Growing Pains are REAL — How to Spot Them
Let’s talk about growing pains in business. We all, eventually, come up against them. Growing pains are essentially the speed bumps, setbacks or resistance that occurs when a business's current systems, team, or strategy can no longer support its size or ambitions. This evolves over time and can occur at varying intervals.
Here are some signs you’re experiencing growing pains:
Owner Bottleneck & Decision Fatigue - This happens when all decisions are still running through the owner. Growth is stalled because the team doesn’t feel empowered to take ownership and make decisions. This is a huge time suck for everyone.
Context Switching Burnout - This happens when there are too many competing priorities and everything feels “urgent”. This is mentally draining, and strategic thinking and productivity will suffer.
Busy vs Profitable - Your client list has grown but so has the amount of time and energy required to service all these clients. When’s the last time you increased your pricing? Shifted your target audience? Restructured your offerings? Analyzed your calendar? If you don’t do these things periodically, your profit margin and bandwidth will shrink dramatically the more you scale.
Infrastructure Challenges - As the business grows, so does your need for stronger systems and structure. What’s your tech stack? Do they talk to each other? Have you updated your processes to reflect the changes this growth has created? Are tasks repeated reliably and consistently? You will leak TIME, MONEY and CLIENTS here if it doesn’t get addressed.
Team Inconsistency & Performance Gaps - As the business grows and responsibilities become more demanding, ensuring each team member knows exactly what they’re responsible for and how to perform their duties is imperative. Team training and development need to be re-evaluated and updated accordingly. Resources need to be on hand with the team knowing where to look to troubleshoot without having to come to you.
Growing pains are completely normal. You just want to have awareness around which ones you’re having, why you’re having them and how to fix them.
