I’ve been wracking my brain to find a new one, but there’s no way around it. Although there are hundreds of specific approaches, when you distill them all down, there are only three ways to expand a business. Three main ways, and only three. What are they?

1. Sell more to your existing customers
2. Find more new customers
3. Merge or acquire your competitors

You might ask, “What’s the point of talking about three when there are ‘hundreds of specific approaches’?” That’s a reasonable question - it’s easy to think consolidating them obscures the opportunity. But in fact, it’s just the opposite.

You see, most people don’t think much, and when they do they never pay attention to how they’re thinking -so they never develop tools for how to do it. Generalization is one of those tools - a powerful one allows you to crunch a whole bunch of information into a few manageable pieces you can more easily manipulate in your mind.

That’s what we’ve just done here. Now that you realize there are only three ways to grow a business - whether it’s sales, or cash flow, or market share… whatever, you can examine each of these three more carefully and see how they apply to your business.

And that’s what you should do next.