TL;DR — You have five things you could do next and time for one. Most owners pick on gut, on whoever pitched last, or on what a competitor just launched — and wonder why the effort didn’t move revenue. This tool scores each candidate play on the Growth Mapping “3P” rubric — Profit, Potential, People — and ranks them, so the next move is decided by a rule instead of a hunch. List your plays, score each one 1–5 on all three, and it tells you in 60 seconds which one to run next and why.

When everything is a priority, nothing is

Every owner I talk to has the same problem. They know they need to do something about their marketing, and they have a list: run ads, fix SEO, launch a referral program, clean up the CRM, build out email, win back lapsed clients. The list is long. The time is short.

So they pick based on gut feel, or whatever the last consultant pitched, or whatever a 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. And activity is not the same as growth.

The 3Ps give you the ranking system. Score every candidate play on three questions, blend the scores, and the list sorts itself. The play at the top is the next move. This tool does that sort live as you type.

How it works

List the plays you’re weighing — start with the three examples or swap in your own, up to six. Score each one from 1 to 5 on the three P’s:

  • Profit — near-term return versus the cost and effort to run it.
  • Potential — the growth ceiling; how big this could get if it works.
  • People — your team’s capacity and energy to actually execute it well.

The tool blends the three into a single 1–5 score and ranks every play, re-sorting the instant you change a number. The top play gets a “Run this next” card with its score and a bar showing its Profit / Potential / People split. Want one P to count for more? Adjust the weights — they default to equal.

No login. No email required. The calculation runs in your browser.

Why Profit, Potential, and People — and not a single gut call

The 3Ps come 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 move will compound into real growth or just add noise. Score a play on all three and you get a number you can defend, not a preference you have to.

Profit is first because it is the constraint everything else runs inside — will this move the bottom line, given what a client is worth and what it costs to serve them? Most marketing decisions get made with no real financial grounding: an owner runs ads because “everyone is doing it,” without checking whether a new customer at the current acquisition cost is even profitable after service cost. The Profit question forces that check.

Potential is upside and scalability — can this be run again, systematized, and compounded? Davenport and Harris frame the difference as analytics that answer a question once versus analytics that become a capability. The same logic applies to plays. A referral loop compounds as the client base grows; a single ad creative is consumed and gone. You want capabilities, not one-offs.

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 — human and agent — can’t run it well. People has two sides: capacity (bandwidth to run it without dropping quality elsewhere) and capability (the skill to run it well). An honest People score often forces a sequencing decision — build the capability first, then run the play. That is not failure. That is strategy.

This is the Seize step of the Sense → Seize → Transform loop, drawn from Teece’s dynamic-capabilities theory: once you’ve sensed the opportunities, seizing is the disciplined act of choosing which one to invest in. The 3P score is that choice, made explicit.

The rule is simple:

Next play = the candidate with the highest blended Profit × Potential × People score.

A handful of plays. One number each. And the list ranks itself.

Your judgement is the back-of-napkin. Your real data is the lever.

The tool ranks the plays — but it ranks them on your scores. The Profit you typed is a feel. The Potential is an estimate. The People is a gut read of your own team. Useful for a fast, honest sort. Still a guess.

The reason most owners can’t truly prioritize is that the three P’s live in their head, disconnected from the data that would settle them. QuickBooks knows your real margin. The market knows your real headroom. Your time-tracking knows your real capacity. Nobody joins those three to the question of what to do next.

Hiilite’s platform computes each play’s 3P automatically from your real numbers — Profit from your QuickBooks margin, Potential from market headroom, People from your actual team capacity — and re-ranks continuously as the data moves. So when the Sense → Seize → Transform loop asks “which play should this client run next?”, the answer is a ranked list grounded in this business’s actual financials and capacity, at this moment — not a hypothetical one.

That is the closed loop a manual score can’t build.

Read more: The Growth Mapping framework and Growth Mapping: the research behind the platform.

FAQ

How do I prioritize marketing initiatives when everything feels urgent?

Stop ranking by urgency or by who asked loudest, and start scoring against a fixed rubric. Take every initiative you’re weighing, score each one 1–5 on Profit (near-term return vs. effort), Potential (how big it could get), and People (can your team actually run it well), then blend the three into one number and sort descending. The top score is your next move. The discipline isn’t the math — it’s forcing every candidate through the same three questions so you’re comparing like with like instead of comparing a loud idea to a quiet one. Re-run it whenever conditions change materially.

What is the 3P framework — Profit, Potential, People?

The 3Ps are a three-question rubric from the Growth Mapping research for deciding which growth move to run next. Profit asks whether the move will materially improve the economics, given what a client is worth and what it costs to serve them. Potential asks how much upside it has and whether it can scale and compound rather than being a one-off. People asks whether your team — humans and AI agents together — has the capacity and the capability to execute it well. A move that scores high on all three is your next play; a move that scores high on only one is usually a distraction. It maps to the “Seize” step of the Sense → Seize → Transform loop.

ICE vs 3P scoring — what’s the difference?

ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) is a fast prioritization rubric popular in growth and product teams. The 3Ps overlap with it but shift the lens for owner-led businesses. ICE’s Impact and the 3Ps’ Profit are cousins, but Profit insists the impact show up in the books — margin and lifetime value — not just a top-of-funnel metric. ICE’s Ease and the 3Ps’ People both ask “can we do this?”, but People separates capacity from capability and explicitly counts your AI/agent layer. The biggest difference is Potential: ICE has no real equivalent for whether a play compounds, and compounding is what separates a channel you build once from a campaign you burn once. Use ICE for a quick experiment backlog; use the 3Ps when the decision is “where does the business invest next.”

How do I decide what marketing to do next?

List the candidates, score each on Profit, Potential, and People, and run the one with the highest blended score — which is exactly what this tool does. Two tie-breakers help. First, when two plays score close, pick the one that’s faster to run and measure: a play you can learn from in two weeks beats one that takes three months, because the feedback updates your next decision sooner. Second, don’t run low-Profit plays indefinitely on the strength of high Potential alone — set a time horizon and a signal that tells you when the brand or audience play has earned its keep. The point of the rubric isn’t to remove judgement; it’s to make your judgement consistent and defensible.

About the author

William Walczak is CEO of Hiilite Creative Group (2014–present) and a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan, where his doctoral research — Growth Mapping: A Mixed-Method Study of Growth Hacking — examines how small businesses can apply rigorous, data-grounded growth frameworks without a data team. He holds an MBA (UBC) and an Engineering degree (Simon Fraser University), and was named Marketing Strategy CEO of the Year 2023 (BC) by CEO Monthly.

His published research includes Walczak, W., Li, E. P. H., & Nelson, S. (2024), “Logarithm: A Cinematic Exploration of Time,” Journal of Customer Behaviour.

  1. Porter, M. E. (1996). “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy ↩

  2. Teece, D. J. (2007). “Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance.” Strategic Management Journal, 28(13), 1319–1350. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.640 ↩

  3. Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2006). “Competing on Analytics.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2006/01/competing-on-analytics ↩