What Got You To $X Million Won’t Get You To $Y Million
FACT: There’s a moment in every staffing firm’s growth where the things that made you successful begin holding you back.
The entrepreneurial hustle that built your first million becomes total chaos at five million. The founder-led sales effort that landed your best clients turns into a bottleneck at ten million.
What got you ‘here’ won’t get you ‘there.’
The sooner you embrace that, the sooner you can actually create growth.
The problem? It’s not that you’re doing something wrong. It’s that you’re still doing what used to be right.
Every growth stage in staffing requires a different approach and operating model. Different people. Different skills. Different structure. The manager who was a solid contributor when you had three clients might struggle when you have thirty. The sales approach that worked early on doesn’t work when your brand begins to gain recognition.
Most staffing firms hit a ceiling not because the market isn’t there, but because their model hasn’t evolved to capture it. They push harder on what has always worked instead of creating what they’ll need next. I know this from my own experience in building and growing a large staffing company.
Staffing leaders don’t recognize the difference between growth and scale. They are not the same thing, and if we don’t know that, we fail to identify the transition points. And if we do recognize that something needs to change, it often feels like abandoning what made us successful in the first place.
Look at your own staffing firm right now. What stage are you actually in? Not where your revenue is, but where your operating model is. What capabilities do you need for the next level that you haven’t built yet? What processes and behaviors that served you well now seem to be holding you back?
Everyone in staffing wants to grow. For that matter, every business seeks growth. But not everyone is willing to evolve the model that brought them their current success.
I challenge you to be the firm that builds in order to achieve scale and find the next level of explosive growth. Invest in people and systems even when they feel premature. Develop leaders before the founder burns out. Choose strategic evolution over heroic hustle.
Then you’ll become the firm that scales instead of the one that hits the same brick wall over and over again.