The 3Ps: how to decide which growth move to run next

By William Walczak, MBA — CEO, Hiilite Creative Group · PhD Candidate, UBC-Okanagan

TL;DR — Most owners have a backlog of things they “should” be doing. The 3Ps — Profit, Potential, People — is a three-question rubric that turns that backlog into a ranked list. Score each candidate move on all three. The one that scores highest across all three is the next Play to run. The one that scores high on only one is a distraction.

The problem with a long to-do list

Every owner I talk to has the same problem. They know they need to do something about their marketing. They have a list: run ads, fix SEO, start a referral program, clean up the CRM, build out email, post more on social. The list is long. The time is short.

So they pick based on gut feel, or whatever the last consultant pitched, or whatever their competitor just launched. Then they wonder why the effort didn’t translate to revenue.

The real problem is not the list. It is the absence of a ranking system.

Michael Porter made this point in 1996: strategy is not about doing more things. It is about choosing which things not to do. A business that tries to do everything has no strategy. It has activity. Activity is not the same as growth.

The 3Ps give you the ranking system.

What the 3Ps are

The 3Ps framework comes from the research behind Growth Mapping — a mixed-method study of how SMEs grow and what actually drives repeatable results. The framework identifies three questions that, asked together, predict whether a given move will compound into real growth or just add noise.

The three questions are:

Profit — will this move the bottom line, given what a client is worth and what it costs to serve them?
Potential — how much upside does this have, and can it scale beyond this one client or campaign?
People — does the team — human and agent — have the capacity and the skill to run this well?

Score each candidate move on each question. The one with the strongest case across all three is your next Play.

P1 — Profit

Profit is first because it is the constraint everything else runs inside.

Most marketing decisions get made without any real financial grounding. An owner decides to run paid ads because “everyone is doing it,” without knowing whether a new customer at their current acquisition cost is actually profitable once service cost is factored in. A campaign generates leads. Nobody checks whether those leads closed, what the average contract value was, or what it cost in team hours to service them.

The Profit question forces that check. It asks: given what we know about this client’s revenue, their cost to serve, and the gap between where they are and where they want to be — will this move materially improve the economics?

This is why the Growth Mapping platform binds recommendations to real financial data: QuickBooks revenue, Everhour hours tracked against clients, CRM pipeline. Not generic benchmarks. Not industry averages. The actual numbers for this business. A recommendation grounded in that data is a different animal from one that isn’t.

A move scores high on Profit if it either: – increases revenue from existing clients (retention plays typically do this), or – brings in new clients whose LTV justifiably exceeds their acquisition and service cost.

A move scores low if it generates activity (impressions, followers, clicks) without a clear line back to either of those outcomes.

P2 — Potential

Potential is about upside and scalability.

A move with high potential is one that can be run again, systematized, and compounded. A one-time campaign has lower potential than a repeatable acquisition channel. A social post has lower potential than a referral loop that keeps running after you build it.

Davenport and Harris frame this as the difference between analytics that answer a question once and analytics that become a capability. The same logic applies to growth moves. You want capabilities, not one-offs.

Ask these questions to score Potential:

Can this Play run again with minimal marginal effort?
Does it get better with time and data (compounding)?
Does it work at a higher client volume, or does it break?

A referral program, once built, compounds as the client base grows. Fixing a technical SEO issue pays forward for years. Running a specific ad creative for one week is consumed and gone.

High-potential moves tend to be infrastructure plays — ones that build an asset, a system, or a channel. Low-potential moves tend to be output plays — ones that produce a deliverable that expires.

P3 — People

People is the most commonly skipped question, and skipping it is how good moves fail in execution.

A Play that scores well on Profit and Potential still fails if the team cannot run it. “The team” here means humans and agents together. A small operation with one generalist and no automation capacity cannot run a full-funnel content program the way a twelve-person team with trained AI workers can.

The People question has two sides:

Capacity — does the team have bandwidth to run this without dropping quality on existing work?

Capability — does the team have the skill to run it well? A weak execution of a high-potential move often produces worse results than a strong execution of a moderate one.

For agencies running the Growth Mapping operating model, the agent layer is part of this calculation. Some Plays have been systematized enough that an AI worker can handle the execution, freeing human capacity for the judgment-heavy steps. But that only works for Plays that are well-defined and repeatable. Novel or high-stakes work still needs human judgment at the core.

The honest score on People often forces a sequencing decision: build the capability first, then run the Play. That is not failure. That is strategy.

