What a Rare CIM Taught Me About Sustained Growth — and Why Product and Sales Can’t Stall
I’ve reviewed a lot of CIMs over the years. Most of them are overly optimistic—big claims about future growth, questionable add-backs, and EBITDA numbers that mysteriously inflate with every footnote.
But every once in a while, you get a CIM that’s the opposite: modest, disciplined, and quietly exceptional.
That’s what I saw recently.
This company wasn’t bragging. It didn’t need to. It had 20% net profit for five straight years, and when you included add-backs, margins reached 25%—all fully defendable. No fluff. No games.
They manufacture precision consumables for pharmaceutical companies—a niche with real moat strength. Revenue is diversified. Customers sign multi-year commercial contracts. Everything is Made in the USA, so tariff and geopolitical risk is basically zero. Demand spiked during COVID, then normalized—and the business kept growing.
It reminded me of one of my favorite business truths:
If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
But if you stop improving, it will break eventually.
Even high-performing companies can drift into complacency. And when you're under 100 employees and under $100M in revenue, two priorities always decide your next decade:
1. Sales penetration
2. Product innovation
Let’s break those down.
1. Sales Penetration: Great Today Doesn’t Mean Great Tomorrow
They’ve nailed pharma. That’s the good news.
The bad news? That’s exactly when companies start coasting.
If I were advising their CEO, here’s how I’d approach expansion—straight from the Apex CEO playbook:
Map your adjacent verticals.
Biotech, med-device, diagnostics, specialty food packaging—each has slightly different needs but similar enough to leverage the company’s current expertise.
Run a dedicated sales initiative.
Not a “let’s see what comes in” approach.
A real initiative with:
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clear ownership
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defined KPIs
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targeted outreach
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weekly tracking
Start with one vertical. One goal:
Win 1–2 anchor accounts within 6 months.
Once you earn trust in a new vertical, everything else accelerates.
2. Product Innovation: Protect the Core, then Expand It
Great companies don’t innovate because they’re failing.
They innovate because they want to stay great.
A simple roadmap:
Stay close to your new customers.
Understand their exact pain points—not what you assume they need.
Build a rapid-feedback loop.
Customer feedback → engineering → prototype → test → refine.
Focus on incremental improvements.
Small wins compound: durability, tolerances, packaging, throughput, material tweaks.
In precision manufacturing, 3% better often beats 30% new.
Use new customers to drive new products.
New verticals expose new use cases—and they’ll tell you what to build next.
Why This Matters
Companies like this often stall not because of problems, but because success numbs urgency. Strong margins can hide leaks. Recurring revenue can hide stagnation. And “steady” performance can lull founders into the worst mindset:
“We’re doing fine.”
Fine is where companies go to sleep.
The best companies protect what’s working and build aggressively for what’s next. Sales penetration keeps the pipeline alive. Product innovation keeps demand alive. Together, they protect valuation—and create upside.
Bottom Line
This company is in an enviable position. But the moment they stop pushing sales into new markets or stop innovating for new customers, the momentum fades.
Keep the core.
Push the edges.
Never coast on profitability.
That’s how disciplined, founder-led companies turn strong performance into a decade of growth.
