Why Most Businesses Aren’t Actually Ready to Grow (Even If Revenue Is Up)

Business growth. The holy grail.

It’s the next leg of your grand entrepreneurial adventure. You figured out how to predictably run your business. Revenues are stable, your pipeline is reliable, everything is primed and ready. People are telling you to grow, including your accountant, and she’s almost never got good news for you. Why does it feel more like the arrival of death itself and not the exciting moment you thought it would be?

For many experienced businesses, growth means trouble. Excellent employees start to fray at the edges, yourself included. Systems crack, and processes that people were proud of suddenly are whispered about in darkened hallways and secretive text threads.

Why would anyone be excited about this?

Growth doesn’t fix what’s wrong in your business, it exposes it.

To understand why, grasping the temporality of success is key. As we’ve talked about in the past, revenue is a lagging indicator. It is a clear statement of what happened in the past. At best, it informs your decisions in the future, but it has nothing to say about capacity. If you brought in five million in revenue last year, what does that say about your ability to manage ten million? Absolutely nothing.

A business can be profitable, busy, even well-run (nice job!) and still be structurally incapable of handling more volume.

Smart, and especially experienced, owners know this, even if it’s subconscious. They know that growth leads to realizing their ambitions, but they know suffering is involved and aren’t as anxious to give chase. That reticence isn’t weakness, it’s emotional callouses … it’s pattern recognition.

Reluctance to grow comes from experience, from memory. From seasons when demand outpaced structure, when every mistake landed directly on the owner, and when there was no margin for error. It was a different, darker time for their business but the lessons were learned and ingrained.

Most successful businesses run smoothly at their current volume. That success depends on everyone performing their tasks admirably, and it breaks if demand spikes or one of those critical people leaves unexpectedly. It’s a cold world, but that’s the reality.

A successful scalable business, on the other hand, can absorb more work without everything falling apart. Slack and redundancy exist everywhere. The business doesn’t rely on heroics to continue its successful trajectory, and decisions are made clearly and decisively.

Scalability isn’t the same thing as efficiency, either. Efficiency is the scaffolding, the foundation that scalability builds and stands upon.

My question to you is this:

If you added 30 percent more work next quarter, what would break first?

Would your intake system drown you to the point where you couldn’t actually serve the clients you successfully secured? Would one of your key employees bear the brunt instead? What would the onboarding experience be like for the incoming clientele? Would the quality of your service suffer at all? What about your communication with your clients, or with your employees? What about your cash flows?

Your health? Your family?

Nothing lives in isolation. There are ripple effects from every change in your environment, even positive changes like a growing business. Scalability, then, is the act of strengthening the infrastructure to account for that inevitable change. Removing single points of failure, streamlining processes, and more generally building capacity above and beyond your needs. In this environment, growth isn’t a looming specter that spells the downfall of your meticulously crafted business. It’s safe, and quite possibly even exciting.

What a world.

So when you sit back and think about the scalability of your business, of your firm or practice, it isn’t about how you grow. Scalability is about how to handle that growth. It’s about whether your business can grow without extracting the cost from your health, your relationships, or your sanity.

You absolutely can drive growth for your business, but that’s not what this month is about. This month is about designing the environment that will give your business everything it needs to support that growth. It’s not sexy, but it’s essential if you want to reach the rarified air of Stage 7 and the good, ephemeral life it promises.

This is the real work of Stage 6: Scalability. This is the work I do with owners who want growth to feel calm and exciting instead of chaotic and costly.