How to break £1m in revenue

A lot of businesses get stuck somewhere between half a million and a million in revenue. The business works. Clients are happy. Everyone’s busy. And the number stops moving.

It’s almost never a strategy problem. The way the business is run was designed for a smaller version of itself, and it’s hit its ceiling. Here’s what moves it on.

Set the vision, then keep saying it

Growth needs a direction everyone can repeat. Not a mission statement. A clear answer to what the business is trying to become, by when, and what that means for the person hearing it.

Founders nearly always underestimate how much repetition this takes. You’ve been thinking about it for months before you say it out loud, so by the time you announce it you’re already bored of it. Your team is hearing it for the first time. Say it far more often than feels necessary, and be specific about each person’s part in it. A team that knows where the business is going will make hundreds of small decisions in that direction without being asked. A team that doesn’t will aim for looking busy.

Build a marketing strategy that does both jobs

At this stage marketing has two jobs to do at once, and most businesses only do one.

Brand is the slow work: being known, being credible, being the name someone already recognises when they finally have the problem you solve. It’s hard to attribute and easy to cut, which is why most businesses under-invest in it.

Lead generation is the fast work: creating demand you can measure and act on this quarter.

Lead gen without brand gets more expensive over time, because every approach is a cold one. Brand without lead gen feels productive and doesn’t pay the bills. You need both running. And you need to accept they’re judged on different timescales. Expecting brand work to show up in next month’s pipeline is how good brand work gets killed.

Stop relying on referrals

Referrals are the most tempting trap at this stage. They convert well, they cost nothing, and they got you here. The problem is simple maths: your network is finite. Unless it’s enormous, you’ll run through it. And you’ll usually notice at the point where you’ve got no other channel and a pipeline that’s already thinning.

I’m not against referrals. Keep them. But treat them as a bonus, not a plan, and build at least one other channel that works while you sleep. Content, outbound, paid, partnerships, events: whatever fits how your buyers behave. Start before you need it. Every new channel takes months to become reliable, and the worst time to learn one is when the referrals have dried up.

Put processes in place

Somewhere around this size, the informal way of working stops scaling. What worked with four people (everyone knowing everything, decisions made in the room) becomes the bottleneck with twelve.

Process doesn’t mean bureaucracy. It means the same task gets the same result whoever does it: how work is scoped, handed over and reviewed, and how a client gets onboarded. The test is whether a new starter can do good work in their second week without shadowing you.

Write down the things you find yourself explaining again and again. That’s your process backlog, and it’s already in priority order: the things you explain most are where you’re the biggest bottleneck.

Give people real ownership

Delegation and ownership aren’t the same thing. Delegation is handing over tasks. Ownership is handing over an outcome, with the authority and the numbers to go with it.

Pick the areas of the business (delivery, new business, a service line, an operational function) and give each one an owner who’s accountable for how it performs. Then let them make decisions you’d have made differently. That’s the uncomfortable part, and it’s the part that decides whether it works. If every decision still comes back to you for approval, you haven’t handed over ownership. You’ve added a step.

The payoff isn’t just your time. People who own an outcome find improvements you’d never have got to, because they’re looking at one part of the business far more closely than you can.

Use your data

Most businesses this size have data and don’t use it. Growing past a million means knowing your numbers well enough to make decisions with them.

The ones that matter: where leads come from and how many, cost per lead and cost per acquisition, conversion rate at each stage of the pipeline, average deal value, customer lifetime value, gross margin by client and service line. And the one most people miss: how long the whole cycle takes, from first contact to cash in the bank.

Two things change once you have these. You stop guessing which marketing works, and you start seeing which clients are profitable. Both usually throw up a surprise. Your gut feel about which accounts are the good ones is wrong more often than not, because effort doesn’t show up in revenue. It shows up in margin.

Be responsible with cash

Growth eats cash before it makes any. You hire ahead of the revenue, you spend on marketing before it converts, you deliver before you invoice, and you invoice before you get paid. A business can grow its way into a cash crisis while every other number looks healthy.

Which brings me to the least popular point here: plan to take less out of the business for a while. Growth needs working capital, and the cheapest working capital an owner-managed business has is the profit you choose not to take out. Deciding that on purpose, for a set period, with a target to hit, is very different from finding out in month eight that there’s nothing in the account.

Know your runway. Know what a hire costs before they bring anything in. Know how long your cash conversion cycle is, and shorten it: deposits, staged invoicing, tighter payment terms, chasing earlier. Freeing up cash you’ve already earned is easier than winning new work to cover the gap.

The pattern

Look back over the list and there’s one theme running through it. Every point moves the business away from depending on the founder and towards running on systems, information and other people. That’s what breaking a million is really about. The revenue follows.

If you’re stuck somewhere between half a million and a million, this is the kind of work I do with founders through scaling and advisory.