Do any research on the stages of business growth, and you’ll see something like this:
Startup -> Growth -> Maturity -> Renewal
It makes sense. It’s easy to understand and maybe easy to see where your business fits because you can compare your revenue, team size, and market presence to the descriptions for each stage.
But there’s one thing these definitions of the stages of business growth ignore. They ignore you, the owner and leader of the organization.
This is a huge missing piece. Not all business owners are the same, obviously, yet descriptions of the stages of business growth don’t even try to capture those differences.
Why do some owners move easily through the stages and others keep finding themselves stuck even when they’re using the same strategies?
What Do the Stages of Business Growth Measure?
In general, they measure the external features of a business. Things like revenue range, team size, market position and operational complexity. This can be very helpful for planning.
But it doesn’t tell you whether you, the leader, are ready to navigate the next stage or even the stage you’re currently in.
And that’s because every stage of a business requires a different version of the owner. Yes, I’m talking about identity and not just skills. The new identity can show up in things like risk tolerance and willingness to let go of what worked in the past.
A business can only grow as much as the owner is willing to grow.
Here’s why.
The business doesn’t make the decisions. You do.
It also doesn’t evaluate risk, choose which clients to pursue, decide when to hire or what to charge, or whether to hold the line on a boundary that’s costing you revenue. All of this is up to you, which means every single one of those decisions is filtered through your current level of development as a leader.
When that filter is limited, the business is limited. Yet the owner of every business that’s plateaued, including me, looks at external factors as the issue. So, we look at the market, the strategy, or the team’s abilities before looking at ourselves for the root cause of the limitation.
This is the mechanism. This is why your business can’t outgrow you.
Why Do Business Owners Keep Hitting a Ceiling Even When They’ve Broken Through One Or More?
The answer is uncomfortable. Growth doesn’t repeat exactly the same lesson. It just presents what’s next.
When you resolve one ceiling, the business can move forward and grow. Until a new edge, limit, or lesson appears.
And this one won’t look like the last one.
This is what the traditional stages of business growth miss. They treat growth as linear. You climb the ladder from one rung to the next, and the next, and … What actually happens is more like a cycle, and the owner is the common thread in every iteration of it.
In addition, you don’t get to just bust through a ceiling once because it can show up differently again and again as you grow.
The Limiting Belief That Followed Me Across Two Businesses
I’ve watched this play out for me across two entirely different businesses. Looking back, I can clearly see that the same limiting belief was running behind the scenes even though the circumstances were entirely different.
I was a divorce coach the first time I saw this limiting belief show up. I thought I was doing everything I was supposed to, but my income stayed low for years.
What I didn’t understand then was that I was operating under a belief that I’d absorbed as a child: sales were beneath me. I came from a family that used to believe STEM careers were the only ones that were safe. Every other career was not as important, especially sales.
I wasn’t aware of the bias I held. It’s what drove me, at the age of 15, to decide that I would get my doctorate in chemical engineering and then get it.
And when I started my first business, divorce coaching, that belief was underneath every decision I made. It kept me waiting for business to come to me instead of going after it. Then, when it didn’t come, I found ways to explain that away instead of seeing what was really happening.
So, instead of learning sales, I learned SEO and content marketing. It was easy for me and allowed me to stand up and grow another business. This business got good traction, and I felt like things were actually going in the direction I wanted. I felt safe.
And all of that ended when two anchor clients, representing 50% of my revenue, left within 4 months of each other. YIKES!
Yes, I was afraid. How was I going to recover from this? I didn’t know how or when my next client would show up.
Gradually, I recognized something I didn’t want to see. I was still operating from the belief that if business didn’t just come to me naturally, it simply wasn’t going to.
My actions and inactions proved that I still believed selling was beneath me!
As soon as I recognized that the same belief that made my divorce coaching practice difficult was showing up again in my SEO and content marketing business, I knew I had to change.
I decided to learn sales, so I could serve more people and stabilize my income. And this is the exact moment when I shed the belief that I unconsciously learned as a child.
Can a Strong Team Mask an Owner’s Growth Ceiling?
Yes, and it’s one of the more expensive ways a growth ceiling can remain hidden.
When you have capable people around you, they can keep things moving even when you may not be able to because of your limits. The business numbers will look reasonable, and you won’t feel stuck because your team is compensating for your shortcomings.
That is, until they can’t compensate anymore.
There’s always a time when the next business growth stage requires something only the owner can provide. It might be a direction, a decision, or a willingness to step into something new. And when that moment requires you to fundamentally change your role, not just your tactics, the team can’t do it for you.
This is why your internal work and your business’s growth can’t be easily separated. The idea that you fix yourself first and then grow the business is a pipedream. They happen together and not always at the same pace. In the best scenario, the tension between the two different growth rates can propel you and your business forward.
Or it can happen more slowly, as mine did, because of my unawareness of the personal growth I needed.
Awareness of the Cycle Isn’t the Same as Seeing Where You Are in It
Understanding everything I’ve just described won’t show you where you’re stuck. And that’s just how this works.
The same belief that cost me years of income across two businesses was invisible to me. Both times, it took someone else’s reflections for me to name why I was stumbling. I was just too close to see it for myself.
This is what the knowing-doing gap looks like. You genuinely can’t see what needs to change because everything is normal for you.
McKinsey’s research on leadership and growth found that leaders who believe they’ve adopted a productive mindset for growth don’t consistently translate that belief into the behaviors that actually move the business. Awareness and action aren’t the same thing.
That’s the problem with identifying head trash. It doesn’t feel like a distortion. It’s just your reality. And here’s the sneaky part about it: the more capable you are, the better you are at creating reasonable explanations for staying exactly where you are.
Getting stuck in the growth cycle for yourself or your business usually looks like a revenue plateau. And it can cost you years, as it did for me.
The hardest part is that it doesn’t feel like you’re stuck in a learning curve. It feels like you’re working really hard, trying all the right things, and that you’re almost there. Being stuck in a growth cycle feels like a strategy problem. But it’s not about the strategy, it’s about you.
What Changes When the Owner Grows to Match the Business Growth Stage?
The business gets bigger and clearer.
Decisions that used to require enormous effort start to feel easier and more straightforward. The team starts owning their work instead of waiting for you to step in.
And when you’ve been through this often enough, you’ll start welcoming the stall, the feeling of stuckness, the plateau, because you recognize it as simply information that it’s time for you to grow again. This is what all of the business growth strategies that actually work have in common.
If your business is at a plateau right now or things aren’t moving the way you need them to, it’s the perfect time to ask yourself if it’s the strategy or the person running the strategy that needs to change. In my work with clients, it’s rarely the strategy.
Ready to take that question on? Let’s talk. Schedule a 15-minute call.
