Most entrepreneurs believe that working harder and adding more resources is the path to success. But what if that approach is actually holding you back?
In this episode, operations strategist Gwen Bortner and marketing expert Tonya Kubo unpack the critical difference between growth and scaling. They reveal why many business owners feel stuck in a cycle of overwhelm despite “doing everything right.” You’ll discover:
- The telltale signs you’re trapped in unsustainable growth
- Why marketing and sales aren’t the answer to scaling
- How to transition from exhausting growth to sustainable scaling
- The surprising truth about what really drives business expansion
- Why simplifying operations (not adding resources) is the key to success
If you’re tired of working longer hours without seeing proportional results, this episode will show you how to break free from the growth trap and create the sustainable, profitable business you really want.
New episodes are released every Tuesday. Connect with Gwen and Tonya at thebusinessyoureallywant.com.
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Watch the episode here
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The Growth Trap: Why It’s Holding Your Business Back And How To Break Free
Is your business growth actually keeping you stuck? Most entrepreneurs believe that working harder and adding more resources is the path to success. What if in your case, it’s actually holding you back? We’re uncovering the critical difference between scaling and growth and why it matters for your business and your life.
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I’m Tonya Kubo and I am joined by my favorite business operations expert, Gwen Bortner. Our episode is for the business owner who is working harder than ever before, but feeling like they are getting nowhere. Many entrepreneurs think they’re failing because they cannot keep up with the demands of growth when actually they’re just approaching it wrong. Gwen, why do you think that is?
It’s multiple things. First off, there is what I call the internet lie of if we’re not growing, we’re dying. That’s the first one. You cannot grow forever constantly every moment of every day of every time. There are points that you need to pause and no one talks about that. That’s one of the issues around it. There is also a distinction between growth and scaling, which we’re going to jump into the details of talking about, so I’m not going to say too much about it right here.
You can't actually grow forever, constantly, every moment of every day. There are points that you need to pause. And no one talks about that. Share on XThose are not the same things. They are related, but they’re not the same things. I think they get conflated, and people think that if they’re growing, they’re scaling, or if they’re scaling, they’re growing. Maybe, but probably not, and understanding that they have different expectations and outcomes. Often one will lead to the other and vice versa but it’s understanding where you’re really trying to trying to go with it. To me, those are the two biggies that are the issue.
The Internet lies and not understanding the difference between growth and scaling. Since you open the door, let’s walk through it. Why don’t you define growth for us?
Defining Growth And Its Characteristics
Growth is everything getting bigger. We’re serving more customers. We’re probably, hopefully, making more income. We probably are bringing in more people to help us on either the vendor side or the employee side or the 1099 contractor side or some combination of all of those things. Growth really is about getting bigger and bigger. Growth are the things that we think of. Growth is Amazon. Growth is Microsoft. Growth is Facebook. They continue to grow and grow and get bigger and bigger over time. That was their goal. That was actually the goal. It may not have been their initial goal may not have been to the size that they’ve ended up, because that may not have even occurred to them but it was about getting bigger. Bigger was necessary for their business model to really work.
How I have always defined growth is because I use all these textbook examples of things, but it’s that linear increase where you’re adding resources. It’s more time in the business, you’re investing more money. As you mentioned, you’re adding more people and you’re doing that to increase capacity so that you can increase your revenue. Before we get to defining scaling, you’re the person who helped me to appreciate the difference in energy expenditure between growth and scaling. Can you go into a little bit of why growth is so exhausting?
It’s because it is all about more. Everything is more. It’s more money. It’s more customers. It is more time. It is more energy. As we do more, at some point, you may be able to recoup some of that back but it also is a bit of its own momentum. Although you may get a little bit back very quickly, it sucks. It says, “You’ve got more energy. I’m going to take more again because we’re going to continue down.” Like you said, it’s a linear path. The direction is as they like to say in the corporate world, up and to the right. It’s continuing to move up.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that all things are moving up in a positive way. That’s the other piece about growth is everyone assumes if I grow my income, I grow my people, I grow my grow everything that everything is growing up in a positive way. Often, at least at different levels, growth isn’t doing that for everything. Your profit may get reduced. The amount that you’re taking out of the business may be reduced. There are things because it’s always a trade-off. Growth always has a trade-off. If I’m putting energy in here, or money or whatever, it’s probably coming from someplace else.
Defining Scaling And Its Importance
Contrast that with scaling. How is scaling different from growth? As you’re saying this, I’m thinking, I know a lot of people who are talking about scaling as being the jump from 5 figures to 6 figures, 6 figures to 7, 7 to 8. How do you define scaling as being different?
