Sustainable Growth vs. Irresponsible Growth —
And Why the Difference Doesn’t Show Up Until It’s Expensive.
By Dan Sullivan | Sullivan Commercial Group
Every growing consumer brand is under pressure to show a number. The board wants velocity. The sponsor wants the topline moving. The founder wants proof the thing is working. So, the organization does what it can to make the number appear…most of the time, it can.
That’s the problem. Because there are two ways to grow, and from the outside, in any given quarter, they look almost identical. One builds a business. The other quietly dismantles it while the topline goes up. And the difference doesn’t show up until it’s expensive to fix.
Velocity Is a Symptom, Not a Lever
When commercial performance stalls, most companies reach for the same three moves: more distribution, more spend, more pressure on the sales team. Push product into more doors. Pour money into more promotions. Lean harder on everyone with a quota.
None of that fixes the underlying issue. It just pushes product. And pushing product is not the same as building demand.
Velocity — the rate at which product actually moves off the shelf — is an outcome, not a lever you pull directly. It’s what happens when the right product is in the right place at the right price for the right consumer. When those things are aligned, velocity takes care of itself. When they’re not, no amount of spend or pressure creates it. You can force product onto shelves all day, and it still won’t move.
This is where the two kinds of growth split apart.
What Irresponsible Growth Looks Like
Irresponsible growth is manufactured velocity. It’s the topline going up because the company bought the increase — not because the business got healthier. It usually looks like some combination of:
- Deep, frequent discounting that trains the consumer to only buy on deal and erodes the margin on every unit sold.
- Distribution chasing — opening any door that will take the product, regardless of whether it’s the right channel or whether the brand will actually turn there.
- Trade spend with no accountability — pouring money into promotions and slotting without measuring what any of it returns.
- Inconsistent pricing across channels that creates conflict, erodes trust with partners, and slowly poisons the brand’s positioning.
Every one of these moves can produce a few good-looking quarters. Revenue climbs. The chart points up and to the right. Everyone exhales.
But underneath, the business is getting weaker. Margins are thinning. Your customers and consumers are trained to wait for the discount. Retail partners are getting frustrated by the pricing chaos. The brand appears to be winning in places it can’t sustain and buying volume it can’t keep. You can manufacture short-term velocity with discounts, displays, and promotions. But that’s not growth. That’s intervention.
Sometimes intervention is necessary — to protect a key listing, move expiring inventory, or hit a commitment. Used deliberately and sparingly, it’s a tool. The danger is when intervention becomes the strategy. When the only way the company knows how to grow is to buy the number, it has confused motion with progress.
What Sustainable Growth Looks Like
Sustainable growth is a byproduct of the commercial machine working. It’s slower to start and far more durable, and it comes from getting the fundamentals right rather than papering over them:
Who is the product for — the specific consumer, defined clearly enough to make real decisions. Where does it win — the channels and accounts where that consumer actually shops and where the brand genuinely turns. And why the commercial model supports it — pricing that holds across channels, trade spend that earns its keep, a sales organization structured around how the brand actually goes to market.
When those things are built, growth compounds instead of leaking. Every new door is the right door. Every promotional dollar returns more than it costs. Every point of distribution holds because the velocity is real. The topline still goes up — but this time it’s going up because the business underneath it got stronger, not weaker.
The difference between the two is invisible on a topline chart. Both lines go up. You cannot tell sustainable from irresponsible growth by looking at revenue alone — which is exactly why so many companies don’t realize which one they’re running until the bill comes due.
The Bill Always Comes Due
Manufactured velocity is a loan against the future, and the repayment terms are brutal. The margin you gave away doesn’t come back when you try to raise price — the consumer just stops buying. The distribution you chased into the wrong channels churns out and takes your trade investment with it. The pricing chaos you created with retail partners becomes a trust problem that outlasts the person who caused it.
And it shows up at the worst possible moment: during a fundraise, during a sale process, during diligence. That’s when a sophisticated buyer or investor pulls apart the topline and asks the question nobody internally wanted to ask — how much of this growth is real, and how much of it did you buy? A business built on intervention doesn’t survive that question. The valuation reflects the answer.
This is the same reason a brand that’s “proven it can scale” isn’t necessarily “built to scale.” Acquirers pay premiums for durable, well-constructed commercial engines — not for topline growth they can see was purchased. Infrastructure is what separates the two, and it’s the piece most companies haven’t built.
The Question Worth Asking Every Quarter
When the number comes in and it’s up, the celebration is automatic. The harder discipline is asking the second question:
Did the business get healthier this quarter, or did we just buy the number?
If growth came from real velocity — the right consumer, the right channel, a commercial model that holds — that’s a business getting stronger. If it came from discounts, distribution chasing, and unaccountable spend, that’s a business borrowing against its future and calling it progress.
Both look the same on the chart. Only one of them is worth anything when someone finally looks underneath. Sustained velocity is a byproduct of the machine working. Everything else is just intervention wearing the costume of growth.
About the Author
Dan Sullivan is the founder of Sullivan Commercial Group LLC, a commercial advisory practice that partners with FMCG/CPG brands — founder-led, family-owned, PE-backed — to architect the commercial infrastructure so leadership can move from operating to scaling.
He has spent 18+ years in commercial leadership in the CPG industry. At Reynolds American, he restructured a 1,500-person sales organization to 1,200 and redesigned the route-to-market model — the infrastructure that overtook Juul and made Alto the #1 tracked electronic nicotine device in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Texas as a whole. He then designed the RGM strategy to maximize profitability across the full portfolio by geography — Texas first, then the Southeast, then nationally. At Republic Brands, he built the commercial machine from the ground up — hiring, sales org design, third-party execution, and data integration.
Most engagements start with a commercial diagnostic. Some evolve into fractional leadership. All of them start with a conversation.