There are only four ways to get a lead. Which are you ignoring?

Ask a ₹5 crore owner where their business comes from and you'll usually hear one word: referrals.

It's a comfortable answer. It's also a risky one. When one source feeds the whole business, you have a single point of failure.

I've been reading Alex Hormozi's $100M Leads. What he's really saying is that there are only four ways to let people know you exist. Everything else is a version of one of them.

He sorts them using two questions. Do the people already know you, or are they strangers? And are you reaching one person at a time, or many at once?

That gives you four doors:

1. Warm outreach. You contact people who already know you, one at a time.
2. Free content. You publish something for many people who know or follow you.
3. Cold outreach. You contact strangers, one at a time.
4. Paid ads. You pay to reach many strangers at once.

Every channel you can think of fits behind one of these doors.

Why most owners use one door

Most businesses grow on warm outreach. The founder knows people, those people buy, and they tell others. That works for years.

Then it stops working. The network runs out. The founder's hours run out. The business feels stuck, and nobody can say why.

The reason is simple. The growth engine was only ever one door.

Do the arithmetic

Here's a hypothetical. Say your average client is worth ₹4 lakh a year, and you close one in five qualified conversations.

To add ₹1 crore of new business, you need 25 new clients. At one in five, that's about 125 qualified conversations.

So the real question isn't "how do we grow?" It's this: which door can deliver 125 conversations? For most owners, referrals alone can't.

Audit your four doors

Go through each door and ask three questions:

• Did we win a client through it in the last 12 months?
• Does it have a named owner?
• Is someone doing it every week?

Picture most businesses doing this and you'd expect the same pattern. One door busy, one half open, two shut.

Referrals aren't a strategy. They're one door you happened to leave open.

Choosing the next door

Which door to open next depends on your business.

• High-ticket B2B with a small list of buyers? Cold outreach to a researched list. Hormozi suggests personalising it and following up two or three times.
• Expertise that's hard to explain? Free content. Let people see how you think before they talk to you.
• An offer that converts, and numbers you trust? Paid ads, judged on cost per client, not on likes.

Whatever you pick, Hormozi pushes volume over polish. His "Rule of 100" is 100 lead-getting actions a day for 100 days. The point I take from it: most doors fail because nobody walks through them often enough, not because the message is wrong.

And it doesn't have to be you. Hormozi points out that employees, agencies, affiliates and happy customers can all bring leads. But each door needs an owner. A door that belongs to everyone belongs to no one.

Try this week

1. Draw the four doors on one page.
2. Go through last year's client list. Mark each door open, half open or shut.
3. Pick one shut door.
4. Name one person who owns it, and set a weekly number for them.
5. Review it every Friday for a month.

One new door, properly owned, can change where your next ₹1 crore comes from.