10 years ago, I thought scaling = success.
The faster you grow, the more “legit” you are, right? Turns out, scaling too fast nearly destroyed my business.
Here’s the story:
Year 1 → $85k revenue, ~$15k profit.
Year 2 → $450k revenue, ~$90k profit.
Year 3 → $1.1M revenue, but only ~$50k profit (yes, profit went DOWN).
What happened? I got greedy.
I was so obsessed with growth that I reinvested everything into:
More SKUs (chasing trends instead of focusing on winners).
Bigger ad spend (burning cash on campaigns I didn’t fully understand).
Hiring too fast (without systems in place).
By the middle of Year 3, cash flow was a nightmare. I was paying suppliers late, juggling credit cards, and losing sleep every night. On paper I was “7 figures”. In reality, I was broke, stressed, and 2 bad months away from shutting down.
The turning point was humbling: I had to let 2 people go that I’d hired too soon. It sucked. But cutting back saved me. I re-focused on 2 core products, killed the distractions, and stabilized cash flow.
Lessons I wish I knew earlier:
1 – Revenue is vanity, cash flow is sanity.
2 – Don’t scale what’s broken. If your systems don’t work at $100k, they won’t magically work at $1M.
3 – Hiring = overhead. Hire slow, systemize first.
4 – Growth feels good, but survival feels better.
Looking back, scaling slower would’ve made me more money and saved me a lot of stress.
Has anyone here also scaled too fast and regretted it? Or do you think “grow fast or die” is still the best play?
I scaled too fast and almost lost everything. Here’s what I’d do differently.
byu/emojidomain inEntrepreneur
Posted by emojidomain
4 Comments
I’m in year 1 and so far have 100k rev, 46k profit. I think often about how I can carefully scale without overspending. Your post is insightful but I’d love for you to even keep elaborating more!
thanks for sharing i will remember it !
I scaled too fast last year and got to the point where my business checking went negative and I was struggling to make payroll. I decided from now on, instead of cash-flowing growth, to build up $X in cash reserves to fund growth, based on the expenses required to scale to my next goal. So basically sit tight for a few months, build up the necessary cash, then use that cash to fund growth until I hit either hit my goal or run out of cash reserves, rinse and repeat. Now I always make sure I have enough cash to fund my normal operations, and treat cash for growth as separate.
Hiring is an important piece. A new employee should be thought of as an investment which will drain cash at first but will pay off in the long term. You need to think about how long it will take for the employee to add more to the top line than they take from the bottom line, and how much it will cost you until they reach that point.
More businesses die from indigestion than they do from starvation. Build for durability, not speed.