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THE GROWTH CYCLE: HOW TO SCALE WITHOUT BREAKING YOUR BUSINESS
The Growth Cycle: How to Scale Without Breaking Your BusinessLast week, we talked about the Operating Cycle and **how rhythm and discipline turn plans into predictable performance. When that rhythm becomes culture, execution becomes effortless. This week, we close out the series by looking at what comes next: the Growth Cycle. When you start with Planning, you gain clarity. When you move into Operating, you build rhythm. And when you reach Growth, you create momentum. Everyone loves growth. It’s the reward for all the planning and operating work you’ve done. But growth has a funny way of showing you where you’re still weak. It magnifies every gap in your systems, every leadership limitation, and every crack in your cash flow. Growth isn’t just about doing more… it’s about doing better, at scale. It’s about expanding intentionally, not accidentally. The same energy that drives you forward can just as easily pull you apart if it isn’t managed with discipline. The Growth Cycle is where your systems, leadership, and finances are stress-tested. It’s about scaling what works, fixing what breaks, and learning how to grow without losing what made you successful in the first place. A healthy Growth Cycle focuses on three outcomes:
When you’re built for scalability, have the capital to keep going, and the proper risk planning to avoid catastrophe, the growth cycle can be “always on.” Today, we’ll talk about the core drivers of the growth cycle and how to build a culture that can handle it. THE CORE DRIVERS OF THE GROWTH CYCLEThe three core drivers, as I see it, in the growth cycle are:
We’re going to hit lightly on these first two, as I think they’re pretty self-explanatory (and don’t have as much of a finance lean), then spend more on capital, since this is where we excel. CAPACITYYou can’t scale chaos. You can only scale predictability. True capacity is holistic: sales, marketing, operations, finance, and delivery all need to expand in sync. When one area races ahead of the others, imbalance creates friction: overpromising to customers, underdelivering on projects, or straining cash flow. That means:
Capacity is gained by the ability for all departments to scale in unison. If one lags, that limits your capacity and creates stress on the business. That turns into delivery delays, overworked teams, and missed opportunities. Capacity that grows together keeps the business stable and scalable. CAPABILITYCapability is about increasing both value creation and market reach. It’s not just about doing more but about doing better. This can look like:
Marketing and sales are the levers that convert operational excellence into momentum. They turn readiness into revenue. Without a strong marketing engine, most growth is temporary. You can grow well with referrals and good work, but at some point every business outgrows that momentum. CAPITALEvery growth story is a cash story. Growth consumes cash long before it produces it. Expansion requires working capital, and poor planning here turns opportunity into crisis. So to grow well, we have to manage our capital well. I can’t stress how important it is to know where your money is coming from and where it is going during a growth cycle. The two most important things to focus on in managing capital are: Maintaining cash discipline and “mapping” your capital. This looks like: Managing working capital aggressively. In growth mode, liquidity can evaporate quickly.
The tighter your working capital discipline, the longer your runway. Forecasting your cash like a CFO. A 13-week cash flow forecast isn’t just a tool for stability: it’s a growth weapon. Use it to anticipate cash needs ahead of expansion. Build scenario models: best case, likely case, and worst case. The goal is to know your next 90 days before you start your next 12 months. You can read more about this here. Balancing reinvestment with return and stability. Growth requires reinvestment, but not all reinvestments are equal. Ask:
Discipline here is what separates sustainable growth from cash-hungry chaos. Choosing the right funding mix (debt, equity, retained earnings) for your stage. Debt can accelerate growth or crush it. Align repayment schedules with the cash flow generated by the investments they fund. Use lines of credit for timing gaps, not operating losses. And never mistake access to capital for capacity to grow. Think in terms of matching funding to length of asset: long-term assets to long-term money (5/10 year+ loans) and short term initiatives funded from cash flows. Preserving optionality. The best operators always leave room to maneuver by building liquidity buffers and maintaining borrowing capacity. The ability to act fast when opportunity arises, or pull back when risk appears, is the hallmark of strategic capital management. This means not leveraging to the gills and understanding when it’s time to keep extra borrowing capacity. — A business that manages capital well earns the right to keep growing. This is where a fractional CFO can be invaluable, because they can leverage their experience to help you navigate areas you’ve not had to in the past. Managing capital in the Growth Cycle isn’t about chasing more but instead ensuring every dollar you deploy works harder than the last. A GROWTH CULTUREThe mechanics of growth build momentum. The culture of growth sustains it. Ultimately, as with so many other things in business, a good growth culture requires good leadership. Growth exposes misalignment fast and good leaders ensure there isn’t misalignment. The right leadership keeps focus sharp and execution steady. Good leaders also help make sure growth doesn’t outpace the business. This can be done with pauses for reflection and feedback loops. Don’t run so fast that you forget to look around. Intentional pauses to assess what’s working and what’s not helps ensure the team can identify if something is “off” early. Just as growth compounds, mistakes during growth compound. It doesn’t take long to get off track and ultimately kill your growth. Last, but probably the most important piece to a growth culture, is understanding risk. Growth without risk awareness is gambling. The same speed that creates momentum can also create fragility. To manage risk during growth, we have to be on the lookout for the types of things growth exposes us to:
Growth magnifies fragility. Know where you’re vulnerable before it matters. — Over the past few weeks, as I’ve talked about the planning and operating cycles, I’ve gotten more positive feedback than usual. It seems to have hit a nerve. I hope this delivers for you just as those did. Ultimately, as I said at the beginning, these cycles aren’t always consecutive or in a specific order. I’ve thought about whether or not there is an ideal order, but I really don’t think there is. Sometimes you’ll enter a planning cycle and be able to go directly into a growth cycle. Other times you’ll go from a planning into an operating cycle and then a growth cycle. Others, you’ll go from a growth cycle to an operating cycle back to a growth cycle. But if you do it right, your planning cycle will stay on an annual cadence. Your operating cycle will never stop because you have a great team. And your growth cycle will just keep compounding. But even when they’re stacked, within those stacked cycles, there will be sprints to accomplish certain things. My hope is that by walking through this, we’ve equipped you to (1) identify what cycle you’re in and (2) the path to get to the next cycle. I’d love to hear your feedback! Has this illuminated why past failures happened? Where you are now? Where you’re going next? Reply to this email and I’d love to have a conversation. Next week we’re going to start something new. I won’t spoil it now, but I think you’ll love it. Talk soon. Thanks for reading–see you next week, Work with meNeed more than this newsletter? You may not know, I have other ways we can work together. Check them out:
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