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How Startups Grow Fast Without Imploding
You need to strike a balance between growth and profitability from the earliest stages of your company
You’ve been taught to believe that your business can either grow or it can remain profitable. Doing both at the same time may seem like a circus-level juggling act — but it can be done.
For a startup to grow, money has to be spent and resources have to be diverted. Everyone — from the highest to the lowest levels of the company — has to take on several responsibilities at the same time. All of them are top priority. And not all of them will be done well.
For a startup to remain profitable, customers have to be the company’s main priority. They have to have their needs met, and they have to be thrilled with the experience of how those needs are met. They expect one thing. They expect that one thing to be done well. And they don’t want excuses when that thing isn’t done well.
Growth is a sprint, and profitability is a marathon. The paradox is unfortunate, but at least the solution is simple: If you want your startup to grow, you need to stop pleasing your customers.
Blasphemy!
I hear you. I’m a customer-first entrepreneur and have always been. But here’s the unpleasant truth: Pleasing your customers takes 100% of your focus at all times. It means doing everything 100% right at 100% capacity with 100% efficiency. And if you have any time left over, that time will be spent coming up with ways to push customer satisfaction to 100%, the one true path to profitability.
But growth requires experimentation. It mandates doing new things in new ways, moving fast, breaking stuff, and apologizing later. None of this is good for the customer, and thus, none of this is good for profitability.
Everyone tells you to think like the customer, to put the customer first, that the customer is king. And I’m totally with them on that.
But here’s the problem: When I say a business can either grow or remain profitable, the reverse of that is also true. If all we’re doing is pleasing our customers, then we’ve taken our eyes off of growth. That’s a death sentence for any business, no matter what stage it…
