Article
Which Sales Do You Turn Off?
May 25, 2026
The leaders who keep growing aren’t fearless. They’re clear.
John McLean is CEO of Bundaberg Brewed Drinks — the Australian family business behind a world famous ginger beer, sold in more than 60 countries.
In 2012, the company crossed $100 million in revenue. John and his wife Rae-Lee, who serves as a director and company secretary, sat down with a bottle of Grange (an iconic Australian wine that signals “we’ve arrived”) to mark the moment. The business employed 150 people. John knew everyone’s name. It felt manageable.
And then Rae-Lee said: “Let’s stop here. This is a great size — a hundred million.”
John paused. And then he asked the only question that mattered.
“Which sales do we turn off?”
The Problem With Every Market Working
That question sounds simple. In practice, it was almost impossible to answer.
Every market was profitable. Every product line was growing. There was no obvious candidate for reduction, no struggling division to exit, no bad revenue to eliminate. The business was working. All of it.
And so, without knowing what to shut down, they kept going. To $200 million. To $300 million. To 60+ countries. To a state-of-the-art master brewery capable of producing 800,000 bottles a day.
The chance to ask “which sales do we turn off?” is one most CEOs would trade for in a heartbeat. Most are fighting hard for the next deal, the next market, the next inch of growth. From the outside, Bundaberg’s $100M moment can sound like a lovely challenge — and in some ways, it was.
But growth at scale often gets harder, not easier. The numbers get bigger and so do the consequences of every decision. Momentum is hard-won and easy to lose. The strategic tension of choosing between good and better is real, even when the choices look enviable from the outside. Plenty of companies have made it to John’s position and quietly given the momentum back, one wrong call at a time.
This is one of my favourite moments in the Bundaberg story, because it illustrates something I don’t see discussed enough: the hardest strategic decisions aren’t the ones where you choose between good and bad. They’re the ones where you choose between good and better.
Most of us can stop things that aren’t working. The harder skill is stopping things that are working perfectly well, but consuming resources that could be generating more value somewhere else.
The Discipline of the Flywheel
What let Bundaberg keep growing with discipline, rather than just adding complexity, was clarity about what drives the business.
From early on, Bundaberg had an almost stubborn understanding of their competitive advantage: they were a flavour house. Their brewed beverages took up to seven days to produce, compared to soft drinks made in minutes. That process created flavours that couldn’t be replicated at industrial speed.
That clarity became a filter for every growth decision. New markets, new products, new distribution models — all of them got run through the same question: does this protect and amplify the flavour advantage, or does it compromise it?
When you have that kind of clarity, growth decisions become less agonizing. You don’t debate every opportunity from scratch. You have a principle to apply.
The leaders who grow fastest don’t just know what to chase. They know what to refuse. And refusal gets easier when you know exactly what you’re protecting.
The Hardest Thing to Name
We spend a lot of time in strategic planning sessions helping leadership teams identify their equivalent of the flavour advantage — the thing at the core of the business that customers will pay a premium for and can’t easily find elsewhere.
It’s surprising how hard this is to articulate, even for leaders who clearly know it in their bones.
They can describe the category they’re in. They can list their features. They can articulate their values. But when pressed to identify the single irreplaceable thing — the thing that, if compromised, would cause customers to leave — it often takes real work to surface.
That work is worth doing. Without it, every growth decision gets evaluated without a clear filter. And decisions without filters get slower, more contested, and more likely to pull the company in multiple directions at once.
Rae-Lee asked a great question at $100 million. John gave an honest answer. And together they kept pushing — not because they were indifferent to the risks of scale, but because they had enough clarity about what Bundaberg was protecting to trust their next decisions.
The Question for Your Business
If someone asked you today to stop a segment of your revenue — not because it was underperforming, but because it was consuming resources that could be generating more value — could you answer the question?
Or would you, like Bundaberg at $100 million, find that everything looks like something worth keeping?
Both answers tell you something important.
The leaders who keep growing aren’t the ones who are fearless about cutting. They’re the ones who have done the work — through strategic thinking and planning, through honest flywheel conversations, through rigorous self-examination — to know what they’re building toward. And they keep growing because, at every fork in the road, they know which direction is closer to the core.
Which sales do you turn off?
If you can answer that question, you’re clearer on your business than you might realize. If you can’t yet, that’s the most important conversation in front of you.
Watch the full interview below or read more in our recent case study with Bundaberg here.
Additional Resources:
Articles
- The Most Underrated Strategy Tool: The Stop Doing List
- Learning One Thing at a Time: How Ajit Prabhu Builds Enduring Companies
- Pressure Makes Diamonds
Podcast
Case Study
Book: The 4 Forces of Growth
Book: Scaling Up
Book: Your Oxygen Mast First
About Lawrence & Co.
Lawrence & Co. is a growth strategy and leadership advisory firm that helps mid-market companies achieve lasting, reliable growth. Our Growth Management System turns 30 years of experience into practical steps that drive clarity, alignment, and performance—so leaders can grow faster, with less friction, and greater confidence.
About Kevin Lawrence
Kevin Lawrence has spent three decades helping companies scale from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue. He works side-by-side with CEOs and leadership teams across North America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Europe, bringing real-world insights from hands-on experience. Kevin is the author of Your Oxygen Mask First, a book of 17 habits to help high-performing leaders grow sustainably while protecting their mental health and resilience. He also contributed to Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0). Based in Vancouver, he leads Lawrence & Co, a boutique firm of growth advisors.