The Growth Gap: Why Businesses Stall After Early Success – Business Growth Coach in Edmonton

Hitting a wall after early success is something most owners live through and few talk about openly. Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces calls it the growth gap.

If you are overwhelmed, overbooked and under-profiting, this is the conversation about what actually causes a business to stall, and how to stop doing more with less.

Why businesses hit the wall

Entrepreneurs are doers, and that is the problem

Bruce: An entrepreneur is a doer. They execute, they want results. First time founders come in, execute, and things start to look good. Not that there are no challenges, but we get excited, we see traction, volume increases. Then we hit that proverbial wall like a sledgehammer.

Volume keeps coming but so does overwhelm, and as the overwhelm grows we become paralyzed. We start losing clients. We start annoying team members. And the outcome sounds like this: I do not know where my cash is going. I do not know why people are so frustrated. I cannot keep my clients happy the way I did six months ago.

Why does it happen? Structure and process. Making sure you are not the only person in the room who thinks they have to be the only person in the room making the business happen.

What the growth gap feels like from inside

One big emotional blob

Bruce: A client said to me years ago, Bruce, I know I am making money, but I do not know where the money is going and I do not know if I am profitable. Or, I am hiring employees and I think I am doing the right thing, but they seem to want to work for themselves rather than for the business.

These things mount up until the owner sees it as one big emotional mess. I cannot do this. I cannot keep things going. I am either giving up or trying something different.

And trying something different is usually just another reaction. These days it is all about AI, so I am going to invest in an AI system. I am a huge advocate of AI, but at that point it is adding problem on top of problem. If you are digging a hole deeper and deeper, the way out is to stop digging.

Is it bad planning?

No. It is behavioural

Bruce: You are not a bad planner. You are not lazy or apathetic, whatever unkind word you have been using on yourself. This is the moment to nurture yourself as you grow the business.

It is emotional and behavioural. Our minds are driven at least eighty percent of the time by a fight or flight response, so we react. And that reaction is like a sore. Every time you scratch it, it gets worse.

Stop for five minutes. Do not respond emotionally. Think about what is going on. What you will find is that the symptom stays the same no matter what you do, and if you keep doing something that is not working, it is time to pause.

Getting somebody out of the cycle

Why “stop” feels like a threat

Bruce: When you tell someone in this state to stop what they are doing, you are asking them to stop the very thing they have justified as their means of survival. Even for five or ten minutes, that is a threat to anybody.

It is easy for someone outside the crisis to see the opportunity to stop and think. The work is giving the owner enough comfort to take five minutes. I did this yesterday with a client in a bit of a crisis. The five minutes turned into two hours, and what she admitted at the end was, I have actually paralyzed myself, how did I get here?

The answer is always the same. Because you are not allowing yourself to pivot. You are not allowing yourself to re-engineer your thinking. Once people are comfortable enough to acknowledge they are in a rut, it is smooth sailing nine times out of ten.

People, systems, money, in that order

Money is the outcome, not the starting point

Bruce: When you hear business gurus talk, the first thing is always money. Money is the measuring stick, and money is the outcome.

Yes, you need money to build people and systems. But you are not going to have money on any sustainable basis if your business is not people driven and systems driven. People are the assets that make the systems work. A system is useless if you do not put the right things into it, and only people put the right things in.

Somebody will say I am not thinking broadly enough, because AI and agents can automate all of that. You can automate a great deal. For the time being you still need people to create it.

So we start with people, beginning with the owner, because that is where the behavioural change has to happen. Once minds are ready to execute, we look at routines, which are the systems. Broken all the way down, what are the most basic things that have to happen? In lean manufacturing they call it input, throughput and output. What makes things happen, and is what reaches the customer actually of value and the same as what we committed to?

Once people are sorted and the systems run, the reward comes. First a satisfied customer, and the money follows. And money itself has to be managed through systems, because there is a behavioural component that creates either a positive or a negative money outcome in any business.

