I Didn't Take The Stairs. I Took A Rocket Ship.

Six Fridays ago I told you about the year I turned over $10M for the first time… and lost $200k.

Five emails since, all pieces of the same machine.

Reading your P&L.
Cashflow visibility.
Protecting margin.
Retention before acquisition.
Removing yourself as the bottleneck.

This one explains how they all failed at once.

Here's the framework...

Every growing business is under pressure. That part is unavoidable, and it isn't the problem.

But there are two kinds of pressure, sitting at opposite ends of a spectrum.

Pressure 1: Under-resourced

You're stretched. Lean. Doing too much with too little. It's uncomfortable, and it has a real cost - your team burns out and your culture suffers. And you're consistently turning down work that you just don't have the capacity to deliver.

Pressure 2: Over-resourced

You've taken on overheads, headcount, premises and commitments you now have to grow into. The machine has to be fed. So you start saying yes to everything, because you need the revenue. And with that, goes your leverage.

Both ends carry a cost. But they are not equal.

Under-resourced costs you comfort. You keep your optionality, and the problem stays manageable.

Over-resourced costs you your decision-making. Every choice becomes a short-term one, made to service the overhead rather than build the business.

Which is why the goal isn't to eliminate pressure. It's to stay on the under-resourced side of that spectrum, deliberately, while you grow.

So how do you cross from one side of the spectrum to the other without meaning to?

You take the lift instead of the stairs.

The stairs are one step at a time. One small overhead, brought on when you can genuinely afford it, sitting inside a percentage of revenue you've already decided is acceptable. Then the next one. Then the next.

The lift is multiple levels at once. The lease, the hires, the equipment, the fit-out - all committed to on the strength of a forecast rather than what the business is actually producing today.

The lift feels like ambition. It's usually just optimism with a signature on it.

And here's what happened to me.

I didn't just take the lift. I got in a rocket ship and took it to the moon.

Growth was fast, which meant finance was easy to access. And because the money was available, I took on overhead at a rate the business had no business supporting.

I had no P&L guardrails. No idea what any of it should cost as a percentage of revenue. No visibility on cashflow. No culture foundation underneath any of it.

I made every mistake in this series simultaneously, and the growth hid all of them.

Then I landed on the wrong end of the spectrum, and the thing I lost wasn't money... it was leverage.

Every decision from that point was made to service the overhead. Short-term, defensive, and always about keeping the thing fed rather than building it properly.

And then COVID arrived.

By then I had no room to move at all. The overhead was so significant that survival was the only strategy available to me.

That's the real cost of the wrong end of the spectrum. Not the expense. The fact that when something goes wrong - and something always goes wrong - you have no options left.

So here's this whole 6-part series in one question.

Where does your business sit on that spectrum right now?

If you're stretched, uncomfortable, and doing too much with too little, you're in the right place. Uncomfortable is survivable.

If you're saying yes to work you don't want, at prices you don't like, to service commitments you've already made, you're on the wrong end.

And every week you stay there, your options narrow.

Take the stairs.

One step at a time, at a pace the business can actually carry.

Because the goal is never to grow as fast as possible.

It is to still have choices when it matters.

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.