You're Spending More on Marketing. Why Isn't the Business Growing?
In the last full holiday season I ran at Canvas Print Photos, a direct-to-consumer company I founded and later exited, I put together a promotion I was genuinely proud of. The creative was specific, the targeting was tight, and the numbers, within the first few days, looked like the strongest I had ever produced. Orders came in faster than any previous quarter, and for about a week I let myself believe the business had turned the kind of corner you read about in founder retrospectives but rarely experience firsthand.
Then the prints started going out late. The production lab we used for fulfillment had a capacity ceiling I had never had reason to examine, because in three years of operating the business we had never come close to it, and the surge that should have been our best month instead produced a backlog of missed delivery dates and a wave of one-star reviews from customers who had ordered gifts and received them after the occasions had passed. I spent the last two weeks of the quarter doing damage control on the very customers the first two weeks had won, and the experience left a mark not because the individual dollars were catastrophic, but because I could not tell you when exactly the operation had tipped from handling the volume to being buried by it.
The promotion was the most competent piece of marketing I had produced in the life of the company. What I had missed was that it was pointed at a system that could not absorb what it generated, and I had never once stopped to ask whether it could.
The pattern behind that mistake has been understood for almost two centuries, though it comes from a field no one in marketing would think to consult. In the 1840s, the German chemist Justus von Liebig, building on earlier work by Carl Sprengel, established what became known as the law of the minimum: the principle that a crop's yield is controlled not by the total nutrients available in the soil but by whichever single nutrient is scarcest relative to the plant's demand. A field rich in nitrogen and potassium but deficient in phosphorus will grow only as much as the phosphorus permits, and pouring on more nitrogen, however generously, changes nothing, because nitrogen was never the constraint. Liebig's students illustrated this with the image of a barrel built from staves of unequal height: the water level can only ever rise to the top of the shortest stave, regardless of how tall the others are.
A company is a barrel of this kind, and most of its staves are operational. The marketing that generates demand, the process that turns a new client into an activated one, the delivery of the actual product or service, the support structure that holds a frustrated customer in place long enough for the relationship to recover — each is a stave, and the height of each is determined by how much genuine attention it has received relative to the load now being placed on it. In a founder-led company, the distribution is almost never even. One or two staves are built tall, usually the ones the founder personally finds most energizing or is unusually skilled at, and several are built low, because they sit in the part of the business no one has yet had cause to examine closely.
What I have observed consistently, across nearly every company I have worked with since, is that the tallest stave is almost always acquisition. It has a budget, it has a reporting cadence, it has someone paying attention to it every week, and it is the function a founder can point to in a leadership meeting and feel is being actively managed. The short stave — the one that is quietly setting the water level for the entire business — tends to be the unglamorous middle: the stretch between a client signing and that client actually reaching the point where the product or service is delivering value, the onboarding that happens differently depending on which team member runs it, the first sixty days that determine, with considerably more finality than most founders realize, whether someone becomes a long-term client or a slow and silent departure. When that middle is the constraint, more acquisition spend does not produce more growth. It produces churn, and it produces it expensively, because every client acquired into a system that cannot reliably carry them to value is a client the company has paid once to win and will shortly pay again to replace.
Every client acquired into a system that cannot carry them to value is one the company has paid to win and will pay again to replace.
My holiday promotion was a small-scale version of this arithmetic. I had done precisely what Liebig's barrel would predict: invested in the tallest stave, the one I understood best, and watched the growth I expected pour into a system whose shortest stave had not moved. The one-star reviews I spent that December answering were not a marketing failure. They were the barrel's shortest stave making itself known, in the only way it could, through the customers who hit it.
The companies I work with now tend to be facing a more complex version of the same dynamic, with a longer list of staves and higher stakes attached to each, but the underlying pattern is remarkably consistent: a founder who has built the part of the business they most enjoy, who is investing in the function that feels most like progress, and who is examining the results with a growing unease they cannot quite locate, because the stave that is setting the height of everything else is the one that has received the least attention and is the least likely to announce itself as the problem. The question that matters, and the one that tends to go unasked for the longest because the answer is almost always unglamorous, is which part of the system is currently the shortest stave — which step every new client is quietly being lost across — and whether you can bring yourself to fix that before spending another dollar on the parts that were never the constraint.
