Every founder has been told the same thing: when leads start flooding in, it’s proof you’ve made it. I used to believe that too, until the flood actually came and nearly cost me everything I’d built.
I recently spoke with Skope about the exact moment applications started arriving faster than my small team could evaluate them, and the decision that came out of it.
Here’s the part most people skip when they tell their growth story. I seriously considered saying yes to every applicant and farming the overflow out to contractors, collecting a commission on each account. The math worked on paper. What stopped me was a simpler question. Could a hastily assembled network of freelancers give clients the same experience they were getting from me directly? I wasn’t confident they could, so I refused to find out at their expense.
That decision turned into a principle I still run every company by: stay small long enough to become big enough. I’ve written about this before, and it still surprises people that “staying small” is a strategy rather than a limitation. Growth was never the thing I avoided. I sequenced it. Culture and systems came before volume, not after.
Most founders treat overwhelm as a staffing problem. I told Skope I avoided hiring aggressively because I didn’t feel experienced enough yet, which isn’t a comfortable thing to admit out loud. New hires add coordination weight and training time to a system that’s already stretched. Adding headcount to a stretched system rarely fixes the strain. It usually just spreads it around.
Before I ever look at recruiting, I look at what can be automated out of the process entirely. My family’s bakery used to lose thirty minutes every night manually sorting orders into a production sheet. A small piece of custom software fixed that permanently. I’ve talked through more examples like it in past breakdowns of where automation quietly outperforms another hire.
Overwhelm doesn’t tell you whether your business is ready to scale. It only tells you your current systems are being tested.
Read the full article on Skope.
Golf never rewards swinging harder once your fundamentals are off, and neither does business.
