1. Why should someone choose you for the first time?

2. Why should they come back?

The first question is about acquisition. The second is about retention.

Whether you’re building an app used by millions or running a coaching practice with 20 clients, these are the two fundamental questions you need to answer.

And sometimes, getting someone to come back means winning them over all over again.

Growth, deconstructed

A friend’s daughter just started kindergarten and is very much into number sentences. Growth has one too:

Growth = Acquisition + Resurrection − Churn

Here’s what each term means:

• Acquisition: New customers who start working with you.

• Resurrection: Former customers who return after being inactive.

• Churn: Existing customers who stop working with you.

For example, say you start the month with 20 active clients.

You acquire 4 new clients, 2 former clients return, and 3 existing clients leave.

You end the month with 23 active clients. That’s 3 additional clients, or 15% net growth. Not bad!

Couple of things to notice:

1. You can grow without acquiring a single new customer.

2. And you can acquire plenty of new customers while your business is actually shrinking.

This is why looking only at new leads or new customers gives you an incomplete picture.

A small technicality: this equation measures the change in active customers. The broader principles apply to revenue, usage, or whatever growth means for your business. More on that another day.

Measure growth, not just activity

You don’t need fancy analytics to start. A spreadsheet is enough. The trick is to maintain it, but that’s a different post.

Track your active customers, new customers, returning customers, and churned customers every month.

Then look at the trends:

• Month over month (MoM): Are you growing compared to last month?

• Quarter over quarter (QoQ): Is growth improving over a longer period?

• Year over year (YoY): Are you building a meaningfully larger business than you had a year ago?

A few practical details matter. Define what an active customer means for your business, and use that definition consistently. For a coach, it might be someone with an ongoing engagement. For a consultant, it might be someone with an active project. This can snowball into something complex quickly, so bias towards simplicity and the reality of your business.

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Where to focus next

Once you start measuring these numbers, you’ll begin to see where your growth opportunities are.

If acquisition is weak, ask why more people aren’t choosing you.

If churn is high, ask why people aren’t staying.

If former clients rarely return, ask whether you’re giving them a reason to reconnect.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Find the biggest opportunity and work on it.

Growth isn’t just about finding more customers. It’s about giving people a reason to choose you, stay with you, and choose you again.

That’s Growth 101.

You are great at what you do. You might even love it. But somewhere along the way, you also become the salesperson, marketer, accountant, IT department, and everything in between.

And even when business picks up or you start delegating, it’s hard to stop looking around corners. Especially when it comes to growth.

I am discovering this firsthand.

After years leading growth at Instagram, I am now building simplifiedQ. I’ve also spent the past year speaking with 250+ business owners, coaches, consultants, and independent professionals.

I LOVE growth. I’ve spent more than a decade thinking about it. But knowing how to grow a business and actually building one as a semi-solopreneur are two very different things.

And there’s so much to learn about that second part.

That’s why I am starting Good Business.

After 250+ conversations and a year of building simplifiedQ, I’ve collected more questions, stories, and surprising lessons than I know what to do with. This feels like a good place to share them.

I will write every couple of weeks about what we are learning, question a few conventional ideas, and explore what it takes to build and grow a business around what you do best.

Some lessons will come from experience. Others from conversations with owners figuring it out every day.

And I would love to hear your stories too. What’s the part of running a business that surprised you he most?

Hopefully, we’ll figure out a few things together.

Welcome to Good Business.

From the folks building simplifiedQ.