The one small thing to start with

The worry you go to sleep on

Bruce: Think of the one key worry, the thing you think about before you close your eyes at night and wish you could fix, and then wake up to and think, now I have to deal with that again.

Start there. Remember the system is not necessarily the problem, the outcome is. Look at why that system is not producing the outcome, and change it.

And do not do this in your head. We are all overly optimistic about our ability to hold it up there. Put it on paper or a whiteboard and work through each step. Then test it. If it fails, so be it. Go back to the whiteboard and fill in the gaps, because there are gaps you cannot see yet.

People say they do not have time to experiment. You do not have the time not to experiment.

From doer to architect

Your job is the arrows between the boxes

Bruce: The biggest shift is from being the doer to being the architect. The designer.

I was going through a process flow map on a whiteboard with a CEO. On one hand he was delighted, look at all these resources and people, all in place. Then he asked, okay, now what do I do? I said, you see those little arrows connecting all the boxes? That is your job.

You are the glue holding the pieces together and overseeing the flow between them so the outcome is what you want. You are the architect of the primary business flow. And that flow is not just what is on the whiteboard, because each section has subsystems and sub-flows. You are the one who has to see how it moves and adjust how it moves. Most importantly, as a leader you are the one who facilitates and nurtures the communication between the people filling those roles.

The shift is away from, I can do it, it will be quick, I may as well just do it. What people do not realize is that it compounds, because there are so many things you can do. That is why you started the business. Moving from that to asking what assets I have that do this for me, and most of the time that is a human asset, and it is the only growing asset in your business.

Trust, and the permission to make mistakes

Bruce: If you have a trust problem and you are not trusting your employees, that needs sorting out yesterday. You have to trust that they can do it, and you have to be open to them making mistakes.

Allow the mistakes, but be the teacher. Coach them. The same mistake repeatedly is not acceptable, of course. But they have to make mistakes to learn, and for an owner who makes that shift it is incredibly liberating.

Does this happen in every industry?

Fortune 500 and two-person startup, same wall

Bruce: Universally. Every business. For-profit or not for profit. Not for profits will say they are not for profit, but you still need something left over. You still need money.

Regardless of industry or size, money is the outcome of systems, and systems are the outcome of you as the leader shifting from doer to architect. You cannot do it all yourself and you cannot be the hero. I have seen this in Fortune 50 and 500 companies and in tiny startups. Same thing, same challenges.

As a business grows, particularly through thirty or forty employees and on to a hundred and fifty, you have to revise the entire business model. Large companies dream of their teams being more entrepreneurial and long for those early days. What happens is that you stop looking at individuals doing functions and start looking at departments, then divisions with departments inside them. Levels stack up. The higher the levels and the more complexity, the more stretched your communication becomes, and the more managers there are, the more times a message has to be passed on. We are not perfect. As soon as the message is lost, systems crumble, and when systems crumble output falls.

So keep it as simple as you can as you grow. There is a fine line between complication and sophistication. Keep it basic and create sophistication, but do not overcomplicate. It is not worth it.

How to stop sliding back

Measure backwards, not forwards

Bruce: Keep reminding people of their successes. There is a book by Dan Sullivan called The Gap and the Gain, and it is excellent.

In summary, owners should stop staring at the gap, the abyss between here and the huge goal in front of them. We measure ourselves against where we want to be one day, so whatever we achieve, we are never satisfied. He says stop measuring forward and measure backward. Look at what you have gained, because where you are today would not have been possible without everything you learned to get here.

We do a lot of that work with clients. What did we set out to achieve this week, did we achieve it, and what has that given us as the foundation for the next step? Always measuring backwards. It is one of the key ways to keep momentum and stop people slipping back to what feels safe but is not.

And people fear mistakes not only through self-sabotage but because of what others will think. Everybody else is far too busy with their own thing. You may get a little initial judgement and they will forget it quickly. Move forward, make the mistakes, and enjoy it, with grace.