The Sweet Spot of Growth...

...(And Why Bigger Isn’t the Flex We Pretend It Is)

Reading Time: ~4 minutes

I’ve been thinking a lot about growth lately, not the curated, performative kind we celebrate online, and not the spiritual flavor where you return from Bali with a new identity and a sandalwood bracelet, but the real founder-kind of growth. The kind that sneaks up on you late at night when you’re staring at your ceiling, wondering whether the business you’re building still fits the life you’re living. This is where you find The Sweet Spot of Growth.

The longer I do this work, the more I realize how much mythology we’ve wrapped around the idea of expansion. Growth isn’t just encouraged; it’s expected. We’ve created a culture where “bigger” is treated as synonymous with “better,” and where the size of someone’s... business becomes a proxy for their intelligence, ambition, and, let’s be honest, their worth.

There’s even data that backs this delusion. Bain & Company found that nearly 30% of high-growth companies collapse from growing too fast without internal alignment. And according to a 2023 HubSpot study, 63% of founders who scaled rapidly reported burnout within 18 months. Yet we still applaud speed like its strategy.

But let me drop an uncomfortable truth that almost nobody says out loud...

“Bigger isn’t better. Better is better.” — every founder who has outgrown their own ego

Some founders scale themselves into misery. Some build small, intentional businesses and end up with more profit, more sanity, and more joy than the people sprinting toward the next milestone. Some grow slow because their nervous system knows exactly what they can hold.

The sweet spot lives somewhere in the middle, in that quiet zone where your ambition and your capacity are actually in the same conversation. But many founders get lost at this point. They chase a version of growth they think they're supposed to want, instead of the one their life, season, and identity can sustain.

This isn’t laziness, it’s misalignment, and misalignment is expensive... emotionally, financially, relationally.

What complicates this further is how growth has become a performance. Social media turned business into a spectacle. Suddenly revenue screenshots became personality traits. Everyone started comparing dashboards, team size, client rosters, and visibility metrics like grown adults trapped in a middle-school locker room.

We even use language that reveals our collective insecurity: “How big is your audience?” “How fast are you scaling?” “What’s your annual?” (Insert your own metaphor here; I know you already did.)

But at some point you have to ask a more honest question:

Does the way you’re growing actually feel like you? Or are you cosplaying someone else’s dream?

Growth that fits you feels like relief, not constant pressure. It feels like momentum, not ongoing performance. It feels grounded, not frantic. It aligns with who you’re becoming, not an old identity you’ve already outgrown.

That’s where the real magic lives...not in metrics, velocity, or “10X your business by Friday” promises, but in clarity, the quiet confidence that you’re building something you can actually inhabit without breaking yourself in the process.

This is where most founders quietly unravel or quietly break through. The middle space. The in-between. The season where you’re expanding and questioning simultaneously, and the version of “success” you inherited from the world starts to look suspiciously like someone else’s definition.

It’s also the space where I do my best work with people.

About Deevo (the part you didn’t ask for but probably need): I’m not the guy who tells you to scale at all costs. I’m the guy founders call when they can feel they’re evolving faster than their business, their message, or their identity. My work sits in the uncomfortable but necessary space between ambition and alignment, helping you articulate who you are now and what kind of growth actually fits the life you're trying to build. I’m allergic to guru language, trauma cosplay, and hustle-theology nonsense. I care about clarity, capacity, and coherence, the things that make growth sustainable instead of performative.

And if you’re reading this thinking, “Yeah, that’s exactly where I am right now,” then here’s the honest invitation:

If you want clarity on the size, shape, and direction of your next chapter, the kind of clarity that makes your decisions easier and your growth feel like your own, send me a message.

We’ll figure out the version of business that fits you, not the one you’ve been pressured to build.

— Deevo