How to Achieve 4x Quarterly Growth: Annual Business Results Review

Why an Annual Business Review Creates Quarterly Breakthroughs

How do you achieve a breakthrough every quarter, every year? By reviewing your results. Reviews force you to constantly think about what will end up in them — whether it will be regret over nothing working out, or the joy and dopamine rush of “you actually did it.” But there are risks too: after a public positive review, you might relax and assume you’ve already made it. Or worse, repeat the fate of Refocus. That’s why I keep asking myself whether to shut down this quarterly format altogether. For now, it stays.

Annual Business Results: 4x Quarterly Growth and 2.2x Year-Over-Year

Revenue grew 4x compared to Q4 2022. Over the full year, we grew 2.2x against a planned target of 2x. The team itself grew 3 to 4x over the course of the year. Of course, this new level is not guaranteed going into 2024 — but we’ll fight for it. So how did we get here?

Product Focus Methodology and New Products as an Annual Business Growth Driver

The Product Focus methodology became the distillation of everything I’ve built up in strategy, product, project management, and leadership. We managed to create a systemic foundation for all of product management and entrepreneurship — one that made it possible to launch separate new products and services, because product management is something almost every company struggles with.

In total, beyond running lessons in the Product Management course, I delivered 16 standalone trainings covering specific areas of the methodology: JTBD, customer research, trends, product strategy, unit economics, the product competency model, PLG, Blue Ocean Strategy, mission and vision, OKR, metrics trees, NSM, and more. We’ll be publishing the methodology soon.

Scaling the Product Management Course

We successfully launched 2 cohorts of the Product Management course, with a combined 80 students. Beyond project managers and product managers at various levels, we attracted a significant number of CEOs, CPOs, HRDs, department heads, and entrepreneurs — all of them looking for a systemic foundation and a clear understanding of how to run a product transformation.

Students came from virtually every major company in the market: Tinkoff, MTS, VK, Beeline, Rostelecom, Magnit, the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Sportmaster, Sber, Alfa-Bank, Uralsib, Gazprom, Business Lines, NSPK, Uralchem, Tavrida Art, Rosselkhozbank, and many others. What was especially gratifying: corporate training orders and requests for full product transformations started coming in while the course was still running.

Strategy Sessions: The Unexpected Driver in This Year’s Business Review

One of the more surprising growth drivers turned out to be strategic planning and strategy sessions. It started with our OKR sessions — a form of strategy session, but unlike what was common in the market (which often looked more like team-building exercises), we developed tools for identifying real, concrete growth points within companies.

From there, clients began asking not just for OKR facilitation, but for full strategy sessions. That eventually led to demand for comprehensive development of mission, values, vision, business strategies, brand strategies, and marketing and communications strategies. The results exceeded expectations — and that’s not surprising, since our team isn’t made up of theorists or students, but of senior executives from major companies, Big Four consulting partners, and entrepreneurs with real operational experience.

Partners, Team, and Culture: The Foundation of Sustainable Annual Growth

Another significant driver was the institution of business partners — not corporate partners, but individuals who lead business directions the way partners do in consulting, sharing in the profits. Ours are senior executives and entrepreneurs. The key effect of this model turned out to be cross-pollination: partners complementing and building on each other’s work, which translated directly into growth across those areas. We’ll continue developing this model — if it’s something that interests you, reach out.

And of course, the growing team is now starting to deliver real results. New directions that never got attention before are finally moving. There’s more systemic structure to how we work, new rising stars, and new opportunities on the horizon. The uncomfortable side effect has been headhunting — leading companies coming after our people. But here’s the thing: you can poach employees, but you can’t poach a company’s culture. And it’s culture that creates the future of the company — and the future of the people in it.