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Growth creates opportunities. It also creates difficult decisions.
For many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), growth can mean saying yes to every opportunity: expanding into another municipality, reaching more subscribers, upgrading infrastructure, introducing new services, or investing in new technologies. Each promises progress, and each can feel equally important.
But as businesses grow, opportunities can quickly outpace resources. There are more markets to serve, more services to improve, more technologies to adopt, and more expectations to meet—but not every opportunity can be pursued at the same time.
For providers navigating these choices, growth starts with knowing where their resources can create the greatest value.
The following four steps can help clarify what to keep building within the business, what new capabilities growth will demand, and where the right partnerships can help create more possibilities.
1. Start with What Makes Your Business Worth Choosing
Before deciding what to build next, identify what customers already value about your business.
For many providers, that advantage has been earned through customer relationships, community presence, responsiveness, service quality, and an understanding of the businesses and communities they serve. These strengths are difficult to replicate because they are built through experience and relationships over time.
This principle applies well beyond the connectivity industry. Salesforce's guidance on business growth recommends strengthening the business foundation before scaling, including defining what differentiates the business, optimizing operations, and protecting the customer experience.1
Growth can easily create pressure to focus outward—to build more, cover more, and offer more. But sustainable growth also requires continuing to invest in the qualities that made the business valuable in the first place.
Start by asking: What does your business do particularly well that customers would find difficult to replace?
Those are the strengths worth continuing to build.
2. Identify What the Next Stage of Growth Will Demand
Knowing what differentiates the business is only the beginning. Growth also introduces new requirements.
The future of connectivity indicates that more customers place greater pressure on network capacity and performance. Serving more businesses raises expectations around resilience, security, and availability. Expanding operations can create greater complexity, requiring stronger processes, digital platforms, operational technologies, and technical expertise.
Customers may never see many of these capabilities, but they experience their impact through reliable connections, faster resolution, stronger service continuity, and a provider that can keep supporting them as their own requirements grow.
So when considering how to grow your business, do not look only at the next market or customer segment. Instead, ask: What capabilities will the next stage of growth require from us?
Identifying those requirements early helps ISPs prepare for growth instead of reacting to it.
3. Decide What Deserves to Be Built and What Does Not Need to Be Built Alone
Once providers know what differentiates them and what future growth will require, the investment decision becomes clearer.
Not every important capability needs to become an owned capability.
PwC's 29th Global CEO Survey, published in 2026,2 found that businesses are pursuing growth amid rapid technological and industry change. PwC recommends looking inward at existing capabilities while looking outward for new opportunities, noting that complementary capabilities and collaboration with ecosystem partners can play an important role in creating value.
For ISPs, that creates a useful distinction: what makes the business different versus what enables that difference to be delivered consistently.
Customer relationships, service culture, community knowledge, and responsiveness are closely tied to the identity of the business and the trust customers place in it. These are difficult to outsource because they are part of what makes the provider worth choosing.
Infrastructure, cybersecurity, interconnection, digital platforms, and specialized technical capabilities can play a different role. They may be essential to growth without necessarily needing to be developed entirely in-house.
For providers considering how to grow their business faster, this distinction becomes even more important. Faster growth does not necessarily mean building faster. It can mean avoiding the time, capital, and complexity of recreating capabilities that can already be accessed elsewhere.
The objective is to build where ownership creates meaningful advantage—and access what enables that advantage to go further.
4. Choose Partnerships Based on What They Enable
If a capability does not need to be built in-house, your next step is to evaluate the best way to access it. A partnership should do more than fill an immediate gap. It should expand what the business can deliver.
Research on business partnerships from Instituto de Empresa (IE) New York College, a higher education institution specializing in business and management, highlights the value of combining complementary strengths, expertise, networks, and resources to pursue opportunities that are harder to achieve independently.3 For connectivity providers, that principle can translate into access to infrastructure that supports expansion, expertise that helps navigate increasingly complex technologies, or broader ecosystems that open new capabilities and opportunities.
The right partnership should therefore be evaluated by what it makes possible. Can it strengthen reliability? Improve resilience? Expand reach? Reduce complexity? Bring expertise the business does not have? Or allow resources to remain focused on the areas where the provider creates the greatest differentiation?
Those questions turn partnership from a procurement decision into a growth decision.
Growing Without Building It All
There is no single formula for growing your business. Every provider has different strengths, resources, and ambitions. What matters is becoming deliberate about the choices behind that growth.
Continue investing in what makes the business distinctive. Understand what the next stage of growth will demand. Decide where ownership creates real value and where access can achieve the objective more effectively. Then choose partnerships based not simply on what they provide, but on what they enable.
For connectivity providers, this creates room to grow while keeping what customers already value at the center of the business. Trust, relationships, responsiveness, and service quality remain the provider's advantage, while stronger infrastructure, expertise, technology, and ecosystem access can expand what the business can deliver.
Sustainable growth has never been about building everything. It is about building what matters most and gaining access to the capabilities that make more possible.
For Globe Business, that means helping providers access infrastructure, interconnection, expertise, and ecosystem relationships that would be difficult to build independently—so they can continue strengthening what customers already trust, while preparing for what comes next.
Knowing what to build is only half the decision. Equally important is knowing what the right partner should help you achieve.
Sources
1https://www.salesforce.com/ap/small-business/how-to-grow-your-business
2https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/c-suite-insights/ceo-survey.html
3https://www.ienyc.edu/the-blueprint/power-of-partnerships