This is why I think it gets conflated because potentially what they’re really talking about is growth, not scaling. Scaling sounds nicer because it sounds like it’s cool. It’s all going to be all those things but scaling to a large degree is actually harder than growth because it needs to be done in a much more controlled thought-out intentional way.
Growth can just happen because you had some weird thing go viral on Instagram and poof you got growth if something goes viral and Instagram you cannot scale. That’s not scaling. That’s growth. It’s very different because scaling is about saying how do we do more of the things that we want more customers more income more profit, more money in my pocket, whatever positive thing you want without having to add resources at a similar rate.
You may still need to add resources, and I’m using this as an example, I’m not saying this is the formula, but you may be able to 10X your income but only have to 2X your resources. We’re 10Xing our income, but we’re only having to add twice as much time for the people who are already working with us. That’s scaling. That’s saying where we add a little bit more to the base, and it creates a multiplicative result versus what we added. It’s not a dollar-for-dollar thing where I’m adding resources and income is going up this way. It’s like I’m adding resources and incomes going up way faster.
It’s really about that point you hit where your revenue is increasing without you having to substantially increase the amount of money in the resources.
Often you grow and then you scale, which is actually optimizing the growth back down and saying, “How do we do this in a way that’s really long-term maintainable?” There may be another growth spurt that may require another scale. Often they’re done sequentially back and forth. You can do it linearly, but rarely do you just continue to scale because most of us, even those of us who try to be really intentional about our systems and operations, just aren’t quite that good. It’s really hard to only scale all the time. There’s usually some element of growth in there, and then you can manage it, and it becomes scaling back and forth.
Using our own business as an example. We have invested heavily in our infrastructure so that now we’re at a point where we could probably take on five. We could definitely take on five clients in a month, but we could take on between 5 to 10 clients and we wouldn’t have to hire anybody new. You wouldn’t have to work 60 hours a week. You wouldn’t even have to probably work 50 hours a week.
I would probably do different things, but I probably wouldn’t have to work any more hours than I currently do. As I said, I may be doing things a little bit differently and you might be working a few more hours. There are a few people who might be working a few more hours, but we really could bring on the order of magnitude of new customers without having to bring that order of magnitude into our actual work level or at a whole other person or anything else to manage it.
Signs Of Being Stuck In Growth Mode
You mentioned that the problem is that some businesses get stuck in growth mode because there’s this internet lie that’s like, “You have to grow. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” I love that line, by the way. What are some signs that the CEOs, the business owners who are reading right now, what are some signs they could be looking out for to find out whether they’re stuck in growth mode?
If every time they start to have what I’m going to call a normal schedule, and normal being like everyone in the universe would say, “I could totally do that for the next 5 or 10 years without killing anybody or myself or injuring people or losing my mind.” This is really sustainable. That would be normal. That’s what I’ve been calling normal. If they find that every time they get into normal mode, they immediately start moving beyond it into non-sustainable situations.
I’m going to use 40 hours a week as a standard because that’s just what we’ve established in the universe as a standard, which isn’t necessarily a great standard, but we’re just going to use it. If you get down to 40 hours a week and within a month or two you’re back up to 50 or 60 every week, then you’re in growth mode, not in scale mode. Scale mode is I get to 40 and I stay at 40 even though the business grows, or maybe I go down to 30 instead. That’s scale mode but as soon as I have the capacity to max myself out to be an overwhelm, I do that. That means I’m still in growth mode.
What other signs?
Overwhelm and/or your people are in overwhelm. One of the things that we often see is because everyone talks about the CEO, you need to offload, you need to do all of these things. What they’re actually doing is they’re transferring their overwhelm into their people. They’re no longer overwhelmed, but they haven’t actually scaled. That sounds like they’ve scaled because I’m now only working 40 hours a week, but everyone else on their team is in overwhelm mode all the time and totally stressed out.
That means that you haven’t actually scaled, you’re in growth because the only way to get them down is to add significantly more resources to make that happen. Another thing that you can be looking for, is that overwhelm. The other is it controlled? Is it just happening to you, or are you actually making choices about it? Controlled goes back to what you talked about, where you actually know. We’ll use new customers just as the example, that realistically, we can add on three new customers.
We don’t have to add any more staff or anybody else. We can add on three. That’s not because three are leaving every month and we’re adding three but it’s like, “No, we can add on three and we can do that consistently for the next six months.” We may be at maximum mode and we know what maximum mode is. We don’t just keep going. We actually say, “When we get here, we’re maxed out and then we have to make a choice.”
