Over the last 20 years, we've built two $100M+ companies and made hundreds of mistakes along the way. Everything we do runs on our GTM Operating System frameworks. We even wrote a book called MOVE — which became a WSJ best-selling book on go-to-market, quoted by Geoffrey Moore (author of the iconic Crossing the Chasm).
Our mission: help 100,000 businesses run on GTM OS to build profitable companies. We're at about 3,000 now so we have a long way to go.
We also run the GTMarketplace — connecting CEOs with 100+ certified fractional CMOs, CROs, and ops leaders all over the world who know the GTM Operating System.
With that intro, let's get moving!
In today's post, I am going to give you the one question most CEOs never ask, the question that quietly caps their growth. It's the first of the eight questions in the GTM Operating System, and it took us from zero to $1 million in nine months with no sales or marketing team.
Let's dig in.
$0 to $1M in 9 Months, No Sales or Marketing Team
In the first nine months, we built GTM Partners from zero to a million dollars in revenue.
We did it without a marketing team and without a sales team.
I'm not telling you that to brag. I'm telling you because the thing that got us there is exactly what I'm about to teach you.
And guess what, it wasn’t AI so expect zero AI slop in this post.
As you know, the GTM Operating System (GTM OS) has eight questions every company needs clarity on. I'm going to say that word over and over: clarity. Not certainty. Clarity.
Today I'm focused on just the first question. And it's deceptively simple.
The Question: Where Can You Grow the Most?
Read it again and notice the intentionality.
Not "where can we grow." Where can we grow the most.
That one word is the whole thing.
When we sat down as a business, we had a lot of directions we could have gone. We'd written MOVE, the Wall Street Journal bestseller. We were doing advisory around the concepts in the book. We'd invented this idea of the go-to-market operating system. We were running workshops, doing research, and taking on fractional work.
So we asked ourselves the real question. Out of all of it, where can we grow the most?
WATCH: The First Question of GTM OS, Explained (we just crossed 2K subscribers - Watch me break this down step-by-step)
How We Broke the Business Into Three Things
In the first three months, we implemented the operating system inside a couple of companies.
And we realized the advisory work we were doing could be broken into three things:
Workshops. Repeatable, strategic sessions. People happily wrote $25k checks for these, and because we could run them again and again, they gave us strong cash flow.
Pillar work. Deep, hands-on work across the eight GTM OS pillars. This was strategic and involved, so clients regularly wrote $25k to $50k checks for it.
Project work. Ongoing delivery where we'd say "I've got this," and hand them a finished result.
Breaking the work down this way did two things. It gave us predictable cash flow, and it gave clients a clear menu of how to spend money with us.
Once we had the process figured out, we asked the obvious next question: what if we just taught it to a few people?
The Move That Unlocked Everything
We took three specific people and taught them exactly how to run this project and this process. Each of them made half a million dollars in their first year.
Within six months of nailing the process, we had three people out there implementing it for us. From there it compounded. More clients, more projects, all built around the operating system. We ran ads on it. We ran events around it. Every time, we'd pull in four, five, six new clients.
All of it got unlocked because we asked one question with real clarity:
where can we grow the most?
Here's what we deliberately did not do. We could have just run a bunch of events ourselves. But that meant doing all the work by hand, which doesn't scale.
Or we could have hired a big full-time team, which adds cost and kills the bootstrap.
So instead we built a 1099 fractional marketplace (100+ certified partners listed here, each building $500K+ business) of people who could do the work.
We now have people in the U.S., Australia, the UK, Canada so we are going global.
None of that happens if we don't obsess over this one question.
Why "the Most" Matters So Much
If you're building your business right now, this question deserves real time. And not the lazy AI version of it.
Where can you grow the most is really asking:
Where is the most profit?
Where is the highest margin?
Where do you have to do the least amount of selling?
Where is delivery lighter than if you did everything yourself?
Where can you expand into new geographies?
Our blunt advice to CEOs and GTM Leaders:
Don't ask where you can grow.
Ask where you can grow, the most.
Your Challenge This Week
Do a brain dump, don’t let AI do the thinking for you.
List every single way you could grow your business.
Then, if you have an executive team, put the list in front of them and make them prioritize. Ask the hard questions:
If we grow here, what happens to the rest of the business?
What parts break if we lean into this?
Where is the highest margin for us?
When you look at those real nuances, you find the areas where you can grow profitably instead of just growing.
That one question changed our trajectory.
Nine months to $1 million.
Five years in, we're now roughly $10 million.
And "where can we grow the most" is still at the center of how we look at everything. We ask it, and ask it again.
You can take the assessment for yourself at runongtmos.com/move. Sit down with your executive team and answer the most important question first.
Now that you have all of that, let's get back to growing your business.
love,
sangram
p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more frameworks like this, follow along at runongtmos.com — and let's get moving.