Growth *Not* At All Costs: Change Your Mind(Set) To Increase Revenue And Resilience

This article is the second installment in the series Growth *Not* At All Costs. In the coming weeks, I’ll be discussing how to rapidly scale your business while keeping your mental health front and center—and using that foundation of wellness as a superpower that fuels sustainable growth and success.

In the first piece in the series, I covered how to transform your daily habits. Stay tuned for upcoming articles on strategies for curating the right people around you and investing in the valuable asset that most founders neglect.

One of the hard truths that entrepreneurs realize when they’re scaling a company is this: What got you here won’t get you there.

Many founders find that the grit, scrappiness, and do-whatever-it-takes attitude that helped them get their companies off the ground not only aren’t sustainable for years and years, but they’re also not effective for higher levels of growth.

No, scaling a company to six, seven, or eight figures and beyond requires a new way of thinking and behaving. Treating yourself as the leader of a team, not just a solopreneur. Being strategic about the clients you take on, not just saying yes to any project that comes your way. And, perhaps most importantly, visualizing success for the long haul, not simply next quarter or year.

As a therapist and coach who has worked with many executives and entrepreneurs, I often see that the biggest hurdle in reaching those next-level goals is getting stuck in mindsets that no longer serve us. So today, I want to share the stories of four women who have transcended their old ways. They’ve scaled their businesses to incredible heights, and they’ve credited that growth to transforming their mindsets.

If you’re feeling stuck in the same-ol’, same-ol’, get inspired by their journeys.

Mindset Transformation 1: From Always-On Anxiety To Self-Care

Jenny Hanh Nguyen, CEO and co-founder Y’OUR Skincare, realized that hitting every new revenue goal was a milestone—as well as a new set of challenges. “The more inventory that we stock, the more risk we’re taking because if the growth does not continue to sustain, we will be holding on to a lot of inventory,” she says.

Many founders double down on work during these high-stress times, but Hanh Nguyen took a different approach: “In order to alleviate the anxiety caused by the risks that we took, I started engaging in daily workouts and meditation,” she says. “These activities also forced me to step away from my desk, which helped me look at my business from a new and fresh perspective.”

For her, this shift to self-care is a mindset that more founders should adopt. “Many early-stage investors invest in a business mainly because of the founders,” she explains. “It makes sense—they are the core part of the business, especially in the early stages.”

Mindset Transformation 2: From Taking On Any Clients To Prioritizing Alignment

As Tabatha Rowbatham’s marketing company, Twinning Pros, started entering higher revenue tiers, she realized that the team had taken on clients whose values didn’t match their own. “This phase resulted in increased stress, more time commitments, and team burnout,” she says. “We realized we needed to make our core values the foundation of our business.”

Now, the team qualifies new clients to ensure values alignment and says no when a project doesn’t feel right. She quickly saw that getting over the excitement factor of someone wanting to work with them and being more focused on landing the right clients has been crucial to the company’s success. “When we learned how to stand up for our values and opinions, we started to see that existing clients that are aligned and new clients that were vetted had more respect for who we were,” she says. “It essentially made us more proud of our business and what it stands for.”

Mindset Transformation 3: From Constant Stress to Visualizing Success

A few years ago, Hannah Kowalski’s all-natural gut health supplement company Emma Relief was growing, but at the expense of her health and well-being. “My co-founder and I were in a constant state of stress,” she says. “I knew that if the business continued doing the same things, nothing would ever get better.” In a top-to-bottom rebuilding process, she let go of most of her core team and restructured the organization.

There were many moments during that time when she feared that she was going down the wrong path. She remembers thinking, “Maybe we’d fail spectacularly, and that’s the end of it. Or maybe we’ll prosper and truly expand to our potential.” She wanted the latter but realized that it would require a dramatic mindset shift. “I talked to my co-founder daily about our future,” she says. “We did coaching and visualization exercises and trained our minds to not just see, but feel, and be there—where we succeed and have a nine-figure business.”

Ultimately, they did just that. And while it certainly took a lot of hard work and discipline, “I definitely attribute a lot of our success to the mindset we cultivated during this time,” she says.

Mindset Transformation 4: From Dysregulation To Peace and Abundance

For most of Sarah Baldwin’s life, she was deeply traumatized, dissociated, and stuck in terror and anxiety. Now, through Sarah Baldwin Coaching, she helps people like her get unstuck and step into the lives they desire through holistic somatic trauma healing.

“Something that is often not talked about is that in order to step into the bigger lives we desire, we must build our capacity within our nervous system to hold that life,” she says. In a capitalistic society, she explains, we typically internalize the message that faster is better, that we are perpetually behind, and that we must produce at all times, which puts our nervous systems in a state of survival. “Although we can quickly mobilize when we are here, if we are looking for the highest level of abundance, creativity, production and most importantly joy, peace, ease, fulfillment, etc. we must do that from a state of regulation,” she explains.

She knows this firsthand. Several years ago, her company began growing quickly: Her revenue was doubling every year and new opportunities like writing a book were coming her way. “Even as an expert in this field, every single time I take a bigger step… I have to comfort and support the parts of me that feel scared about this bigger level of exposure,” she says. “It’s the only way I’ve ever gotten to the next place I’m going.”

Her advice? When you’re tempted to go faster, go slower. “Take time to regulate your nervous system,” she says. “That’s where the solutions are found, creative ideas take form, and abundance lives in a way that allows for us to be fully present to and enjoy the process.”