Are we going to grow and do it in an intentional way, which means we’re hiring additional person or whatever those other things are, or are we going to stay at that level for a while and optimize that level? That’s the other is like, do you actually know how many you can bring on successfully, consistently? You’ve used the phrase before with people where they say, “What I really need is 100 new clients.” It’s like, “If I gave you 100 clients today, could you actually serve them?” Those who think the answer is yes are usually fooling themselves and they’re in growth mode. They aren’t thinking about scaling because that’s not sustainable. They’re just going to get all hands on deck and freak out everyone.
I appreciate your distinction of overwhelm being that there’s overwhelm for the business owner. That’s definitely a sign you’re in growth. Also if you’re relaxed, but your team is an overwhelm, that’s another sign because I know. I worked with an organization where they had a CEO who used to brag that, after major events, they would take a week off. Part of why they could take that week off is they trusted that the rest of the team was there to run the business. They had such trust in their team the operation could go smoothly even without them there. What they never mentioned is that everybody on the team was working 60 hours during that week that the CEO was out to make good on all the promises the CEO made.
That’s a great example of growth, not really scaling because it’s a short-term problem, but my guess is if that was happening for a week, the rest of the time they were probably not working 40 hours a week, they were probably working 45 or 50. The rest of the team, they were not ever not in overwhelm mode.
I would have to agree with that having been on the inside of it. You mentioned signs that you’re stuck in growth mode. It’s the longer hours or if you have to increase the hours you work to support the new clients or the new business, that’s a sign you’re stuck in growth mode. You mentioned the overwhelm. Overwhelmed on you as the business owner, overwhelm on the team.
Longer hours or increased workload to support new clients or the new business is a sign you're stuck in growth mode. Share on XSome things that I have seen, especially with the business owners I know who read to our show is there’s constant hiring which I think is more for the larger organizations. Also, this like not so much willy-nilly, but reactionary adding of tools in tech. Like. “I’ll add this automation. I’ll add this.” We need a transcriber, we need AI transcription because that’ll cut down on the notes that are needed. Like just this acquisition of tech that should make things easier, but not necessarily attention paid to the cost of acquisition of the tech. Do you see that?
The thing that I love, and I’m going to refer to our good operations friend, Crista Grasso because we love her. She’s another operations person like I am and one of the things that she talks about is if you’re actually scaling your simplifying, you’re actually taking things away you’re not adding things. Instead of adding more tech you’re looking at all the tech and saying instead of these three things we’re going to do this one thing because back to you’ve got to simplify before you can scale. That really is the trick of it because we can always add more of everything and that will allow growth, that will allow it to go forever.
We add more people, we add more tech, we add more whatever. We can do that forever, that’s growth. Scaling is saying, “No, we’re going to take away everything but the essentials and focus.” Of course is what we talk about all the time. Simpler is better, that’s always the answer and that is a key element in scaling. Whenever we are simplifying and that allows the same people to do more or do the same amount, but in less hours. Any way that we’re reducing for everybody, not just me as owner, but us as a team. More tools rarely are simplifying. We can exchange three tools for one tool. That could be simplifying, but rarely is that simplifying.
Transitioning From Growth To Scaling
This is perfect because I really feel like for our readers to get the most value out of this particular episode. We’ve got to shift our conversation to helping our readers understand how they can transition from growth to scaling. Where do we start? I think you started off by really talking about examining current operations. Is that the best first step if you want to start making that shift?
The first thing is GI Joe is my favorite knowing is half the battle. The first is identifying are you actually growing when you think you’re scaling. That’s the first that you really have to like to admit. “I’m not really scaling. I’m just growing. I’m just I’m continuing to do it.” Like I said, a lot of us conflate it because of the way people talk about it and so really saying, “What is the difference? Doing some self-analysis.” That’s always the first place is you got to know that you’re doing it. The next, almost always for scaling, is your operations.
Scaling has almost zero to do with your marketing, has almost zero to do with your sales. Those actually have to do with your growth. Scaling is about streamlining the back end. It may possibly, but probably not, have to do with your product slash business model. That may be in there but maybe, maybe not. This is one of the other, I’ll say, lies that everyone says, “To scale, you have to go from one to one to a group program. That’s the only way you could scale.” That’s not true. That is an answer. Not saying it’s a wrong answer. It is an answer.
You have to have a course to scale. That is also an answer. Context matters. It is not the answer. It is not the best answer but sometimes you do need to make some tweaks to your business model to be able to scale. It’s not necessarily the answer that everyone’s telling you is the only way that you can do that but not necessarily. It often really is looking at all of your backend processes and saying, how do we simplify? Where can we simplify these? Where are we taking more steps? Where are we doing more things?
