How to grow your business when you can do anything
- Lucy
- Jan 20
- 9 min read
Updated: May 22
This year is the first year I feel like I’m growing my business rather than building it. And that means it’s the first year that it’s really hit me how I can actually do anything to grow my own success.
I work for myself, which means no one above me is handing down objectives or deciding what matters this year. It’s down to me to choose what I work on, who I work with, and how I grow. Which is quite a lot when you really sit with it.
In the corporate world, even when things feel chaotic, there are guardrails. Someone else is responsible for setting the company’s mission, and the leadership team’s priorities will trickle down to guide you in setting your own KPI’s. The field of what’s possible is narrowed, and you’re told, explicitly or not, where to focus your energy.
But there’s no inherited structure with self-employment. If you want to pivot your services, you can. If you want to launch something new, you can. If you want to burn everything down and start again, technically, you can (we’ve all been there).
When you start your business, the guardrails are fairly simple. You usually begin with something you know how to do, or something you’re willing to learn quickly. You find a product or a service that sits at the intersection of your skills and someone else’s need. You look for people who are willing to pay for that thing. And that’s enough to get moving.
But as you build your business and it becomes unique to you, there’s less and less templates to follow on what’s the right next step. At the end of last year, I found myself repeatedly questioning what I should focus on next. Thinking into if I was missing opportunities or should be doing something more or different. When every option is available, it’s hard to pick just one. (And probably the core reason why so many of us fall victim to burnout).
Growth is overwhelming when you have too many ideas
Research into entrepreneurial overwhelm often points to choice overload rather than workload as the real issue.
As you grow your business, you understand your industry better and can spot opportunities where you couldn’t before. It’s a good thing you have a longer list of things you could do, but without a way to prioritise, it will quickly turn into a lot of noise.
I myself have been stuck in circles seeing advice to launch products, launch a new service, reduce my services down to one signature service, and the worse one, sell a course.
When there isn’t a straight path forward, it’s common to review every single path available.
So if you were like me, this is the path I have formed myself to work through the next step of my business.
I’ve kept this purposefully quite top line to allow you space to think about your own business and goals, so see this as an overall caveat that this is of course not in depth and there’s a lot more to do beyond what I could fit in a substack article.
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Your scaling guardrails
My first question in any strategy thinking is always: why.
1. Why do you want to scale?
Is there a bigger goal you have for the future? Is something not working right now?
This is a pretty big question (or questions) to answer, and so I find it best to address this by focusing on a week in my life right now, and how I want a week in my life to look like in 1 or 3 years time, depending on how big of a change you’re wanting for your business.
For example, right now, a week for me looks like working on client projects pretty much 10am-6pm Monday to Friday. I preach about taking time away from your desk, but I often don’t manage this once I get into a flow with work. So I am pretty good at taking myself out for a longer walk or run first thing in the morning and starting that bit later so I feel less guilt if I then chain myself to my desk for 8 hours. Typically, I work about two evenings a week and likely a few hours on a weekend, also, which is when I give myself time to work on my business. Writing articles like this (it’s currently Sunday morning for me, and I’m planning to post this on Tuesday), planning any social media content, organising my accounts.
In a years time, I want to get to the point where I have a dedicated day each week that is for working ON my business. An actual mid-week day that isn’t a Sunday or an evening, reducing my client work to four days a week. I’d also like to be able to do my exercise class in the middle of the day sometimes, rather than the evening, or actually try to do those screen breaks I always promise myself.
(This makes my life sound incredibly boring. I promise I do have a life outside of work that includes many glasses of wine, friend catch-ups, date nights, and holidays. But that’s besides the point for this. I’m not here to preach a digital nomad lifestyle, I’m talking about the actual work you’re doing).
Comparing these two weekly overviews shows me that the real reason I need to scale is to gain more flexibility and better work-life balance. Which means for every further scaling decision I make, I can bring myself back to this core goal by asking myself, “Will this choice help me to improve my work-life balance?” That’s a pretty basic example, but you get the idea.
2. What does this look like in practice?
Once you understand why you want to scale, it’s time to think about what that looks like. There’s two angles to this: your business model, and your business operations. Both are incredibly important, but the top priority for you will depend on your goals.
A) Business model
This is about the services and products you offer, the prices of these, your target customer, and all the foundational business elements.
What services and products are you offering?
