What Should Our Next Year’s Growth Goal Really Be — and Why?
Growth goals are often emotional reactions more than true, strategic plans. They result from a good year that feels validating, or perhaps a weaker year that got you worried, or perhaps from the rise of a competitor who you can’t stop thinking about.
So, you sit down with your leadership team and choose a percentage: ten, twenty, perhaps more. And everyone nods, which is great, but then nobody asks (when they should) — what’s this going to cost us?
There’s concerns about money of course, but what I’m actually talking about is the cost in strenuousness.
I’ve seen businesses hit aggressive growth targets and feel worse afterward, even though revenue went up. The trouble was that margins went down and the calendar filled up, leaving the owner — the person who had started all of this in the first place to be freer in their life than if they were working for someone else — to feel more trapped than they had before.
It doesn’t exactly mean that the growth was a mistake, but it does mean that the goal was chosen without a clear idea of the whats or the whys.
The mental reframing that a lot of owners have never been taught is that growth is about how much your business can sustain without breaking trust of customers, employees, or yourself.
We know of a home services company in the Southeast that once decided to “press the gas” after a banner year; their marketing worked and they started getting more calls, and soon their calendar was full for weeks. Then, though, the business began to change, with jobs becoming stacked too tightly, callbacks increasing only just enough to be noticed, and good employees starting to get stressed.
Though nothing catastrophic happened, the business stopped feeling proud of its own work. And that’s a shame.
So with this example in mind, I wanted to say this:
The right growth goal is the one your business can honor without asking you to become someone you don’t want to be.
Because there’s usually a downside to growth, from new customers leaving to more complexity in taking care of them, to the movement of more volume meaning more chances to get it wrong and disappoint them, to faster business operation meaning more erosion if systems aren’t ready.
And unfortunately, trust, which fuels long-term growth, scales slower than sales.
When your sales get ahead of people’s trust in you, there can be some negative results like employee turnover and customer frustration — not to mention owner exhaustion.
So let’s try to think about how to set a growth goal that’s a bit healthier. I’d recommend honestly asking questions like:
How much strain can our business handle without rushing ourselves to an uncomfortable extent?
How much complexity can we introduce to our systems without freaking anybody out?
How much trust can we scale or build up without diluting who we are?
These go beyond the standard “small business” questions to encompass something more like “leadership questions”. These kinds of questions separate businesses that merely have spikes in revenue to businesses that stick around long into the future.
If you’re trying to set a goal for your company in the next year, I’d recommend choosing a growth target you think your systems and people can support and that your leadership can sustain. There is wisdom in this approach, which needn’t be only thought of as “cautious”.
Durable growth begins in clear ideas about what you can and cannot do. For owners bearing the true burdens of running a business, clarity like that is a relief.
I understand that trust and hypothetical complexity can be hard to quantify. If you’d like help or want to discuss building your business through building trust, you can book time on my calendar. I’m here to serve.
