You Can Do Everything “Right” In Business and Still Build Yourself a Very Efficient Cage
You plan. You forecast. You annual-plan the hell out of it. You try to be “realistic.” And without realizing it, you shrink the goal down to fit what you already know how to build.
Practicality is great… right up until it becomes a ceiling.
A lot of founders confuse growth with scale because of this. The business gets bigger, but the way it works stays the same.
So let’s do something that feels irresponsible for about thirty seconds.
Forget about the plan. Forget your mental roadmap. Just go 10× bigger and ask, how could this actually work?
That’s exactly where this shows up in real life.
I had a client come into a planning session last month with a goal: increase revenue 20%.
Solid, right?
He was already deep in the weeds operationally. Working himself out of that was the whole point of what we were doing together.
And his plan to hit that 20% growth? Do more of what's already burying him.
The math doesn't work.
He's on a treadmill. Already running fast. And now he wants to run faster.
Where does that end? Especially when the goal is to stop being the bottleneck.
We talked about it. He kept circling back to the same thinking.
To actually change the situation, you can't just write a goal and go back to doing the same thing Monday.
You're going to have to change the way this business works.
So I pushed him.
Forget 20%. What if the goal was 3× that?
And I could see it, he was still trying to figure out how to run three times faster.
Same treadmill. Same legs. Just... faster somehow.
So I went further: What if it was 20×?
And that's when it made sense.
If he had to go 20 times faster, he'd need something completely different. A motorcycle. Or a vehicle. Not faster legs.
Growth keeps you focused on improving what already exists.
Scale forces you to question whether the way the business works still makes sense at all.
I had Dr. Benjamin Hardy on The Business Owner's Journey to talk about exactly this.
His 10× framework removes the scaffolding most of us build around goals. You start with a target that's bigger than your current setup, then work backward to see what would actually need to change.
It exposes which paths can support the outcome and which ones can't, no matter how familiar they are.
I went into the conversation sensing I'd fallen into this pattern myself. Asking "What can we do with what we've got?" instead of "What do we want, then how do we get it?"
Dr. Hardy pushed me further than I expected, especially around how much involvement I was still assuming was necessary.
That’s why I wanted to have this conversation on the podcast.
It’s a simpler way to look at how we’re trying to accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish.