Where are we doing things that we can start reducing, and/or eliminate and say, “This isn’t actually providing the value.” You and I recently had two conversations that were separate but related. Operations is our business. I mean, like this is what we’re supposed to do. This is the cobbler’s son who wears no shoes and you cannot read the label from inside the jar. You’ve got to have some outside perspective often to get help with this. We had two situations. One where we were talking about it.
You said, but then we have to do this and we have to do this. When I said, “Cannot we just do X?” You were like, “No, because we have to do, which I had forgotten that we were doing A, B, C, and D, because someone else on the team had been doing it for a long time.” As we talked about it, it was like, we used to need to do that 18 months ago because of how we were delivering the service and all the things that were going on. That’s naturally no longer true.
We’re doing all of these steps for something that doesn’t actually apply anymore because we made probably 2 or 3 little tiny tweaks over time that changed what actually needed to be done but there was no reason to think through that whole peace. That’s simplified things for us a whole lot and all of a sudden something that was taking an hour per client, we are able to do an hour for all of the clients in one shot. We do it every quarter. That adds up to a lot of time. That’s a scaling move. That’s a scaling move to be able to say, “If we’ve got twenty clients, we don’t need twenty hours to do this. We can do it in an hour.” That’s a scaling move. A thousand things, I’m sorry, I rambled.
I heard three steps, potentially four. I want to recap those and then I want to pull out something you said that I think is really important that if our readers read nothing else, they read this. The first thing is the steps I heard. Step one is having taken a good hard look at the business and what’s going on and identifying whether you are in growth mode or scale mode. We’re giving you the perfect like we’re giving you the checklist right here in this episode.
The second step is to examine your operations, to really look at the systems and structures that are running your business. We refer to it as the engine and the gears that support the engine. What you said there that I want people to read, like if you’re a note-taking person and you happen to have pen and paper with you, I want you to write this down, which is marketing and sales have to do with growth and your operations have to do with scaling.
Marketing and sales have absolutely nothing to do with scaling because I hear that conflated all the time. As a marketing expert and a marketing professional, I have to tell you, it sets us up for failure. Please stop doing that to us. Marketing sales have absolutely nothing to do with scaling. Operations is where you need to be looking when you’re going to transfer from growth to scaling. That’s just step two is examining the operations.
What I heard you talk about, and you were using our own business and what we’ve recently gone through as the example, is you need to identify the inefficiencies. Using the example that you just pointed out, we were following the same process we were following before we had reduced the complexity of our service delivery. We had a super complex process that was no longer supporting a complex delivery system.
Step three being identifying the inefficiencies. What I heard you say, but I don’t think it was explicit. You’re going to have to drill down for us on these last two points but I heard you talk about optimizing before expanding. That’s what we just did. We’ve now optimized our system. We’ve gone now from one hour per client in this super back-end process to one hour potentially taking care of ten clients if not twenty in this case. Optimizing before expanding. Where I think you are heading toward is really how you make strategic rather than reactive decisions. Anything you want to add to that?
I can add to that and you did, you totally nailed it from a summary standpoint, which is why I love doing this with you because you’re really good at that. It is about being intentional and looking at it and saying, “Can we do this differently? I know we’ve done it this way, but do we have to do it this way? Is there some other opportunity to do this differently?” Not just reacting because someone says something. Back to sometimes what we realize and I’ve seen this in other businesses, I don’t think we’ve ever done this, but I’ve seen this in other businesses where one client wants you to change your procedures to take care of them.
You do but what happens now is that adds a whole level of complexity. It feels like I’m doing good customer service, but you’re actually just reacting to a client, where instead, maybe they just aren’t your best client. If you didn’t serve them, you would actually be able to serve 3 or 4 more customers with the same amount of effort, whether it’s you, your team, or all of the other things. That’s where you start being able to scale, is also saying, “Who are my best right-fit clients, customers?” Whatever term you use with the people that buy your product or your services.
What are the best ones and how do I focus on making sure their experience is optimal? If there are people that just are fighting that all the time, letting them go because that also allows for scaling. Companies that truly try and serve everybody rarely can scale. They can grow, but they cannot scale because they have to keep adding people to deal with all of the variations. To me, that’s where the strategic piece comes in, to say, “We’re going to make some hard choices along the way.” Maybe they’re not all hard. Let’s be honest.
