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Last week, we explored the theme of speed and what can mean to you in business. You can read up on that here. This week, I want to follow up with growth and how to think about it in a sensible way.

In the entrepreneurship world, growth and speed are often intertwined. It’s not just about getting to 10x but also getting there fast.

Both are highly charged with different sets of believes, depending on the context you move in.

Growth in particular has a bad rap, which isn‘t helpful.

Marketing, at its core, is a growth activity. You market to help people find what you offer. Likely, you have dreams about the impact you want to create in the world. You also need more than one client to keep the doors open to your business.

At the same time, overly fixating on growth has detrimental effects on an individual and collective level.

What is healthy growth? Let‘s explore.

Is Growth Bad?

Growth is a challenging concept. A collective fixation on growth as the only measure for the health of an economy has wreaked havoc on the environment and people.

Yet, as business owners we welcome growth. We need it.

You’re here to learn more about marketing, after all. Marketing is a growth activity. You’re putting word out about your business so more people can buy from you, work with you, or read your newsletter. If you’re not comfortable with the notion of growth, it’s hard to be in business or market your services.

I think our challenges with growth primarily exist because we‘ve lost any healthy notions of growth, scale, and speed.

What If We Saw Growth as Something Cyclical?

I live in a place where natural cycles shape everyday life in profound ways. In spring, nature explodes, flowers shoot up everywhere, and seemingly overnight all trees are covered in verdant leaves. Summer brings with it languid days and maturation, while in the fall, nature’s slowdown becomes tangible. In winter, everything comes to a rest under thick blankets of snow.

Even in climates with less pronounced seasons, nature has its own rhythms and cycles. We think we don’t and that growth needs to be linear or exponential.

It can be. It can also happen fast. But it doesn’t have to.

When we make growth and speed the only yardsticks for business, we undermine a more sustainable pace of ebbs and flows, growth and plateaus, and becoming and unravelling in our businesses.

The more I observe my own past in business, the more I come to understand it as a cyclical activity. Sometimes, you charge ahead and sometimes, you need to take it slow and evaluate (like with my laptop kerfuffle last week).

For More Healthy Growth, Think of Your Business Like a Plant

Navigating growth and speed in a sustainable way takes a great amount of self-awareness. It makes no sense to negate or embrace these concepts wholesale.

Different people feel different levels of comfort with different levels of speed and growth. The key to long-term success is finding yours.

Just like a plant can’t bloom year-round, it’s unhealthy to expect every aspect of your business to flourish at all times and force that. It’s not sustainable in every sense of the word.

Looking at your business like a plant, can make it easier to come to a healthier understanding of growth.

Just like a plant your business needs:

Just like a plant, your business has cycles of growth, flourishing, shedding old leaves, and rest. So do you.

How to Find Your Best Level of Growth in Business

For a healthier relationship with growth, you can ask yourself these questions:

How I Intend to Approach It

As a parting thought, I want to share a bit about my own journey with growth. I went to school for politics and for a long time that informed my perception of growth. Namely, that it‘s bad. That‘s not great for business.

Then, I got sucked into the world of startups, VC, and online business and saw the other side of the growth coin. The potential these people saw felt alluring. It takes a certain type of person to hold a big vision and dare to go through with it - with all that entails, good and bad. That was interesting. At the same time, just as it doesn‘t help to reject growth entirely, chasing after it at all cost doesn‘t feel healthy to me.

For me, now, I intend to embrace two things:

I‘m more aware of creating streamlined offers. Previously, I didn‘t and needed to trim my figurative business tree a lot.

Now, I feel I have a greater sense of clarity about what I want and what feels manageable. I‘d love for this newsletter to explode this fall and serve more solopreneurs, for example. Equally, I‘m not willing to force it at all cost - gritted teeth, 12-hour days, and everything.

A big part of why I‘m an entrepreneur is because it gives me an opportunity to channel my creativity and introduce new ideas to the world. I want those to spread, though not on a timeline somebody else sets for me (10x in 2 months, etc.).

What do you think? I‘m curious to hear your thoughts on growth and how you embrace it in your business.

Happy Marketing 📣,

Johanna

PS: Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think it might benefit. Thank you for helping these ideas spread!

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