Hey, welcome to another episode. On this episode, we’re going to talk about the growth trap, the trap of thinking you have to grow and that growth is the only success metric.

So I have had a few clients recently who are doing really well. Revenue is up. They’ve survived the tough years because they’ve made smart decisions to stay lean. Has it been easy? No. But they’re still here. Their revenue’s up, they’re doing well, they’ve survived, they’ve still got their teams (as much of their teams that they’ve been able to keep). And something, though, is making them feel stuck and that potentially they’re still not where they should be or where they actually want to be. And the real issue is usually because we’re comparing ourselves to someone else’s benchmark, their yardstick.

So I had a coaching session recently and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And, you know, she sat across from me and was like, I just feel so stuck in the swampy middle ground. I’m not small and I’m not too big. I just, I can’t. I feel like I’m stuck here and being stuck for a little while, you know,

By every metric, she was succeeding. Her marketing is amazing. She’s got loyal clients, she’s got a dedicated team. Revenue’s up. Things are going well. She’s stuck with it in these last many years. She just couldn’t see it.

And what she was doing instead is she was doing that, measuring her success against others and weighting their, I suppose, their idea of success and what they thought growth for her should look like. She weighted that more than what she’d had already done and weighted this more than what she wanted to do. And she actually had stopped listening to what she wanted to do. That intuitive voice that has actually kept her in the game for this long.

So her partner kept talking to her about growth and what it actually looked like to him. But the problem with that is if you’re not in the arena, as Theodore Roosevelt says, the man in the arena, getting dirty in it, it’s easy to be like, oh, you should be doing this.

The reality often of more things, more buildings, more staff premises like full on social media and advertising and scale and going to the next level when you’re in it, it’s a lot of complexity, a lot of frictions, things break.

There’s a lot more people to manage. Like, it’s not just as easy as that zoomed out stop strategy. And often the best strategy can come from the person who has to be who’s still in that engine room. And her current business is giving her some amazing freedom anyway. And she’s getting to do stuff that she loves. So it looks amazing, right? But she was being stuck because of this comparison.

We had to validate her feelings. Like it comes down to. But I don’t, It doesn’t feel like enough. And often with the beautiful neuro spicy brains, it can be that dopamine hit of growing new things bright and shiny. 

You know, she goes on her phone and these ads that say, are you a business and you’re stuck? You know, with making this much money and this many employees? And think, yeah, that’s me and this is what I need to be doing. And so therefore you’re marketed to made to feel stuck. Not necessarily. That’s actually the truth. 

But what can happen with our beautiful brains is we can get stuck with that dopamine hit of grandiose ideas of success. Has to be that kind of growth, right? That grandiose kind of growth. 

So what was happening and what is happening for her? She was drowning out her own intuition and just listening to everyone else’s noise where actually she needed to come straight and work on an area which was coming back and financially looking at her work and really seeing where could she make better money doing exactly what she’s doing now.

So I was saying to her, you know, what do you want? And she’s like, well, actually, I want to stay small. I think that’s the first time she’s probably said that out loud. And she wants to stay boutique, and that’s beautiful. And she wants to focus on the things that she loves more and she wants to eventually kind of break the business in two and pass them onto her team. And she’s known this for years. 

The great thing about coaching with someone for a long time is you actually get to hear their dreams and their real truth come out and you can hand it back to them and actually get them to go and do the work that needs to happen.

But she kept weighting, everyone’s ideas of definition of success more heavily than hers.

And then letting our brains go, it needs to look like this. And that dopamine rush and that go, go, go. And that growth has to look like this as opposed to not seeing it as a failure that you’re not doing that.

And you then. What’s that word? If you keep thinking you’re stuck and you keep thinking you’re in the messy middle, then that’s actually what you’re doing, right, you’ve got a lens on, you’re looking through, but it devalues the things that are actually working and what you’ve actually created and then you can’t actually see what the clear next steps are.

And when I said to her, tell me what you love about in the business and what do you want to improve and look at, she’s like, I want better systems and processes.

And I’m like, you must already have good ones because this is where you’ve got to with the current ones, you know?

And she said, I’ve started doing some more personal outreach to clients and I love that intimacy, that boutique piece, you know, But my CRM probably needs to be better in automation and proper strategy.

And I’m like, wait, wait, wait. This is where that should and must have brings that complexity where actually she really does have a CRM. She is doing automation. She does have a strategy, but she thinks it needs to be. It has to look a certain way and doesn’t look like what she’s doing. Does That makes sense?

We think that our stuff isn’t already good. We think that everyone else’s stuff is better than ours. But believe me, I’ve seen behind the curtains of many, many businesses, just the fact that you’ve got any form of CRM and that you’re using it is the first freaking hurdle.

And your stuff is probably. Exactly. It’s just amazing. There is no end point with having all these perfect systems and automation.

Anyway, I digress. So sometimes we’ve got to catch the things that we’re telling ourselves and we’ve got to go, okay, if we keep going round and round and in loops, this is where that financial understanding is really useful. And coming back to, okay, where can I financially understand the numbers in my business and actually see I am growing really well.

If I did do these other suggestions by other people, it might do this to my margins, for example. It’s really about not undercutting your own strengths and coming back to what do you want, what is already working. Particularly if you’ve got a business that is doing well and you’re just being a bit of a dick about it and you’re thinking that it has to look a certain way.

So a word for her year we came up with was discipline. The discipline to not work harder, but the discipline to stay in her own lane. The discipline to say no to work that doesn’t fit. Like her loves the discipline to trust her own Numbers instead of wanting something complex. And the discipline to define success as contentment for her. Like, what is it that’s definable for her?

So I hope you got some information in this episode. If you’re stuck in that middle, I want you to really think about what if the things you keep dismissing as not good enough are actually the reason that. That you are doing well or the reason people choose you?

So we’ve got to look at the other side. What if staying small wasn’t a bad thing? It actually was already successful. What you’re doing is already amazing. And that this trap of we have to grow and it has to be like this actually is just that growth trap.

So just really think about why do you want to grow? Don’t just want to grow for growth sake. Like, that’s crazy. What would your business look like if you stop trying to be what you think it should be? I suppose is a better way of saying that.

Always great to have conversations with you guys, even though you’re not here to tell me your stuff.

But I would also like you to think about what is success for you. And it’s really cool because I need to come back and redefine that for myself. It’s something that moves a lot of the time.

I know you guys will already know that people will talk about what’s your dream day? What’s your dream week? And I used to write that down.

And then it was, you know, a couple of years ago that I was like, oh, that I’m doing that. But if I hadn’t stopped and seen that and saw that evidence, I probably would have kept pushing for it to happen when it’s already happened. I mean, that’s just freaking madness, right? It’s just about giving yourself permission. You don’t need to be bigger. You just need to be more intentional and really see where you’re at and celebrate that and own it.

So go own it. Let me know what you think of this episode.