Years ago, I knew a dentist who loved his practice and spent many years working 70-80 hours a week in the office, seeing his many patients. But once he asked me, “Michael, why is my practice not growing?”
I didn’t know it at the time, but his practice was stagnating for the same reason many dedicated entrepreneurs also never see growth: becoming so busy working in the business that there’s no time to work on it.
When you first start your firm, it’s normal to be a one-man show — a Renaissance man who works dusk till dawn, seven days a week. That’s the dedication that starting a successful business requires from you.
But the same technique that got you to that initially successful firm won’t get you to grow it. After a certain point, it’s not about working harder, but about working smarter.
After earning that first six- or seven-figure revenue mark, working longer hours and spending more time micromanaging Teams, responding to every Slack, and leading every meeting won’t cut it.
If you want to take your small business to the next level, you have to stop thinking about the present and start thinking about the future. You need to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Consider: What do you need to upgrade and automate in your firm? Are there systems you could put in place to make everything more efficient? Maybe you need to hire someone to outsource some of your responsibilities. Maybe there are new technologies you’re not leveraging. Maybe you need to invest in team training and development. Maybe it’s all of the above.
Being a leader means seeing what your company needs to thrive in the long run — and implementing it.
It’s less asking, “What do we need today?” and more asking, “What are we going to need a year from now?”
At some point in every successful organization, you need to stop getting your hands dirty in the weeds and start getting them dirty in higher level strategy sessions.
This is exactly why we bring Crisp Coach members to workshops in Atlanta. Many firm owners ask us to make it convenient by doing it remotely. But we know that the second we agreed to that, people would try tuning into their workshop while constantly checking email and being active on Slack on the side — and that would defeat the whole purpose of taking a break, zooming out, and reframing your thinking.
If you never carve out the space to think at that level, growth becomes impossible. You stay busy instead of being effective. You stay reactive instead of intentional. You become the bottleneck without realizing it.
So if you find yourself buried all day in tasks, doing about the same things you did when you first started your business, and wondering why it’s not growing — you have the answer.
Real strategic thinking requires distance. Mental, physical, and even environmental, at times.
It requires you to stop being the only producer and the default problem-solver.
It requires you to stop reacting and start building instead.
