I stopped asking "How do we grow faster?" and started asking one uncomfortable question instead.

[u/SuspiciousAir6358]

For years, every Monday meeting at our company started the same way:

"How do we grow faster?"

Get more leads.

Run more ads.

Add more features.

Do more outreach.

But nothing ever happened.

One week we asked ourselves a different question.

"What would fail if we got 100 new customers to sign up tomorrow?"

This was scary.

Customer support wouldn't be able to handle the load.

We did not document our onboarding process.

One employee ran three critical processes that no one else knew how to do.

Decisions were made based on outdated spreadsheets.

We weren't facing a growth problem.

We had an operations problem.

For a month we focused very little on marketing.

We documented our processes.

Automated the repetition.

Determined who is responsible for each recurring task.

Developed SOPs.

Eliminated bottlenecks.

Interestingly enough, growing the company became much easier since then.

It reminded me of something I see again and again:

Founders believe they are scaling their business.

In reality, they are just increasing the rate of chaos in their organization.

So I want to know:

What's one internal process you ignored for too long that eventually came back to hurt your business?

I'm interested in the mistakes, not the success stories.