Your business has to grow.
It always has to grow.
Or it will die.
And by “grow”, I specifically mean that you need to make sure your business is making more money each year.
Why? Because there’s no “stable state” of a business. Entropy which applies to all things in the universe also applies to business.
Businesses are always shrinking if they are not growing. They eventually lose momentum and fail.
Why will your business shrink or fail if it doesn’t grow? Because pretty much everything in the environment is trying to kill your business.
And if you’ve decided to keep your business at the same “stable” number each year, you’re going to run into these unavoidable problems:
Inflation increases mean you’re making less than the year before even if you make the same number on paper. That 100k from last year is now worth a a lot less with 10% inflation. This also means you’ll be paying yourself and your employees less and less each year if you don’t increase your revenue.
A war happens, or a pandemic, and you suddenly start making a lot less than you’d planned for. Aiming for growth might have meant getting closer to your “stable state” goal.
A competitor outgrows you and takes a serious chunk of your customers while you were sitting around.
Important employees leave when you can’t pay them more each year for the work they’re doing (because you don’t want to grow the business), which means you lose key talent (to your competitors).
Talented employees will leave because of the lack of career growth opportunities and lack of ambition at your company.
This stable-state simply doesn’t exist and the closest thing you’ll get to it is actually by growing your business year over year.
Cheers,
Jonathan