Small Wins and Squeaky Wheels: How to Build an Unstoppable Growth Flywheel

If you’re familiar with the Flywheel concept from Turning the Flywheel, you’ll remember when author Jim Collins sat down with Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team. It was the early 2000s, before Amazon Web Services existed, when Amazon was purely a product and e-commerce business.

See, Amazon’s growth was stalling.

So, they called in Jim to explain the Flywheel, a conceptual framework he observed while researching his best-selling book, Good to Great. A flywheel, as Collins describes it, is “a slow, cumulative process where a series of consistent, aligned efforts builds unstoppable momentum for a great company.”

On the back of a napkin, Amazon sketched their first, now-famous Flywheel.

It began with the company’s purpose and overarching ethos: to put customers at the centre of everything they do and be the most customer-centric company in the world.

Amazon’s flywheel started with their customers’ top job, which they identified as choice and lower prices. If they provided the largest selection of products on the planet, this would inevitably lead to a better customer experience, which in turn, would attract more visits to their e-commerce store.

Sounds simple enough. So what was the problem?

Their biggest constraint? Amazon’s costly IT and supply chain infrastructure, the very foundation of their e-commerce business: hosting, warehousing and logistics. Amazon’s 10X advantage came when they removed this constraint by opening up their infrastructure so that smaller third-party retailers and product suppliers could leverage it. More sellers meant shared overheads and reduced costs with each new customer.

Was there push-back? You bet!

(“What? Let competitors in on our industry-leading infrastructure? No way!”)

Did they debate it? Fiercely. But what mattered most was their purpose and brand promise. It was right for the customer.

By addressing their biggest constraint while delivering on their brand promise and strategy, Amazon became a once-in-a-generation success story.

Developers and third-party sellers joined in droves, driving costs down and allowing everyone in their marketplace to offer better prices for customers, while still maintaining margins.

The rest is history.

Small Wins

Here’s the key insight from Jim Collins’ Flywheel concept: Great companies aren’t built on a single innovation or event, but through many “small wins” that accumulate over time.

Once you understand your flywheel, scaling up is like getting fit, it requires smart decisions and routines. It’s like going to the gym, not the day spa — improving your strength little by little, every day.

Rather than a single breakthrough moment, great companies achieve exceptional results by continually pushing a handful of core activities in their flywheel, with discipline.

Each push builds on the previous one, accelerating every turn of the flywheel, speeding it up, creating exponential growth, and eventually reaching a point of breakthrough. At that stage, the flywheel has unstoppable momentum, slowing it down becomes harder than speeding it up.

Here’s how it works:

• Initial effort: At first, you must push a heavy, horizontal flywheel with great effort. It moves only imperceptibly at first.

• Momentum builds: As you keep pushing consistently, the flywheel begins to move faster with each rotation, gaining momentum and speed.

• Breakthrough: Eventually, the accumulated effort and compounding results lead to accelerating momentum and a breakthrough.

• Self-sustaining growth: At this stage, the flywheel’s own momentum starts to carry it forward, even with less concentrated effort. The slack can then be reinvested into new long-term growth opportunities, or extracted as higher profitability.

How to Unveil Your Flywheel

There are infinite variations of flywheels. While it’s helpful to study others, you need to uncover your own.

Step 1: Document the replicable successes your organisation has experienced. The handful of good decisions, core activities, or events that led to growth and got you where you are today.

Step 2: Do the same for the failures. What have you tried or invested in that didn’t lead to growth or make it easier to grow? Look for patterns.

Step 3: Think about what you primarily offer. Why did customers first start coming to you and why do they keep coming back? It’s likely linked to your purpose or brand promise.

Step 4: Identify five to six activities that naturally and inevitably feed into each other. Such that doing one, cannot help but lead to the other.

Step 5: Determine what drives your economic engine (or “profit per X” in Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept). What are your biggest costs as you scale, and how will you improve unit costs or profit as you scale?

Step 6: Finally, if you could reinvest that profit and cash into one thing to turn your flywheel again, what would it be?

When Flywheels Fail

Once you’ve mapped your first flywheel, it’s time to test it.

If you double down on a step in the flywheel, does it inevitably lead to the next? Does that cause-and-effect relationship become easier over time?

If not, you might have a constraint — or, as my fellow coach Jon Mond calls it, a squeaky wheel. Part of your flywheel is stuck. It’s not turning as smoothly as the rest.

Focus there. Remove the constraint. Give it some oil. Speed it up.

Because a flywheel is only as strong as its squeakiest wheel. Which is often the next bottleneck you need to remove to keep scaling.

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