What Got Us Through the Early Years Couldn't Take Us Into the Next Stage

In 1989, my parents and I opened our tile-importing business with no wages, no big team and no room for unnecessary spending.

For the first couple of years, we didn't draw a wage.

Every dollar of profit went back into the business.

We kept costs low by not hiring anyone.

It wasn't glamorous.

But we made it past year five.

Looking back, that frugality helped us survive those early years.

But it also taught me something I didn't fully understand at the time.

Survival and growth require different things

When you're starting out, you do things yourself.

You wear multiple hats.

You keep the overheads down.

You make every dollar count.

There was nothing wrong with that.

The problem comes when you keep operating that way after the business has changed.

We didn't have a formal business plan, so many of our processes lived in our heads.

We knew how things worked because we were the business.

That works when you're small.

It becomes very different as you grow.

Orders get lost.

Customers are left waiting.

The team keeps asking the same questions.

And suddenly, every day becomes about putting out fires.

The business had outgrown the way we operated

That's the part I wish I'd recognised earlier.

The problem wasn't that we weren't working hard enough.

We were.

The problem was that the way we operated had been built for a smaller business.

What helped us survive wasn't necessarily what would help us grow.

We needed processes that didn't rely on one person remembering everything.

We needed systems that made things clearer.

Here’s the truth.

Frugality can get you through the early years

There's nothing wrong with being careful with money.

But eventually, something has to change.

Growth brings more customers, more orders, more people and more moving parts.

The informal ways of doing things that worked when the business was small can eventually become the things holding it back.

Frugality can get you through the early years.

Systems are what let you grow beyond them.

So here's something worth thinking about:

Has your business outgrown the way you operate it?

Because sometimes the next stage of growth doesn't require working harder.

It requires building a business that doesn't depend on you remembering everything.