Growth.

The framework

1. 01

   Fix the cohort before you calculate anything.

   A retention ratio is only as honest as the group it's measured on. Pick a starting month, list every account paying you then, and freeze that list — nobody added, nobody swapped in for a similar customer who left. Twelve months later, total what those same accounts pay. The point of the exercise is that it refuses to let new revenue near the answer, and the moment one new logo slips in you've rebuilt the blended number. Then settle the awkward cases in writing while the answer is still unknown: whether a customer who left in March and returned in September rejoins their cohort, and what happens when two accounts merge. Same discipline you dated on the retention curve morning, pointed at a new object — and the reason for doing it first is that once the ratio exists, every one of those calls has a preferred answer.

2. 02

   Which flow is doing the work?

   Two companies can post the same net retention for opposite reasons. One loses a quarter of its customers a year and covers it with heroic expansion inside a few large accounts. The other barely loses anyone and expands modestly across the base. The ratio can't tell them apart, though the businesses could hardly be less alike. So run it: pull your three largest expansions out of the cohort and recalculate. If the figure falls through one hundred, your retention story belongs to three account managers and three renewal dates, and the thing to fix isn't churn — it's how much of next year rests on three conversations you could name.

3. 03

   Gross retention sets the floor; net retention is the story built on top.

   Report both, always. Gross retention counts only what you lost — churn and downgrades, and it can never rise above one hundred — so it tells you whether the product holds people. Net retention adds expansion on top, and expansion is where the flattery lives, because a handful of enthusiastic accounts can hide a long tail leaking steadily underneath them. Put logo retention beside both while you're there: revenue holding up while customer numbers fall means you're becoming a smaller business with bigger customers, which might be fine, but it ought to be a decision rather than a discovery.

4. 04

   Mark the accounts with nowhere left to go.

   Take the frozen list one more time and write beside each account what it could pay you next year without buying anything it doesn't already want — more of what it already takes, the tier above the one it sits on, a second team on the same contract. Every blank is an account capped at one hundred on its best possible year, with only contraction and cancellation left as movement, and no amount of account management lifts that cap, because it was set by what you charge by rather than by how the relationship is going. That decision gets its own morning later in this elective; bring this list to it. Then read the outflow side for its rhythm, because the two halves don't behave alike: cancellations arrive when they arrive, while contraction almost always lands on a renewal date you can see months out, with seats or usage already drifting down beforehand. One half of the ratio is a list you can build. The other is a diary.