How I Grew Up About Business Growth

If you check the new Inc. 5000 Regionals list of fastest growing companies in the Southeast, you’ll notice Content Science. I am thrilled and a bit shocked about this achievement. You see, business growth has always been a sticky wicket for me. There are so many conflicting perspectives and recommendations about whether to grow and how, that it's easy to get stuck. So I'm sharing a few ways I changed my mindset to help anyone interested in growing business and beyond.

From No Go to Must Grow

Ever since I started Content Science, I was aware that most businesses in the U.S. fail in their first five years. (The failure rate for startups is even higher.) So over the years, I’ve read, listened to, and consulted with all kinds of philosophies about running a business. There are no shortage of opinions. The spectrum runs from “supporting your lifestyle” to “grow or die.” Within that spectrum, there are plenty more conflicting opinions and possibilities. To save you 10,000+ hours of reading them, I’ll highlight two of these opinions.

• Paul Graham, Cofounder of Y Combinator , has long defined and supported startups as companies designed to grow fast.

Jason Fried CEO, of 37signals , consistently expresses a distaste for the startup approach and advocates slow growth.?

Where I have landed is you and your business must grow…for both metaphysical and practical reasons. The more scientists study the universe, the more they realize the universe is expanding rapidly. We don’t know exactly why, but expansion is fundamental to how the universe works. So, I think growth is somehow in our DNA. We can’t avoid growth, we have to address it in business and in life.?

More practically speaking, not growing and simply maintaining is boring for everyone involved. It’s hard to define meaningful goals that motivate people and interest clients or customers. “This quarter, let’s keep the status quo!” And, our volatile time of digital disruption makes simply maintaining nearly impossible today. Something in the market, the technology, customer expectations, and more is likely to change–and that forces a successful business to evolve.

The key is you and your business must grow in your own way. And, no one can tell you exactly what that way is. This reality has been the most difficult challenge in business for me. But it also has been the most rewarding.

I’ve also found this philosophy handy outside of business, when trying to make progress in health or relationships or even interests and hobbies. The prescribed way isn’t always the right way for you. But that’s no excuse for not figuring out a way forward. To help, I share a whole list of other books that have helped me over at The Progressionist.

From Profit Mongering to Profit with Purpose

Content Science’s recognition by Inc. 5000 Regionals for growth comes on the heels of making the Inc. Best in Business list for our strong purpose. I’m extremely proud of each honor on its own. But I’m ecstatic about achieving them together because it validates my hypothesis that purpose and growth can go hand in hand.

But I didn’t always believe in that approach. Even though intellectually I understood that was possible, my gut had the impression this was an either-or situation. You can either pursue profit like a profit mongering jerk or you can pursue purpose like a martyr. Neither option was appealing. Two books helped me reconcile the disconnect.

• You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero
• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

So, after much thought about 2 years ago I set both a goal to grow and a vision for Content Science with this purpose:

Experience the delight of enabling worthy organizations to make content make a constructive difference in how people feel, decide, act, and live

I believe this purpose has acted like a gravitational force driving our expansion in ways such as

• Attracting the right clients, partners, and product users.
• Attracting great team members.
• Navigating tough decisions or unexpected changes.
• Bouncing back from mistakes.
• Tying even seemingly mundane efforts to bigger goals.

Let’s turn to one other important shift in my mindset.

From Straight Line to Space-time

Even in successful businesses, revenue and profit charts rarely look like the ones you see in cartoons, with smooth lines pointing straight up.

Yet, as an enterepreneur, if your lines go up, down, and around instead, it’s easy to become frustrated, discouraged and even burned out. We all, whether business owners, investors, or partners, intuitively prefer an efficient line showing a steady increase in revenue and profit.?

Today, entrepreneurs can pick from more methods to accelerate growth than ever, from expanding to new markets to forming new partnerships to acquiring other companies. But, still, none of them guarantee straight upward lines on a revenue and profit chart.

So, I’ve had to adjust my mindset about the growth journey, to reconcile the difference between my intuition and the reality. I’ve found help from a surprising place—the counterintuitive theory of relativity, which led to the conceptual model of space-time. The model combines three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Theoretical physicist Sean Caroll explains in Quanta Magazine how this model turns the notion of “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line” on its head.

In space, a straight line describes the shortest distance between two points. In space-time, by contrast, a straight path yields the longest elapsed time between two events.

Carroll further describes why the straight path means more time.

Fix two events in space-time—two locations in space and corresponding moments in time. A traveler could make the journey between them in a straight line at constant velocity (whatever that velocity needs to be for them to arrive at the right time), or they could zip back and forth in a non-inertial path. The back-and-forth route will always involve more spatial distance, but less proper time elapsed, than the straight version…Paths of greater distance take less proper time.

The growth path for Content Science has been much more back and forth than linear. And I’m grateful. Without zipping back and forth, we would not have learned as many lessons, developed as many useful solutions or products, conducted as much research, worked with such diverse clients, developed as much patience, or accumulated as many valuable intangible assets in such a relatively short time. As it turns out, the zipping around has equipped Content Science to survive and thrive as we carry out our purpose.

I’m excited and honored to expand Content Science into new realms in 2023 and beyond. We have more big announcements coming throughout the year. In the meantime, here’s to growing your business and your life your way.