What Your Growing Business Will Require of You

“The person you have to become is harder to build than the business itself.”

A business owner put it that way, and I think he named something that deserves more attention.

When you think about growing your business, you probably think about customers, employees, money, and capacity. You need more work coming in, capable people to handle it, and enough cash to support the next move.

If your business continues to grow, you will reach a point where growth requires something different of you. You will face decisions about your role, your authority, and how much responsibility you are willing to place in other people’s hands. How you respond will shape what the business can become.

You have to make decisions you haven’t made before. Trust people with work you once handled yourself. Address problems you could previously work around. Spend time preparing the business for what’s ahead while other people take care of what’s happening today.

You may know all of that. Becoming comfortable doing it is another matter.

Early in the business, your personal involvement was essential. You answered the phone, solved the problem, checked the work, and kept the customer happy. Your willingness to take responsibility helped build something worth growing.

That experience teaches you certain habits. When something goes wrong, you step in. When someone needs an answer, you provide it. When the work falls behind, you stay longer.

Those habits can become difficult to question because they have served you well.

Then the business reaches a point where nearly every decision still comes through you. Employees wait for your approval. Managers have responsibility but little room to exercise judgment. You spend your days answering questions and your evenings wondering why you can’t get to the work that would move the business forward.

At that point, hiring another person may help. But if every new person also needs your direction, your role continues to expand along with the business.

You will have a decision to make about how you lead. You can continue bringing more of the business through yourself, or you can develop the people, expectations, and discipline that allow it to grow beyond your personal involvement. That decision will shape the business’s capacity to grow and your daily experience of owning it.

Some of that change is professional.

You may need to learn how to set clearer expectations, understand financial performance, develop managers, or make decisions with a longer view.

Some of it is personal.

Can you let someone handle a customer differently than you would, provided the customer is served well? Can you hold a manager accountable without taking the job back? Can you hear that your own behavior is contributing to a problem and stay in the conversation long enough to understand it?

Those are uncomfortable questions. They reach into your confidence, your patience, and your sense of who you are in the business.

You may miss being the person with every answer. You may feel less useful on a day when the team handles things without you. You may discover that giving someone authority is easier to announce than it is to practice.

That helps explain why the person you have to become can be harder to build than the business itself.

You can put a new system in place or hire an experienced manager. Changing your own response when something goes wrong takes repeated, deliberate effort.

As you consider what’s next for your business, give some attention to what that future will require of you.

Which decisions need more of your attention?

Which ones should other people be making?

What conversation have you avoided?

What do you need to learn?

Your business will still need your experience and judgment. As it grows, you have to become more deliberate about where and how you use them.

If your business continues to grow, you will face this transition. You can prepare for it, or you can find yourself responding when the demands of the business exceed what you can personally manage.

At Slark Consulting Group, this is the work I do through What’s Next. I help owners work through consequential decisions about growth, including how their own role needs to change, and put those decisions into practice.

If you recognize your business in this description, let’s talk about what comes next.