A growing business feels fantastic.
Landing more clients, building your team, opening into new markets – maybe even moving into new offices.
But there’s a moment when that changes. Growth stops being an energising force, and starts feeling like a weight.
It might be that you start to feel things slipping: your time, your clarity, your control of the business. It might be that your work life starts affecting your home life more than it used to.
You might even lose touch with the reason you launched the business in the first place.
Naturally, as business owners, our reaction to that can default to type: pursuing more growth, faster, in order to free up that much needed headspace. But what if that’s not the answer at all?
The hidden cost of more
It’s easy to equate growth with success, and it’s suitably hard to come by: between 2020 and 2023 only 14.5% of small- and medium-sized businesses in the UK achieved sustained growth, in large part due to the impact of COVID-19 recovery and the price inflation that followed.
At the other end of the spectrum however, rapid growth can be incredibly destabilising. It forces businesses to operate in completely new ways. All too often either your management and operational structure fails to grow to support the uptick in revenue, or revenue fails to grow at the same rate as your investment in people, infrastructure or stock.
Without a clear purpose or a plan, growth alone can be at worst dangerous and at best meaningless. It can fail to give you a better balance in your life or even the kind of tangible gains that you’d hope came along with it.
If you’re only focused on the business, it makes it difficult to consider what you’re getting from it, how you want to relate to it, or even what the end goal or exit plan may be.
So how can you scale your business without losing touch of what made it special?
Recognising the signs
Working in the business, rather than on it, is rarely the goal that drives entrepreneurs.
And so it’s important to keep an eye out for signs that you’re scaling without the right grounding or level of control. Here are a few:
- You find yourself in a permanent state of reactivity – unable to see the overview, or to find the space to make meaningful decisions
- Your team is growing but you feel more distant than ever, and you’re losing touch with what’s really going on in your business
- You are busier than ever, and business seems to be booming – but either your profit margin just isn’t telling the same story, or your customer feedback or company culture feel like they’re slipping
If any of these sound familiar, then the good news is that the sooner you can discover the issue, the sooner you can address it.
Because if growth starts to race ahead of your plans, systems or reason to even be in business, the path forward is only likely to mean less and less control.
How to regain control and redefine ‘growth’
It’s all too tempting to define growth on a single measure: higher volume, bigger deals, more staff.
But what if we flipped that on its head and instead asked ‘How well is it growing’?
That can help you prioritise efficiency and focused output, rather than sheer volume for volume’s sake.
It can help you hone in on doing the simple things well, and on more closely aligning your day-to-day to your business goals.
Now it’s hard to give specific advice without knowing the details of your situation, but here’s a few practical steps that I’d suggest you could consider:
- Revisit where it began
Take a leaf out of Simon Sinek’s now somewhat infamous book, and remind yourself why you set up your business, and then ask how that now relates to your growth plans. Do you have a specific milestone you’d like to achieve (and if so what makes that milestone valuable to you)? This might help you aim for what matters rather than just what’s possible. - Delegate where you can
If delegation is something you struggle with, it’s not your fault. But it’s important to clearly give responsibility to your teams so they can act with authority, confidence and accountability. Taking care of the tactics so you can take care over the strategy. - Set new boundaries
The goalposts shift rapidly when you’re scaling, and you might find yourself taking on tasks or even working hours that you always said you’d avoid. Take the time to set new boundaries, carve out space for big thinking and stick to the rules. - Don’t try to solve it all at once
Every step forward counts, so as you seek clarity give yourself permission to experience the process – and plan in time for reflection, reviews, and conversations with colleagues, staff and customers. - Set KPIs that matter
Numbers are important, but make sure you’re tracking the right ones: team turnover, customer satisfaction, error rates. They can all provide helpful signals that your growth is running the ship, not you.
And finally, know what you can trust
Scaling a business is always going to be a challenge, and necessitates a change in your role too.
Businesses that trip up during this crucial phase are those whose pace outruns their ability to deliver. They get – understandably – excited by growth. And then one day find that momentum alone isn’t giving them what they want.
That said, controlling growth isn’t about tightening your grip. It’s about understanding what you’ve built, trusting it, and knowing what will and won’t compromise that foundation of culture, systems and leadership. So that when growth comes, you build something stronger and better, not just bigger.
If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to talk about how you can grow your business without losing touch with where it began, I’d love to talk.
Because when growth feels confident, not chaotic, you know it’s the kind that lasts.
Kind Regards,
Chris