When you’re good at what you do, it’s only a matter of time before you get busy. It’s slow at first, but then it happens all at once.
It turns out, having an effective product or service is great for business.
Who knew?
But with that increased demand for your services, you’ll eventually run into a challenge: keep scaling with demand or go slowly and double down on the quality of your work.
It’s really hard to stop taking clients. Especially when you first encounter the limits of your bandwidth. It’s tempting to say yes to everything and figure it out as you go.
But the problem with accepting too many clients in an effort to grow quickly is that you neglect the very process that got you clients in the first place.
As a result, your work begins to suffer.
Growth and new client acquisition is an indicator of health in your business. You should have some turnover. You should sign new clients.
But growing too fast usually means assigning work to people more junior than you, which means your systems need to be rock solid or the quality of your work will drop through the floor.
Or, you simply get too busy to keep doing great work and provide excellent client service.
I’ve seen it time and time again. People get busy, they don’t say no to new business (especially non-ideal business), and suddenly it’s like you’re working with an entirely different freelancer or agency than before.
In the case of agencies, the work is delegated to a junior who does NOT uphold the founder’s original methodology. They too become overworked and things start to fall apart pronto.
In the case of consultants/freelancers, they get so busy that response times become infinite and the work quality becomes a shell of what it once was. It happens to all of us if we’re not careful.
There’s no real correct answer here. You can either scale quickly or uphold high standards in your business. Both can be lucrative, but you need to choose which one you’ll go for. They represent completely different business strategies.
Mass production or boutique service.