Authored By Kishan Dhanjal
The Case for Building a Growth Engine
Canadian small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), are under siege. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), 62% of small businesses face higher expenses from the U.S.–Canada trade war, 48% report declining revenues, 41% are dealing with supply chain disruptions, and 36% have paused new investments entirely.¹ Nearly one in five (19%) absorbing tariff costs say they won’t survive beyond six months; close to four in ten (38%) say less than a year.¹ The trade war has exposed a hard truth: firms that relied on a narrow client base, a single market or select relationships are the most vulnerable.
Survival mode is not a growth strategy; SMEs must build their own resilience against disruption. A famous line used in a firm I worked for was “if we’re not growing, we’re shrinking.” When the 2008 recession hit, their core market nearly took the firm down with it. The firm’s owners had a choice: hunt for work in a new market or be on the menu. The firm’s services were transferrable to adjacent sectors, but transferrable in theory and practice are two very different things. Breaking into new market sectors meant building new customer relationships, finding new partners, entering unfamiliar segments, learning new buying and procurement processes and redesigning the previous business model that had worked for more than a decade in its core market.
Market leaders stay ahead of disruption by innovating and rethinking how they grow. They build diversified client portfolios, innovated business models, healthy sales pipelines and strong internal growth cultures that weather storms and position themselves for new opportunity.
This playbook adapts strategies from The Growth Engine: Building a World-Class Business Development Function in Professional Services into a practical guide for any Canadian SME navigating present economic headwinds. Whether you run a boutique consultancy, a 50-person manufacturing operation, or an emerging tech company, the principles in this playbook can be applied to your business.
Where Does Your Firm Stand? The Four Stages of Growth Maturity
The framework recommends that firms evaluate and assess of where they are in four stages of growth maturity.²
Most Canadian SMEs sit between Entrepreneurial and Tactical. The good news: small, deliberate moves up the maturity curve can produce outsized results—especially during a period where your competitors are standing still. Here are several disciplines and best practices recommended to consider in graduating in the growth maturity curve.
Discipline 1: Know What You Do
You become known for the value your firm creates for clients. There are thousands of goods and service providers in every market—becoming the “go-to” firm for providing value-add and gains relative to your customer’s key risks, problems and pain points is a powerful way to increase market share.
Your niche sits at the intersection of three things: what you are great at, the problem your target market needs solved, and what that market is willing to pay for it.² Too many firms reverse-engineer this—building a solution and then looking for a problem. In a tariff-pressured economy, clarity of offering is not optional.
Best Practices
Define your value proposition. Does it differentiate you from competitors? Does it substantiate how you solve a specific problem with evidence you can deliver? Does it resonate—addressing both the rational and emotional benefits of working with you?
Speak a common language. Equip your team with business development training, elevator pitches, case studies, and branded collateral so that no one on your team ever says, “I don’t fully understand what we do.”
Discipline 2: Know Your Client
The more explicit you can be about whom you serve—the buyers most in need of your services, with the authority and budget to purchase—the more effective your business development will be. A simple test: ask five people on your team to name four new clients you want to serve and four clients you don’t. If the answers diverge, you have work to do.
Best Practices
Build your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). SMEs often believe “there is no such thing as a bad client.” When defining your ICP, consider: industry and sub-industry, company size and ownership structure, geography, specific company contexts (high-growth, M&A activity, disruption), and—critically—the functional buyer. A company is an account; a client is a person. Until you have defined the individual with the budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT), your ICP is incomplete.
Expand Organically. For most SMEs, approximately 80% of new work comes from current client accounts.² Your delivery teams are on the front lines of growth. Train them to listen, ask great questions, and spot opportunities—not to “sell.” The best business development looks nothing like sales. It looks like solving problems.
Build Relationship Action Plans (RAPs) into your account management planning. Map the client organization. Assign a relationship status to key stakeholders—from “Unknown” to “Trusted Advisor.” Identify decision-makers, coaches, advocates, and competitor advocates. Then use “LEGIT” outreach: Legitimate Excuses to Get In Touch.² Share an industry observation or thought leadership piece. Invite them to coffee. Offer help with a challenge you’ve noticed. The objective is not a short-term sale—it is a long-term investment in a real relationship.
Discipline 3: Empower a Growth Team
Canadian SMEs underinvest in business development capacity. The “doers” are expected to sell without training and without a support system.² Technical professionals need support bridging delivery expertise to market reading, pipeline management, and relationship-driven selling. Upskilling, workshops, internal mentoring, and ongoing development are not luxuries—they are prerequisites for growth.
Best Practices
Seller-Doer Model. For most SMEs selling expertise or experience, the seller-doer model is the right one. Top “rainmakers” do the work because delivery based value sells.² But you cannot have your most valuable people spending their days scheduling meetings and formatting proposals. Build an “Engine Room” of support: market intelligence, opportunity capture, proposal management, CRM administration, and business development support.
Incentivize. Design your compensation to reward the behaviours you want, and a system that encourages teamwork, diversifies account management and encourages innovation. Recognize cross-selling on par with new logo acquisition. Balance incentives that point to new logos and organic growth within your current client base.²
Discipline 4: Measure What Matters
Most SMEs lack data governance around growth — tracking lagging metrics like revenue and headcount on disconnected spreadsheets with no shared system or accountability.² Leading firms invest in systems, data and forward-looking metrics to measure where they’re headed.
Best Practices
Invest in a CRM. Even a basic system provides pipeline visibility, forecasting capability, and shared accountability. The goal is a single source of truth that the entire growth team uses consistently to track, pursue and measure new opportunities.²
Measure your Growth. Measure your growth success and failure. Track cost of sales — the single most valuable and least used metric — to understand how much unbilled time goes into BD. Monitor win and capture rates to gauge pricing effectiveness, percent sole-sourced work to measure relationship strength, and client concentration to understand revenue risk. Maintain a weighted pipeline to know what will convert and when, and enforce a regular sales meeting cadence to keep momentum. Leading firms shift from lagging metrics — did we grow last year — to leading indicators that predict where revenue is headed.
About the Author
Kishan Dhanjal is a big-picture thinker who loves detail just as much. He is a professional services leader with 19 years of experience working with inspired owners and leaders of SMEs. For over a decade, he was a business development executive at an Ontario-based SME helping grow it from a boutique consultancy into a leading professional services organization, with majority of its revenue coming from public sector clients in the Canadian market. During his tenure he helped the firm triple in size before its acquisition by one of the largest management consultancies in the world. He now enjoys helping Canadian entrepreneurs and SMEs innovate their business models and go-to-market strategies to open new opportunities for growth.
Sources
- Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). “Nearly one in five small businesses dealing with tariff costs won’t last more than six months if nothing changes.” August 20, 2025. cfib-fcei.ca
- Shill, W., Baldwin, A., Flowers, E., & Parks, J. The Growth Engine: Building a World-Class Business Development Function in Professional Services.