What is your business actually offering? Perhaps your future vision is not be working on a certain service anymore if you no longer enjoy it. Or you want to offer something entirely new. Maybe it includes you stretching to offer products to get that ever-elusive ‘passive income’ goal.
What prices will get you to this goal?
If your future vision includes more money, price is a big one, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a price increase. For me, I have one particular service that takes up far too much time for the price I charge. Simply stopping that and replacing that time with a higher revenue-return service, would increase my overall earnings by working the same number of hours.
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What customer are you targeting?
Is your future vision still focusing on the same target customer? Sometimes scaling means targeting a higher-end customer or a more specific type of business you want to work with. There’s so many things to then think about if it is a new customer you need to target, but that’s for a separate conversation. So for now, just reflect on if you do need a new target market.
There’s again, of course, a lot more to your business model, but I find these three to be a great starting point. There are many many fancy tools and workshops out there to help you with this, but my best advice is to go by gut feeling:
When you imagine yourself doing a set of services in the future, how does that honestly make you feel? Excitement, dread, concern, eagerness? If you’re not looking forward to doing them now, you won’t enjoy doing them later.
When you imagine yourself stating a price for said service on a sales call, how does that make you feel? If you feel like the price is too high, you won’t be able to confidently deliver it as you won’t believe in it yourself. Choose a price that you can confidently say, and that you fully believe is reflective of the quality of your work.
When you imagine yourself talking to a certain customer, how does that make you feel? You want customers you can feel like you connect with, build up a relationship with, honestly want to attract. So make sure you’re targeting people you want to engage with.
B) Your business operations
How will this growth be sustainable?
If you’re thinking about scaling, you need to really consider the unsexy part of how it will actually work.
For example, if you want to increase the volume into your business, do you have the operations, systems, and structure in place to support this?
If you want to target a higher end client, will you need to get slicker onboarding and invoicing in place to look more professional?
If you want to decrease your time working on the business, does future you have an assistant or increase in team members to help you achieve this?
In order for your scaling to be sustainable, you have to both think about if it’s sustainable to you, to avoid you getting overwhelmed or burnt out, and if it’s sustainable for your customers, to avoid giving clients a poor customer experience and losing out on inbound from referrals or gathering poor reviews.
Rather than overwhelming yourself by writing an endless list of things you could do, I recommend keeping a fresh page in your notebook or on your notes app over the course of the next few weeks. Every time you do an action that you think will need to be improved or streamlined in order to meet that future vision, note it down. For example, if you’re manually sending out an invoice that takes you too long, write that down. You don’t need to solutionise immediately (that could either be software like Dubsado that supports automated invoicing or an assistant to do the task for you), but having a clear list of business operations to address, built up from your real life experience, will then help you to prioritise that once it’s complete.
3. How do I get there?
Once you’ve defined your why and your what, it’s all down to the how. The how is primarily through marketing. And within that, it’s mainly down to where do you show up and what do you talk about.
Where to show up
I don’t believe in being everywhere, because unless you have a marketing team behind you that’s not sustainable. But you do have to be where your customers are, and you have to give the channel(/s) you pick your best shot.
Marketing is not an overnight game, so my general advice is unless you can honestly stick with something for at least 6 months, don’t start.
If you’re going to launch a weekly newsletter, can you honestly keep up getting that out every week for 6 months? Or can you definitely post on Instagram twice a week for the same time period? Without consistency, you’re never going to see results or get the data to know if something works or not.
How to show up
Depending on your overall future vision goal, building your online presence is as much about selling as it is about building your reputation. If your future vision includes you speaking at events or working with the press, you need your online presence to build the reputation that you want and need it to.
If you need to increase volume into your business, how do you increase your visibility online? A lot of the time this is trial and error. So start by posting something and see how that goes. Then post something else and see if it performs better or worse. There’s an incredible amount of marketing advice out there, but often the best way to show up is to show up as yourself. If you try to force yourself into a marketing style that doesn’t come naturally to you, not only will your audience likely tell, you won’t be likely to keep it up.
You can’t actually do everything
Scaling can seem daunting with an endless list of options, but really you only have a maximum of three ways to improve. Positioning it that way makes it seem much more manageable.
Instead of a boss dictating your limits, focus on your customers and personal goals, allowing them to set the guardrails. Take time to review the plan you’ve already devised for building your business, and let it steer your next move. And always remember to keep your primary reason for scaling in mind, as identifying what is truly worth building is your most important step.
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