You're not behind. You're just too far ahead.
Growth done wrong looks like success … right up until it collapses.
The pressure to grow quickly is intense, but growing up fast isn’t always a good thing.
Our companies evolve just like us. They need to mature through necessary, sometimes awkward, stages—each with its own struggles and lessons.
When you skip stages, you also skip their wisdom.
I have a client who pushed his company to grow at lightning speed and by all external measures succeeded. He called and told me they had just raised a big round and doubled headcount. But his voice was full of anxiety, not satisfaction. The company had grown beyond its own capacity. They didn’t have the systems or experience to hold up all that growth. Now he felt their success threatened to slip away at any second.
This is one of the most common traps CEOs lay for themselves:
You beat yourself up for being behind.
You push yourself to grow as fast as possible.
You struggle, stress and burn out until you make it.
You end up right where you started: feeling inadequate, overwhelmed, and still behind.
Premature growth exposes every weakness you haven’t strengthened yet—in your systems, your team, and yourself.
This isn't personal failure. It’s far more boring: misalignment.
When your growth stage is out of step with your capacity, your company is like a toddler dressed up in adult clothing.
What feels like being behind is actually finding yourself too far ahead. Your job is to pull back. Forget about growth and align your company with its current capacity.
When you focus on capacity your company naturally matures. If you let it, each stage unlocks the next one.
The Root of Urgency
Founder and company evolve in parallel.
When you pressure yourself to skip ahead in personal growth, you push your company to do the same.
You both suffer.
This pressure starts with comparison.
Other people’s journeys can act as helpful models and guides, but only if you look at them in context. If you forget that they also went through the messy learning, comparison becomes detrimental.
You attempt the impossible: you try to do all the growing and skip all the learning. But you can’t live from the next version of yourself before you’ve built the capacity for it. Neither can your company.
It’s disorienting and frustrating following a vague sense of “more” or “faster.”
When you focus on the external, you lack the internal data to grow meaningfully.
Growing vs Growing Up
“Growing” just means getting bigger. Its movement without meaning.
No matter how fast you do it, it won’t get you where you want.
When I asked the CEO from earlier about his next steps, he showed me a mind map with 47 focus areas. He knew he was showing me chaos, but he couldn’t narrow it down.
When you don’t define your company’s developmental stage, everything looks important. Focus dissolves. There are a million directions to grow in, a million goals you could reach. You end up trying to do it all. That's not really leading.
“Growing up” requires intention and skill.
It’s growth plus vision.
Vision happens when you stop the mad rush and get some data:
What is my current growth stage?
Where am I ultimately headed? (what kind of company do I want to run? what is our overarching goal for the foreseeable future?)
What is the very next step (stage)?
Where do I need to build capacity to reach that next step?
These are simple questions, but they aren’t easy. They require you to be honest and realistic.
“Where are we actually,” not “where do I wish we were?”
But that “actually” is your ticket to that “wish.”
When you have a real understanding of where you are and where you’re going, you go from growing to maturing. This means building a company that is self-sustaining and self-propelling.
What looks like slowing down lets you move faster later—rather than back tracking.
Clarity Creates Clarity
Focusing on capacity is an investment in the future, but that investment comes with short term impact too.
It’s one thing to have a goal, it's another thing to try and live in the future. When you laser focus on speed your eyes get stuck on the horizon.
This creates confusion, not vision.
While you’re busy pushing your company to be better, you forget to define “better”. You don’t know where you’re going, you just know it's not where you are.
Instead of running the company you actually have, you start running some hypothetical company.
Potential problems look like real problems. Future tasks feel like pressing to-dos. You’re haunted by the feeling that no matter how busy you are, you’re always spending your time on the wrong thing.
When you shift your focus to capacity, the pressure drops.
Ground in reality, the number of “problems” shrinks. You know where and what you need to strengthen. Instead of spinning in aimless anxiety, you can have enough clarity to focus on solutions.
Clarity buoys you out of chaos—external and internal.
You no longer need to know every step, you just need to put one foot in front of the other.
Building Capacity
Here are some exercises to help shift your focus from growing to growing up.
1. Identify Your Stage
Most chaos comes from building for the wrong phase.
If you're busy trying to fix tomorrow’s problems with today’s tools, you’ll always feel behind.
Ask yourself:
What stage are we actually in? (Early build, growth engine, scale, or optimization?)
What are the three dominant problems that define this stage?
Are the problems I’m solving from this stage — or the one I wish I were in?
One founder I work with was hyper focused on growing their customer base. But when they finally checked how many people stayed, it became clear that growth wasn’t the problem, retention was. With this insight, they shifted their marketing strategy. Instead of trying to get more people, they could focus on reaching more of the right people. This created a bigger and more stable base.
2. Clarify Your Capacity Cap
Every company has a capacity cap: the maximum load your current systems, people, and mental energy can hold before quality drops.
Instead of resenting that limit, use it as an indicator for where you need to build.
Ask:
Where am I personally overextended?
What breaks first when things move fast?
How much time can I actually dedicate to these areas?
For example, if deadlines slip every time you take a week off, your capacity cap is leadership bandwidth, not demand. That’s a sign the next hire or system needs to reduce dependency on you, not expand output.
3. Build for the Next Stage
Once you know your current stage and your cap, you can build capacity intentionally.
Ask:
What does hitting the next stage unlock?
What new strengths or systems will we need to hold it?
How will I know when we’re there? (Pick one marker you can feel and one you can measure.)
At Joni, our next stage looked like getting a million customers. This number wasn’t growth for growth’s sake, it was about getting the leverage to support our growth. Before that point, big insurers kept trying to push us out of the way because we were changing the market too fast for their comfort. Crossing a million customers meant we had enough weight to hold our position.
Bringing it all together
Clarity gives growth meaning.
When you build capacity instead of forcing speed, your company matures naturally—and the work stops feeling like a race you can’t win.
That’s how you create a business you can finally steer.
This week, try doing a capacity audit:
Write one sentence describing the stage you’re in.
List the three dominant problems.
Circle the one that keeps reappearing (that’s the muscle you haven’t built yet).
Decide what skill, system, or hire would make that problem disappear permanently.
Block time on your calendar for it. If it’s not on your calendar, it’s not a priority.
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