real step forward. But it's rarely the whole story.
The strongest independent businesses we've worked with tend to grow through accumulation. They understand their customers a little better. They sharpen their proposition. They make buying easier. They look after existing customers properly. They stop spending money on things that aren't working and invest more confidently in the things that are. Over time, those decisions reinforce one another, the brand gets clearer, marketing gets easier, the team knows what matters, and investment becomes deliberate rather than reactive.
That's the less glamorous truth about how independent businesses really grow. There usually isn't a secret formula, and anyone claiming to have one probably has something to sell you.
There's a business as it stands today, somewhere it wants to get to, and a series of decisions in between.
Our job at Le Claires is to help independent businesses make those decisions well. We want to build a successful business doing that, just as we want the businesses we work with to be successful and profitable themselves. If our growth comes from helping good independent businesses become stronger, that's a pretty good way to earn it. And if more of those businesses thrive as a result, our towns, cities and local economies will be stronger for it too.