The expectations vs. reality of fast business growth (aka. The time I became an “Overnight Success”)

I had a few people when my business grew really quickly in 2020. I had a few people refer to me as an overnight success and it was kind of funny because I'd already been in business for four years at that point.

>> Click here to listen to the podcast on your app of choice <<

The expectations vs. reality of fast business growth (aka. The time I became an “Overnight Success”)

 

When I first started my first ever business back in 2016, all of the people I had followed up to that point and the people who inspired me, all had these awesome stories of rapid business growth and rapid success and they filled this need that the market had and it just grew exponentially and because of all of these stories, I told myself that anything other than fast growth was a failure.

So when my first business grew too slowly, when I came up against too many challenges I realized it was going to take a lot more to scale it than I had expected. It wasn't a great business model in the first place. The profitability of it was pretty questionable and I just didn't really enjoy running it but in my mind, it had failed because it was growing too slowly.

My second business was growing really slowly as well and I pivoted it because it didn't feel like it was growing fast enough and I was stuck in that messy middle for too long.

My third business is my current one. That one grew slowly and in the first one or two years, there were so many times when I wanted to close it down, there are times when I wanted to do different things and I was experimenting. In 2019, total business revenue was a hundred thousand dollars. It's the classic overnight success story, right? And when I shared my story on social media, I got a lot of people unfollowing me because maybe it triggered them that it grew really quickly. Maybe it triggered them that I was talking about money.

I also got a lot of people calling me an overnight success, which it definitely wasn't. But at the same time, I want to recognize that I achieved that elusive million-dollar revenue goal, a lot quicker than many other people in the online business space. To me, who can't crack 300,000 or 500,000 or 700,000? My business did all of that. In one year, it crack 700 in one go but it wasn't all sunshine and butterflies.

 

Pros and Cons of rapid growth and how it has affected my business

 

Pros

 

It's validation that you are onto something good

When you have that fast growth, it's that rapid feedback of “let's keep moving in this direction because this is working.” Whereas when it's growing a little bit slower, you don't always know if it's because it's just slow growth or if it's because there's no product-market fit. You might tweak something and you'll see that the slow growth becomes quicker.

 

It felt really good

It felt good to finally hit something that felt right. It felt motivating. Everything clicked into place and I know some people spend years trying different things to get to this point where it clicks.

 

It pushes you to grow before you are ready

We upper limit ourselves. We do this a lot in a business where we're only comfortable with 300,000 business revenue. I'm only comfortable with 500 but when you have such fast growth, you have no choice but to grow to your new limit. Now, my business makes a million dollars a year and that feels comfortable to me but if you had told me back in 2019 that my business is going to make a million dollars next year, I would feel like I am not ready for that right now.  So it pushes you to grow yourself, your business, your ability to accept what feels comfortable.

 

It showed me what I don't want in my business

It helped me to realise that I don't want a super complicated business with a million different products. I would rather have two or three products that I can rely on to generate good revenue, rely on to get my students really good results rather than a million different things, a million different directions.

 

Cons

 

You might don't have the systems and structures in place to scale sustainably

You might not have the team required to support you to scale that quickly. I was left scrambling when we grew so quickly. I have to delegate all of the customer support tasks and bring in somebody else to do that. So I'm not sitting in the customer support inbox, replying to 20 people a day. Whereas with that, those first few months of really fast growth, I was the only person doing that.

There's always going to be that small percent of those people who buy from you who are not going to be happy no matter what you do. It's really hard though and I think getting customer support off my plate was probably one of the best things I could have done for my mental health at that point in time, you might also be forced to hire quicker than you are ready for, which I guess is a pro.

 

Burnout and exhaustion mindset

I experienced all those to some degree. I was just feeling like I have no energy left for anything else in my business and it took about six months before I could actually do something in my business. I was just sitting there the first couple of months, too afraid to do anything in case I broke it and that actually forced me to do a lot of things that made me self-sabotage a lot of the success that we were having.

 

Less sustainable than slow growth

Slow growth can be sustained over the longer-term whereas fast growth sometimes is unsustainable.

 

How the fast growth in 2020 and 2021 affected my business as it is today in 2022

 

I feel so much pressure to keep growing and keep smashing goals

Growth isn't linear. There are a lot of things outside of my control. We have raised our Facebook ad costs, which have affected my business so much and there we realise that people are spending money on the things like in-person services and travel things, they are prioritising those experiences rather than online learning and educating themselves.

I don't expect that our product is going to be the product that sustains our growth into the future. It was the right product that people needed two years ago and people will still need it.

Now for most of us, this will be the first recession that we go into as business owners and I'm not going to be all doom and gloom because there are still going to be businesses that thrive in a recession. It's out of our control.

 

We have to take steps back to move forward

It goes along with that non-linear growth. Sometimes you have to take those steps back and accept that you're not going to smash every single goal that you want to smash.

As I mentioned, I had that unsustainable growth that showed me where we need to make changes to create sustainable growth. Now, one of the areas that I've realised is something that needs to change here, is that my business is so bloated in expenses.

 

How can we minimize expenses so that we become a more sustainable business? What would I do differently?

This is something that I consider quite a lot knowing that if I knew that 2020 was going to be such a rapid growth year, what would I do differently? From the start of my business, what would I do differently heading into that year?

 

I would start by scaling my business

Like a real business with systems, procedures and all of that. If you are not doing all of this, now you are setting yourself up to stay a tiny business or a small business, or setting yourself up to stay where you are right now in the long run.

Setting up systems and procedures might not feel like an urgent task but suddenly when we had that growth, it will become an urgent task. So if you can do those now, do it. It's going to make your life so much easier. Make sure you have those standard operating procedures for your customer support before you start thinking about scaling because customer support is the one thing that scales really badly with your business.

Always remember those little stones in your shoe. When you are a small business, those stones become urgent blisters that you need to fix so they will scale with you. So if we can fix the stones in the shoes now, while you are small or whatever size you are, scale it so it doesn't amplify those problems.

Also when you're choosing software that scales, make sure you're choosing one that doesn't become ridiculously expensive when you hit a certain number of students.

 

I would prioritize looking after myself first

I was still a little bit in the corporate mindset that I had to be chained to my desk all day. I still sometimes feel that, oh, it's 11:00 AM and I'm not at my desk. That's really bad and I guilt myself into it.

But when you're running a business and especially when you are scaling your business, looking after yourself first is so important because it's putting your own oxygen mask on first. You can't be that leader that you need to be, or whatever you need to be in your business for it to scale. So take that time to rest and look after yourself.

 

I would make peace

I felt so much fear in everything I was doing. What if it goes away, I'm so scared that it's going to all disappear and I'm too scared to do anything that is going to break it. So, what I would do differently is I would make peace with the fact that it might not last forever. That rapid growth might not last forever because remember rapid growth is not always sustainable.

Rather than acting from a fear of what if it goes away, I would accept it and I would make decisions from a place of what feels good. What do I want to do? What do I want my business to look like?

Those are the pros and the cons of overnight success and rapid growth.

 

Pin this?