The One Question I Ask Every Client Before We Talk Strategy

There’s a question I’ve started closing almost every client session with. It’s not complicated. It doesn’t take long to ask. But it reliably changes the direction of the entire conversation.

“What would have to be true in order for you to 10x your business?”

I first started using it almost by accident. I was wrapping up a session with a client who had gotten buried in day-to-day decisions. We’d covered a lot of ground. I could tell they were getting lost in the weeds.

So I just asked: what would actually have to be true for your business to be 10 times bigger than it is now?

They paused for a long time. Then they said they’d need systems that run without them. And that reframed everything.

Why Tactics Come Second

Most business conversations go straight to tactics. What should I post? Should I run ads? What’s the best email sequence? How do I close more deals?

These aren’t bad questions. But they’re answers to the wrong problem.

If you skip straight to tactics, you end up optimizing for what you’re already doing. You make your current process a little faster, a little cheaper, a little better. And if your current process can’t 10x, you’ve just gotten really good at something that can’t take you where you want to go.

The 10x question forces you to think about your business at a completely different scale before you get tactical.

At 10x, your referral-only pipeline breaks. Your manual onboarding breaks. Your “I handle everything” approach breaks. Most of the systems that work at your current size stop working when you multiply by 10.

And that’s useful information. It tells you what needs to change before you can grow.

How to Actually Use the Question

Here’s how I walk clients through it:

Start big, then drill down.

First, just sit with the question. What would your business look like at 10x? What would marketing look like? Client delivery? Your team? Your day-to-day?

Don’t try to answer it all at once. Let it surface two or three real constraints, the things that would genuinely have to change for 10x to happen.

Use the constraints as a starting point for tactics.

Once you have a real 10x picture, the daily stuff becomes obvious. Here’s an example from my own business: one of the things that would have to be true to 10x is showing up consistently on LinkedIn. That’s a 10x requirement. From there, I get: what do I write, how often, what does the routine look like, what tools do I build to make it easier?

Now those tactics are in service of something. They’re not just busy work.

Revisit the question every quarter.

Things change. Your business changes. What “10x” looks like changes too. I treat this as a quarterly reset, not a one-time exercise.

What Usually Comes Up

When I ask this question with clients, a few things reliably surface.

Process. Almost every owner realizes that their current operations don’t scale. The thing that runs on tribal knowledge, the thing only one person knows how to do, the thing that requires your personal attention, those show up immediately when you try to imagine 10x.

Marketing. Most small businesses underinvest in marketing because they don’t need to at their current size. At 10x, you can’t grow from referrals alone. You need a real engine.

Their own role. This one takes the longest to surface, but it’s often the most important. At 10x, are you doing the same things you’re doing now? Almost certainly not. Figuring out what those things are is one of the most valuable exercises a business owner can do.

Do This This Week

Block 30 minutes. Write the 10x question at the top of a page. Don’t open a tool. Don’t start a deck. Just sit with it.

Write down 3 things that would have to be true. Not 10. Three. Then pick the one that, if it stayed broken, would make the other two irrelevant.

That’s your constraint. Now plan your week around one action that moves that constraint, not around the pile of tactics that showed up in your inbox.

If you need help keeping that action from getting swallowed by a full calendar, protect the block. Treat it like a client meeting.

The Point Isn’t to Actually 10x Tomorrow

Some people hear “10x your business” and immediately get anxious. That’s not the goal here.

The goal is to use 10x as a lens. It’s a forcing function that makes you think clearly about what needs to change, and it surfaces constraints you might not have noticed while you’re busy managing the day-to-day.

Start with the question. Let the tactics follow from there.

If you want help turning those constraints into a week you can actually run, look at 25X. That’s the system I use with clients when the goal is less busywork and more of the work that actually moves the number.