Scaling Smart: What the Best Founders Get Right About Growth
In a recent LinkedIn post, I shared some of the top things I’ve seen successful founders get right when scaling their businesses. It’s not just the actions these leaders take—it’s how they think about growth, risk, and leadership that sets them apart.
This is a closer look at how these choices play out behind the scenes, why they matter at every stage of growth, and how you can pressure test your own strategy.
Growth Requires Different Skills at Every Stage
Successful growth is more than "continuing what’s working." It demands different leadership muscles at different stages. What works at $10M in revenue might break at $50M—and almost certainly will break again at $100M. Here’s a simplified way to think about it:
The best founders evolve alongside their business. They recognize that their personal role needs to change—from being in the weeds to empowering others to drive growth.
Founders who scale well learn to "fire themselves" from old roles as they grow.
They build leadership teams, trust their people to deliver results, and shift their focus to long-term strategy instead of daily execution. That’s what creates durable companies that scale successfully.
How to Audit Your Growth Approach (A Practical Self-Check)
If you’re feeling the tension of growth right now, here’s a quick framework to assess your approach:
✅ Are you chasing any opportunity or building strategically?
✅ Are you a bottleneck in decision-making?
✅ Does your team have both clear goals and autonomy?
✅ Are you testing new ideas in a controlled way before fully committing?
✅ Is your culture scaling alongside your operations?
If you hesitated on more than one of these, it’s a signal that your business is likely scaling risk faster than it’s scaling opportunity. And that’s a solvable problem—but it requires you to address it now, not later, because later never comes.
The Risks of Growth We Need to Talk About
When businesses grow too quickly, or too reactively, certain risks tend to fly under the radar:
1. Success Can Mask Operational Weakness
Rapid revenue growth can hide process failures, talent gaps, or customer experience breakdowns. These flaws tend to surface painfully when growth slows or a major customer leaves.
2. Founder Fatigue
You might not notice it at first, but founders who stay too deep in the weeds eventually burn out. And worse, they accidentally create learned helplessness in their teams. When every decision has to go through you, your business can’t scale beyond your personal capacity.
3. Opportunity Cost of Saying Yes to the Wrong Things
It’s tempting to take every deal or client that comes your way, but not all revenue is good revenue. Misaligned clients and projects pull resources away from your core growth path. As yourself, “is this a distraction?” If you find yourself doing mental gymnastics to justify it, it’s a distraction.
4. Growth Outpacing Cash Flow
Even profitable growth eats cash. Especially when expanding into new geographies or service lines, it's easy to outgrow your working capital and find yourself over-leveraged.
5. Culture Cracks Under Pressure
Growth doesn’t automatically scale culture. It exposes weaknesses in it. Without intentional effort, values and expectations get diluted, and you end up with a fragmented team.
How to Build a Resilient Growth Playbook
These risks are avoidable, but it requires a mindset shift. Here’s how the smartest founders approach growth intentionally:
1. Map Priorities Quarterly
Everything can’t be the priority. Break down initiatives into quarterly focus areas to ensure you’re sequencing growth sustainably.
2. Test Before You Leap
Like the client I worked with who sent traveling crews to test a new market before opening a second office. It was a small, controlled experiment that helped validate their expansion plan while limiting risk.
3. Invest in People—Then Trust Them to Deliver
Hiring great people isn’t enough. The best founders know when to step back, empower their teams with clear expectations, and then give them the freedom to execute. Micromanagement suffocates innovation and slows your ability to scale.
4. Ensure Culture Scales with Growth
Culture isn’t a "set it and forget it" asset. Reinforce your values consistently, especially in the hiring process, and ensure everyone understands not just their role, but your company's purpose and priorities.
5. Design the Business to Outgrow You
From day one, aim to build a company that can run without you at the center of every decision. This not only protects your time and energy—it also significantly increases enterprise value if you ever choose to sell.
Final Thought: Growth Should Make Your Business Stronger, Not Just Bigger
Sustainable growth is about building a company that doesn’t just scale revenue—it scales profitability and strength.
The best founders I know have been able to scale because they intentionally balance ambition with discipline. They know growth isn’t a sprint—it’s an endurance race. And they’re willing to do the hard work of building a foundation before layering on scale.
If this resonates and you want to explore what an intentional growth strategy could look like for your business, reach out to me here. This is the work I love to do and I’d be glad to have a conversation.
