6-bullets on why growth is a grind (and how to drive growth that feels good)

I've had not one, not two, but three conversations with the Founders of three ($200-$1B) firms who are struggling because their firms keep getting bigger, but things aren't feeling better.

All three of them said to me, in one way or another, "I feel frustrated and burnt out. How are we going to scale growth? Maybe I should just be done." It just so happens that none of them want to be done, but they do all want the path to scaling growth to come with greater ease, efficiency, and economics.

The money's good, no doubt, but the margins of all three firms are suffering from dilution. Worse, the founders are now drained of energy and enthusiasm for their work.

Here's a quick 30,000-foot view of why these Founders found themselves feeling this way:

• They didn't have a clear vision, business model, or client model to begin with, leaving them reacting to growth versus driving growth intentionally aligned with the outcomes they wanted to create.
• Their service models aren't proactive, systematic, and tech-enabled, deploying valuable revenue-producing talent to make low-impact, low-value work, deeply diluting capacity and profits.
• As a result, they're struggling to keep up with the demands of servicing clients and managing growth, hurting productivity and culture.
• The Founders/Partners are stuck in the weeds, filling roles that don't leverage their time or talent and that drain versus energize them and distract from leadership and revenue growth
• This, in turn, requires more hires to meet the demands of growth, which tends to compound the complexity right along with the revenue.
• Without a well-developed model for attracting, training, compensating, and advancing the talent they need to support growth, they are left to hire reactively and fail to optimize their team models for greater value delivery to clients, leaving these Founders with a lot of upside they have little ability or interest in capturing.

I'll stop there because I promised six bullets.

Notice how I haven't yet mentioned sales or marketing? That's intentional because those aren't the hurdles that make growth a grind - it's everything else.

The issue is that advisors tend to believe that driving growth will solve their problems, instead of solving their problems to drive their growth.

And, it seems the theme of scaling growth is popular this year because Orion has asked me to give not one, not two, but three sessions related to scaling growth with greater success, ease, and joy. If you're at Orion , please join me and say hi!

No limits!