Why Most Growth Fixes Are Just Plumbing

The category is filling up with plumbers

Every few weeks, someone shows me a proposal for “fixing the growth engine.” I read it and find the same list: pipeline mechanics, attribution stacks, GTM ops, alignment playbooks, CRM cleanups, and a dashboard that finally agrees on a number.

All of it is real work. I’ve done versions of every one of those builds inside agencies, SaaS companies, and expert-led firms, and some people do it very well. But none of it is the foundation. It’s the plumbing, and the pipe can’t tell you whether anyone should be walking toward it in the first place.

That’s the line I want to draw here. Upstream versus downstream. Position versus pipe. It’s also the line that decides whether a growth system compounds or runs hot for a quarter and then stalls.

What’s usually in the box

Ask any firm selling a growth rebuild what you’re getting, and you’ll hear a familiar list. Pipeline measurement, lead-gen systems, attribution, automation builds, maybe a lifecycle program bolted onto the back end. There’s almost always a dashboard.

Every one of those builds sits downstream of a decision the firm has already made, or failed to make, about why anyone would step toward the offer. The pipeline moves water. It doesn’t create the water or decide whether the river is running.

That’s the part the category keeps skipping. When a firm sells downstream work as if it were the whole system, the buyer pays for plumbing and gets a machine that can’t compound, because nobody designed the layer above it.

The plumbing-first problem

Here’s how it usually plays out. The funnel runs, the CRM lights up, and the attribution model finally agrees with itself. Pipeline volume goes up because the new build sealed cracks that were leaking leads, the team feels the bump, and the board likes the chart.

Six months later, revenue hasn’t moved the way the chart promised. Or it moved once, on the volume the seal-up released, and then stalled. Nothing is broken, yet the numbers won’t compound.

I’ve seen this enough times to recognize it on a first call. The plumbing was fine, but the water was thin. Buyers never had a strong enough reason to step toward the offer, and once the released volume passed through, nothing upstream was sending more.

A plumbing fix on a positioning problem buys you one bump and then exposes the real leak. No funnel mechanic can engineer the reason a buyer wants in. That reason is the foundation, and the funnel only carries it.

What upstream looks like

When I say upstream, I mean six things, roughly in this order:

• The position the firm is willing to claim, narrowly and defensibly.
• The message that carries the position across every surface the buyer touches.
• The audience the firm has read accurately, rather than a persona copied from a template.
• The point of view that sets the firm apart in a category where everyone competes on the same generic label.
• The named frameworks that make the firm’s method portable and ownable.
• The proof system that earns the claim at every step the buyer has to take.

The position isn’t a tagline. It’s the decision about what the firm stands for, who it’s built for, and what it refuses to do. The message is how that decision shows up in words the buyer recognizes and can repeat, and the audience read tells you which buyer the position is really for.

The point of view makes you distinct on first contact, frameworks give buyers something to name and ask for, and proof closes the doubt at each step. Together, those six decide why anyone enters the funnel at all. In FAME terms, it’s the Focus and Aim work, the part that has to be right before Multiply and Engage can pay off.

If the upstream layer is right, the funnel becomes the cheapest part of the build, because the position does the converting and the funnel just carries it. If it’s wrong, the funnel does all the work, and the work never finishes.

The example I lead with

When I explain this on a call, I use one example because it’s the cleanest version of the principle I’ve lived through.

In early 2025, I stepped in to lead growth for a consulting training organization. The founder had spent more than a decade building real authority, with books, podcasts, frameworks the market recognized, and a deep library of articles under his name.

The position was earned long before I arrived. But rankings had started slipping, because AI search was changing how buyers found expertise, and the structure that made the library findable in Google wasn’t what made it findable in ChatGPT and Gemini.

So the brief was upstream: make existing authority visible on the surfaces buyers now used. I rebuilt the content engine on top of the founder’s foundation, turning about a hundred core articles into the spine of an AI-retrieval structure and rewriting or consolidating roughly 192 pieces over my tenure.

I merged related articles for depth and intent, restructured pages for AI retrieval, added schema, and strengthened signals across the discovery layer. I also tuned the voice for humanization, because the systems mediating discovery were rewarding the recognizably human and discounting the machine-shaped average.

AI search visibility rose 924% year over year. New inbound leads also started telling the sales team they’d found the firm through ChatGPT and Gemini, which told us the work was landing where it mattered.

I’m careful with that number, because it isn’t mine alone. The founder spent years building the IP that earned the right to be amplified, and the position the library expressed was his. What I did was rework the layer that made that authority visible to the machines now sitting between buyers and experts.

Nothing changed in the funnel, the attribution stack, or the CRM. The discovery layer changed, the position became visible where buyers were looking, and everything downstream inherited the lift. A funnel-mechanics firm could have worked that account for a year and produced none of it.

The AI-era wrinkle

There’s a wrinkle the category hasn’t caught up to, and it’s why upstream work will matter more over the next five years, not less.

AI is flattening the downstream layer. A modern model can configure a CRM, write attribution rules, draft sequences, and build dashboards at a pace and price no consulting firm can match for long. Firms selling pure plumbing are now competing with a tool a buyer can rent for a couple hundred dollars a month.

What AI can’t flatten is the upstream layer. A tool can polish your language once you’ve made the call, but it can’t decide what your firm should stand for or who it should refuse to serve.

Meanwhile, every AI-tuned landing page is starting to sound the same, and every optimized article reads like the one next to it. What’s left to differentiate you is a position you’ve actually claimed and proof with human fingerprints on it. Everything downstream of those is on a price curve toward zero.

That’s why I keep telling expert-led founders the same thing. If your funnel feels heavier every quarter, it probably isn’t broken. The surfaces buyers use to find you have changed, and the position your funnel carried five years ago isn’t doing the qualifying work it used to.

Why the funnel can mislead you

When someone asks me what the difference is, I put it this way. They engineer the funnel, and I engineer why anyone enters it.

The funnel is the visible layer. It’s what the dashboard measures and what the ops team maintains. The reason a buyer walks toward it is invisible, and that invisible layer is the one that compounds.

Most growth work stays in the visible layer because that’s where the metrics live. But the metrics are downstream of a decision the buyer made before ever entering the system. Optimize only what you can measure, and you’re tuning the part that records what happens, not the part that decides whether anything happens at all.

Who this isn’t for

This argument has limits.

If your firm already has a position you can defend in the room, an accurate audience read, a clear point of view, frameworks people use by name, and proof that earns the claim, then better plumbing is exactly what you need. Your next leverage really does live in the funnel.

Those firms exist, and I usually refer them to other operators. A strong funnel team working on a strong position is a great engagement, because the plumbing finally has water worth carrying.

But what if you’re running a well-tuned funnel on a position nobody has re-examined in years? What if the dashboard is green and growth is flat, or you’ve hired a string of plumbers and the system still leaks? Then the funnel isn’t your leverage. The position is.

What the work is

This is the work I do. I diagnose the position and the message that make the funnel worth building, and everything else sits inside that decision.

The plumbing matters, and I’m not arguing otherwise. I’m arguing that it’s downstream, and a category that confuses the two will spend years selling buyers the wrong work.

If most of the growth conversation in your head is about pipelines and dashboards, you may not need a better plumber. You may need someone working upstream, and that’s exactly where a diagnosis starts.

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