The founder’s biggest mistake.
Or a moment of harmony with yourself.
If you give 10 different entrepreneurs the same opportunities and resources, they’ll all end up in different places.
Why?
Experience.
Knowledge.
Decisions.
The sequence of decision-making.
The ability to leverage — to build systems and processes.
But that’s not the main thing.
What matters most is:
- what’s inside you,
- your principles,
- unspoken goals (yes, our inner motivators can differ wildly from what we declare),
- willingness to take risks,
- personal situation and context.
You can be highly experienced, with a wealth of knowledge, and still never get past a certain point.
They say the biggest bottleneck in any business is its founder.
You either find a way to get around your limitations or you accept yourself.
But is it possible to do both?
For me, the biggest limitation was always scaling the team.
And since my business was IT outsourcing, this also became a business growth bottleneck.
Outsourcing is a numbers game because of its low margins (if you’re offering top-class specialists).
You need more and more “heads” to sell.
Most people, myself included, feel uncomfortable when they don’t know the name of the person in the office cafeteria.
That’s just how our psyche works.
There’s an inner circle of close people — 5-7 people.
A middle circle (those whose birthdays you remember, who know the names of their kids, maybe a few more facts) — 12-15 people.
Then there’s another 30 or so people whose faces you recognize, whose names you remember, and maybe their job titles.
That’s it.
Moreover, we’re all drowning in information noise.
Leaders need to sift through grains of knowledge to make decisions.
No psyche can handle that.
That’s where I stumbled.
I wanted a warm, friendly atmosphere. Naive?
We had it — while we were still small.
But I was also ambitious. I wanted more.
So we kept growing.
New offices, more people, more opportunities.
And I hated my job more and more.
A paradox.
I went into business to escape creating someone else’s dreams.
To create my own thing, where people would be drawn to this atmosphere.
And I became a prisoner of my own venture.
I tried many approaches.
Some worked. Some didn’t.
- Built an inner circle of top management.
- Developed and rolled out an employee motivation and engagement program based on the book “The Great Game of Business” (highly recommend it, by the way).
- We did “video windows” between offices — live streams between offices where you could walk up and wave to a colleague in another country (years before this was a trend).
- Organized office-to-office trips.
- Implemented KPI systems and mood tracking.
- And a ton of other stuff.
But...
In the end, sadly, it turned out like it does for most: intrigue, lost information, lack of control over key processes.
And there I am, like Don Quixote, battling windmills just to make this machine work. Growth? What are you talking about?
All wrong.
Through a very painful experience, I had to accept who I was.
A big company, many offices, lots of people — it’s just not for me (though I sincerely believed otherwise).
I became the bottleneck, though I’d never admit it to myself.
Other founders at this point, if it’s not too late, step back from managing the business.They bring in a CEO who’s ready to grow and scale the company further.
I didn’t do that.
A mistake?
Maybe.
But you can accept your limitations and still work around them.
Growth doesn’t always mean scaling up; it can also mean scaling deep.
The funniest part is that I took a business course on this topic many years ago.
And now, all the conditions and opportunities are in place:
- Automating almost any business process with No-code tools.
- AI — from copywriting to video creation.
- Social media — for outreach.
- Digital products and services — scalable and easy to monetize.
Today, a team of 5-15 people can achieve more than a team of 50 could five years ago.
There is a price for this — competition.
Competing with the whole world — thanks to the internet.
Competing for value — thanks to AI.
Competing for attention — thanks to social media.
But growing a traditional business isn’t any easier.
So now, indeed, everything depends on what’s inside.
Some will go on to build a multinational corporation.
Some — a digital business.
And the income ceiling for “small players” is no longer limited.
But this “window of opportunity” won’t stay open forever.
Oh, and some will just get lost in TikTok.
Your move.
If you want to know more about other mess-ups and lessons on my entrepreneurial journey — subscribe to Eugene’s Stories.
See you soon!
- Eugene
And one more thing.
Every founder has their own way of getting through hard days.
Her journal reminds me (and maybe you) that it’s okay to struggle — and still move forward.
- Eugene
Join the “most offbeat” Businessletter on entrepreneurship.
Hi, I’m Eugene.
Over the past 20+ years, I’ve grown an international agency from one-person freelance to a multimillion-dollar business. I’ve led teams, scaled systems, burned out, rebuilt, and learned (the hard way) what it really takes to run a business that doesn’t consume your life.
I help them make sense of complexity, design simple systems, and create the kind of business they actually want to run.
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