Worked example: three candidate Plays, one winner

Here is how the 3Ps work in practice. The business is a service firm — say, a ten-person professional services company with a mix of retained and project clients. They want to grow revenue by 20% this year. Three candidate Plays are on the table:

Play	Profit	Potential	People	Total
Launch a referral program (incentivize existing clients to send referrals)	High — referral clients close faster, lower acquisition cost, historical LTV is 30% above average	High — runs automatically after initial build; compounds as client base grows	Medium — needs a defined process and one person to manage; no specialized skill required	Strong across all three
Run Google Ads to a new landing page	Low-Medium — current cost per lead from paid is $180; average project value is $4,200 but average service cost runs 65% — margin is tight before ad spend	Medium — can scale budget, but margin compression limits ceiling	Low — no in-house PPC skill; would need an external specialist or significant learning curve	Weak on Profit and People
Publish a weekly LinkedIn newsletter	Low short-term — brand play, no direct revenue line today	High long-term — audience compounds, positions founder as category authority	Medium — founder can write; cadence is the constraint	Too low on near-term Profit to prioritize now

The referral program wins. It has the clearest Profit case given the existing client economics. It compounds once built. And the team can execute it without hiring or outsourcing. The LinkedIn newsletter is worth doing eventually, but it is not the next move when 20% revenue growth is the goal this year.

The ads play is not wrong as a channel in principle. It is wrong now given the margin structure and the capability gap. Run the referral program first. Use the revenue to improve margin or build the PPC skill. Then revisit ads.

That is what the 3Ps produce: a sequencing decision, not just a priority list.

How the platform ranks Plays this way

The Hiilite Agentic Advisor uses the 3Ps rubric inside the Sense-Seize-Transform loop. When the Diagnose agent reads a client’s live data — GA4 sessions, QBO revenue, Everhour cost, CRM pipeline — it surfaces gaps. The Advisor agent then scores candidate Plays against those gaps using Profit, Potential, and People signals drawn from that client’s actual numbers.

The output is not a generic recommendation. It is a ranked list specific to this client, at this moment, given their current financials and team capacity.

That is predictive and prescriptive analytics applied to the real question owners ask: what should I do next? The tools that just report on what happened are answering the wrong question.

Read how the full framework works: The Growth Mapping Framework. For the academic grounding behind the 3Ps and the Sense-Seize-Transform loop, see the Growth Mapping paper.

FAQ

What if two Plays score equally across all three Ps?

Pick the one that is faster to execute and measure. Speed of feedback matters. A Play you can run and learn from in two weeks beats one that takes three months to show results, even if the long-run upside is comparable. You can revisit and re-rank once you have data.

Does the 3Ps framework apply to plays inside a single channel, or only across channels?

Both. You can use it to choose between a referral program and paid ads (cross-channel), or to choose between two ad formats inside the same paid campaign. The questions are the same. The scale of the decision changes; the rubric does not.

What counts as a strong “People” score if the team is very small?

A strong People score at small scale means the Play can be run by the people you have today, at a quality level that reflects well on the business. If it requires a skill you do not have, it scores Low — unless there is a well-defined agent or contractor who can carry that skill. “We’ll figure it out” is not a People score. It is a risk.

Is Profit always more important than Potential?

Not always. Early-stage businesses sometimes need to invest in high-Potential plays (brand, audience-building, content infrastructure) even when the near-term Profit case is weak, because those plays create the conditions for everything else to work. The rule is: do not run low-Profit plays indefinitely without a theory for when they convert to Profit. Set a time horizon and a signal that tells you when to double down or cut.

How often should you re-run the 3Ps ranking?

Every time conditions change materially — a client wins or loses a large account, the team grows or shrinks, a channel’s cost structure shifts, or a Play you ran delivers data you can now use to update the scores. Quarterly is a reasonable default. The platform’s Sense loop runs it continuously.

About the author

William Walczak, MBA is the CEO of Hiilite Creative Group (founded 2014) and a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan, where his research focuses on Growth Mapping — the systematic study of how SMEs grow and what drives repeatable results. He is a 2023 CEO Monthly Marketing Strategy CEO of the Year (BC) and a Daily Courier Top 40 honoree.

What to read next

Understand the full framework — The 3Ps are one part of the Growth Mapping system. The framework page covers the complete Sense-Seize-Transform loop, the 3Rs (Recruitment, Retention, Revenue), and how the platform runs them.

Read the research — The academic grounding for Growth Mapping, the 3Rs, and the 3Ps is in the Growth Mapping paper.

See it in action — The platform applies the 3Ps ranking to real client data. Book a call to see how it scores the candidate Plays for your business.