I just need more leads

A few weeks ago, I got on a call with a founder about her systems. She runs a small design agency. Real clients, real work, real revenue coming in right now. She also has something most founders would kill for — a genuinely large audience on Twitter, built over years, the kind of following that could turn into a steady stream of clients on its own, if she pointed it that way. She's not using it. She barely has time to open the app. Because she's also the project manager. She's also the one reviewing every designer's work before it goes out. She's buried, and she knows it. She told me, clearly and without defensiveness, that she can't focus on any single thing long enough to move it forward.

So I asked her some questions.

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Did she know her break-even number? No.

Could she plan her financials three months out with any confidence? No.

Was she sure she could make payroll on time if a client paid late? No.

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We talked for over an hour. And at the end of it, when I asked what she thought her biggest problem was, she gave me the same answer she'd probably given herself a hundred times before: not enough leads. She needs more clients. That's the whole diagnosis. Not: what happens to service quality when designers work unsupervised because she's stretched across everything. Not: whether she has any financial cushion to survive a slow month. Not: what she'd actually do with more clients, given she's already at capacity serving the ones she has.

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Just — more leads. Said like a mantra. Said like it was the one lever left to pull.

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What the mantra was protecting

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Here's the thing I've come to notice, in myself years ago and in almost every founder I talk to since. "I need more clients" is rarely the real problem. It's the version of the problem that doesn't ask you to change anything about how you work. Getting more leads means doing more of what you already know — pushing harder on the thing you're good at. Building the structure underneath your business — the numbers, the delegation, the systems that let clients get served without you personally checking every file — means stepping into territory you don't know yet. And that's uncomfortable in a completely different way.

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So founders reach for the comfortable discomfort. More hustle, more outreach, more supply. Not because it's the right move. Because it's the familiar one. I told her, as gently as I could manage: I don't think your problem is leads. I think you're not ready to admit that. You have work right now. You're overloaded serving the clients you already have. What you're not ready to do is step back from the design work you love and know how to do, and build something you don't fully know how to build yet. She didn't argue. That was the part that told me I was right.

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There's a pattern from studying business failures during downturns that I keep coming back to. It's not the companies short on clients that go under most often. It's the ones full of friction — no structure, no clear process, everything routed through one exhausted person — that break first when pressure hits. A business with steady clients and no system underneath them isn't stable. It's just quiet, right up until it isn't.

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That's what made her situation feel urgent to me, more than the audience she wasn't using or the leads she said she needed. She has clients. What she doesn't have is anything that would let those clients stay, multiply, or survive a rough quarter without her personally holding every piece together.

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Why this is so hard to see in yourself

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Nobody sits down and decides "I'll avoid the thing that would actually help me." It's quieter than that. You tell yourself you're just busy right now. That once things calm down, you'll finally get to the planning, the numbers, the delegation. That the audience, the systems, the financial clarity — all of it can wait until there's a little more room to breathe. But the room never shows up on its own. It gets built, deliberately, by someone who admits what's actually missing.

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Something to try this weekend:

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Answer the same three questions I asked her. Do you know your break-even number? Could you plan your finances three months out? Are you sure payroll is covered if a client pays late?

If any answer is no, sit with that — not as a leads problem, but as the actual thing standing between you and the growth you say you want.

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P.S. I don't know yet what she'll do with any of this. She heard it. Whether she acts on it is a different question entirely — one I've had to answer for myself more than once, and not always well.