Companies that truly try to serve everybody rarely can scale. They can grow, but they can't scale. That's where the strategic piece comes in. Share on XMaking Strategic Decisions For Scaling
Technically the hard choice isn’t actually a hard choice. “We don’t actually like that client very much. “It’s okay for them to go.” Sometimes it’s like our very favorite client or it’s our first client. “They were our first client. They were they were so good to us.” That doesn’t mean that that’s right for the long term. That’s also part of the scaling is figuring out, are we trying to do things that make us more inefficient because we’re trying to serve too many, too much to whatever? There are lots of things that we can pull in the blank. That’s looking at the bigger picture and not just being reactionary and saying, “Where are places that maybe we feel like we cannot change, but we could.”
We actually have had this experience. It’s interesting for me to hear you sum up how you go to making strategic rather than reactive decisions, because we did it, although I don’t know that I knew we were doing it at the moment. We have our weekly accountability process. All of our clients, doesn’t matter whether they are like in our entry-level offer, or they’re a one-on-one private client who works specifically with you.
They all go through this weekly accountability process. Every quarter, we do a quarterly planning retreat. It’s online, it takes two days. We were doing it where people would start almost thirteen weeks before the quarterly planning event. They would get used to the weekly accountability process, and then they would go to the planning event, and then that would help them plan the next quarter. We had somebody who was like, “That should be the first thing that a new client does because I spent a whole quarter focused on the wrong goals. If I would have done the planning event first, then I would have had the right goals.”
We talked about, “Maybe we should put it on the front end.” We tried that for a bit, and we realized absolutely not, because what they needed is they needed the data from the weekly accountability to help them really take advantage of the planning session to understand what was really moving the needle and what wasn’t. That data was what they needed to set the right goals at the planning event. Now we move it midway so that they get a few weeks of that weekly accountability. They don’t need a full thirteen. We’ve recognized, but they need about eight or so.
They need six to eight.
They have the planning event, which then sets them up for the next thirteen weeks. What we had to be willing to shift is we had to be willing to shift our enrollment. We had to go from always open to now having to have a waitlist. It’s hard to say no. As a marketing professional, let me just tell you, it is hard to tell somebody no, who wants to give you money right now. It is really hard. Luckily, I work with you, Gwen, and you support me in the saying of the no.
That was the strategy. For me, it was hard not to say, “I know you want to give me money, I’m not going to take it.”
It goes against everything we’re told, but it is in their best interests and it’s in our best interest in terms of managing that consistent, excellent customer service that we like to provide. I just want to thank you for bringing that up because I hadn’t really thought through that process we’ve been going through for the last year, but it definitely has been a process of strategic decision-making versus reactive decision-making.
What I love about that particular example that you used is we didn’t necessarily get it right off the bat. People always assume that if we’re doing that, if we made the decision, we have to stick with that forever. No, we did it. We looked at the data, and we said, “That’s not what we thought. We’re going to try something different.” The data didn’t pan out to match our assumption of what the result was going to be. It’s like, “Let’s try something different.” That’s also part of being strategic is realizing sometimes the thing that we think is going to fix it, whatever it is and whatever we mean by fix, isn’t the thing. That is also part of scaling, is not believing there’s only one way to make that happen.
Thank you, Gwen. This has been a fun discussion and I have really appreciated it. Now for our listeners. We have covered the key differences between growing and scaling. If you remember nothing else, remember that marketing and sales have nothing to do with scaling. That’s all about growth. Operations are really where you need to focus when you’re going to be making that scaling because every successful business will experience periods of growth.
There are times that you do have to invest more to make more, whether it’s time, it’s money, it’s energy, but you cannot stay there forever without extreme personal or cost to your team, like extreme cost to yourself, cost to your team. Sustainable success comes from scaling when you can increase your revenue while maintaining what you already have in place. I’m just going to repeat myself a bit here. That means no burning the midnight oil to make deadlines. No 60-hour work weeks, unless that is your particular brand of fun.
Every successful business will experience periods of growth. There are times when you do have to invest more to make more. But you cannot stay there forever without extreme personal cost. Share on XEven then, no, because no one else is going to think that’s good. No, even me.
Workaholics take heart, 60-hour work weeks are a no-go on the whole scaling thing. I’m going to speak on behalf of Gwen and I. We would love to give you a quick checklist right now. We would love to give you an ebook that would minimize the pain of escaping the growth trap. You know what? It is not that easy. We are experts at this, and we can tell you, it’s not even that easy for us. This is the thing that will take some level of support and consistent accountability. If you’d like our help with that, you don’t have to get our help, but if you want our help, visit us online at TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com. Click on the services tab at the top, and that’ll tell you everything you need to know. Until next time, we want you to be thinking strategically instead of reacting.
Mentioned in the Episode
- Crista Grasso
- Find all resources mentioned in the episode at The Business You Really Want
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
