Why Efficient Businesses Break Under Growth (And Resilient Ones Don’t)

Business growth. The unstoppable force.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years playing systems-based games: building bridges, laying pipes, managing flow. They aren’t glamorous, but they teach you something quickly. Pressure always finds the weakest point.

These are the more mundane games a person can play, but I mention them for reason.

Plumbing isn’t sexy. Pipe layout, flow calculations, overflow valves, etc. But you quickly learn that if there’s a problem, or a blockage, the water will find a place to go. Pressure builds in the system until the system can’t sustain it and … well … if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have your toilet backup, you know what happens.

All that remains true, no matter how efficient your plumbing system is. You can have low-consumption flow valves, instant hot water, and perfectly run pipework all through the house … but the moment something goes wrong, all the efficiency in the world won’t save you from the horrifying experience of watching the water come UP from the drain.

Your business is like a plumbing system. Efficiency is great, necessary even. But it assumes normal conditions. Growth is not a normal condition. The business is likely built to handle the current load, and it might even work swimmingly well at that volume, but scaling is a totally different affair.

When we think about growth we almost always think about having more work. What we don’t think about is what comes along with that work. There’s more variation, more opportunities for exceptions and outliers, more interruptions, more pressure on people and systems. Growth isn’t just more, it’s More.

Even businesses that are finely tuned, well-oiled machines at current volume will often fail or falter under the variability that comes with growth.

Last week we talked about decision authority … and you can easily see now how a spike in volume leads to a spike in decisions which, if they all rest with you, can be debilitating. The same is true for your office manager who is the only one that knows how everything works. For the process that only one person is responsible for. For the client whose payment timing affects the entire business’s cash flows. Or the owner whose presence smooths out all confusion and conflict.

This is of course normal. No business goes from a solopreneur to a grand entity without passing through these stages. But at a certain point the growth forces successful business owners to address these kinds of structural challenges, these single points of failure.

If you’re experiencing this, you’re successful. Congratulations.

An important distinction:

Efficiency is not the same as resiliency.

Efficient businesses minimize slack, optimize for cost and speed, and depend on consistency. If A, then B, then C. Which doesn’t account for J or P when they randomly appear.

Resilient businesses build buffers intentionally with the expectation that variability is inevitable. They are able to absorb mistakes, absences, or … you guessed it … growth and spikes in volume. They are also able to recover quickly when something goes awry.

Efficiency and Resiliency aren’t at odds with each other, or they shouldn’t be. They work hand in hand. Efficiency optimizes how things operate in the steady state, and they represent how the business wants to perform. Resiliency builds a layer upon that to account for the unknown and protect against tomorrow.

Redundancy is a large part of resiliency, and it feels wrong to someone who has built an extremely efficient business. It looks wasteful. You worked really hard to get the business to this point, and adding redundancy feels contradictory to all the ethos that got you here.

But what got you here, won’t (by itself) get you there.

What qualified as waste earlier is now insurance against the future you’re creating.

To make this concrete, redundancy often looks like:

• More than one person who can make key decisions (sound familiar?)
• More than one person who understands core workflows (or better yet, have them recorded somewhere too)
• More than one way to absorb a surge in volume or new clients
• More than one plan for when someone is unavailable

Notice how it’s not “I have two people to do X job that only requires one person”. It’s not just about the work itself. It’s about the frame within which the work gets done (as well as the work itself).

If something went wrong tomorrow, how fast could the business recover without you? Without your office/business manager?

So when you step back and look at your business, don’t confuse redundancy with inefficiency. Redundancy is simply an acknowledgment of reality and a decision to design for it.

You’re working hard to grow your business. Growth is pressure. Variability is inevitable. The only real question is whether the business is built to absorb that pressure, or whether it relies on everything continuing to go right.

Efficient businesses work well on good days.
Resilient businesses survive the bad ones and keep moving.

If growth is what you’re aiming for, it’s worth making sure the business can actually support it.