When Growth Makes You Forget Why You Started

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There’s an interesting thing that happens when a business starts to grow. The very things that made it successful can become the things people start questioning. They’re too time-consuming. Too expensive. Too difficult to scale. Not efficient enough. And often, the people making these observations aren’t wrong.

But I wonder how many businesses, in their efforts to become bigger, more efficient and more profitable, slowly lose sight of what made them special in the first place. I’ve seen this happen in founder-led businesses, and I’ve come close to letting it happen in my own.

When efficiency starts making the decisions

At Etiket, the beauty and fragrance retailer I founded, our online business was growing, and with that growth came operational challenges.

From the beginning, we’d approached our online customers much as we approached the people walking into our stores. We included thoughtful samples with orders, wrote personalized notes and did our best to accommodate individual requests. It wasn’t necessarily the most efficient way to run an e-commerce business. But it was part of the experience we wanted to create.

As the volume of orders increased, a team member who had come from a much larger company questioned whether we could continue operating this way. The questions were reasonable. Should we move fulfillment to a third-party logistics provider? Replace handwritten notes with printed cards? Standardize samples? Limit the changes customers could request once an order had been placed? From an operational perspective, these were perfectly logical recommendations.

But something didn’t sit right with me. We were beginning to look at the business through the lens of what would make it easier to operate, rather than what had made customers want to shop with us in the first place.

I wasn’t opposed to improving our operations. We needed to. Growth demanded it. But I didn’t want efficiency to become the reason we stopped doing the very things that differentiated us.

So instead of asking what we needed to eliminate, I asked a different question: how could we find more creative, economically viable ways to preserve the experience while allowing the business to grow? That changed the conversation.

We brought the people in our warehouse and customer service into it. Listening to them, we learned how much our notes mattered to customers, and how much they valued being able to adjust an order, within reason, even if it meant we didn’t ship quite as quickly. So we kept both. And we set up a simple inventory system for our samples, so we could keep personalizing orders as volume grew.

Most importantly, I decided we would find a solution rather than give in to what was easiest, or to what everyone else did. Etiket wouldn’t exist if I had listened to the people who told me it wouldn’t work, that no one had done it before. In 2011, no one in Montreal was doing what we were doing, and only a handful across Canada. Even fewer were selling beauty and fragrance online.

We never abandoned the belief that a customer shopping with us online deserved the same level of care and attention as someone visiting one of our stores.

Your why isn’t always written down

Years ago, I read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why and watched his TED Talk about the importance of understanding why a business exists beyond what it sells or how it operates. It stayed with me, but I’d add one thing. It’s one thing to know your why when you’re starting a business. It’s another to protect it when the business is growing, the team is expanding, and the decisions are becoming more complex.

In the early days, a company’s purpose is often understood rather than documented. It’s reflected in the decisions the founder makes, the people they hire, the way they speak to customers, the details they obsess over and the things they’re unwilling to compromise. There may not be an employee handbook explaining any of it. People simply experience it.

But as the business grows, that knowledge doesn’t necessarily grow with it. New employees arrive with experience, expertise and ideas from other organizations. That’s a good thing; businesses need new perspectives. The problem begins when people start changing how a business operates before they fully understand why it operates that way.

Something that appears inefficient may actually be central to the customer experience. Something that seems old-fashioned may be the very reason customers return. And something that looks insignificant on a spreadsheet may have enormous value in building trust and loyalty. Not everything that matters to a business is immediately measurable.

Growth has a way of changing our priorities

I don’t think companies generally lose their identity because someone deliberately decides it no longer matters. It happens gradually. The business gets busier. New people are hired. Revenue targets become more ambitious. Systems that worked with five employees begin to break down with twenty. Decisions need to be made quickly.

And founders, myself included, can be particularly susceptible to this. Many entrepreneurs love creating something: the ideas, the possibilities, the momentum of building a business. But creating something and building the systems necessary to sustain it are very different disciplines. Financial structures, human resources, operational processes, clear responsibilities and a shared vision aren’t always the things that excite us most. Yet without them, the business can begin to move in different directions without anyone fully realizing it.

The founder assumes everyone understands what the company stands for. New employees assume the systems they’ve used elsewhere are the right ones to introduce. Managers focus on delivering results. And slowly, decisions that seem perfectly reasonable on their own begin to change the experience the business was originally built around. No single decision causes the problem. It’s the accumulation of them.

This is where I believe founders have a particular responsibility. We can’t expect people joining our businesses to understand a history they weren’t part of, or recognize the significance of decisions whose origins they don’t know. It’s on us to share that history, explain the beliefs behind the business and make sure the people we’re asking to help build its future understand what made it successful.

That doesn’t mean expecting everyone to think like the founder. Quite the opposite. It means giving people the understanding they need to challenge, improve and evolve the business without unintentionally losing what matters. It also means being willing to question ourselves. Sometimes we’re so focused on where we want to take the business that we haven’t noticed how far we’ve moved from why we started it.

Technology isn’t the strategy

All of this is becoming more relevant with AI. I use it every day, and I believe in what it can do. Used carefully, it can help us create more, build more, and get back to what we started all of this for.

But it can also make it remarkably easy to standardize things that perhaps shouldn’t be standardized. A personalized customer interaction becomes an automated response. A distinctive brand voice becomes generic.

The risk isn’t the technology itself. It’s using technology to replace thought rather than support it. The question shouldn’t simply be, “Can we automate this?” It should also be, “What happens to the experience if we do?”

The people closest to the business

One of the challenges of leading a growing company is that you’re often too close to everything to see it clearly. You’re solving problems, managing people, watching cash flow, dealing with customers and thinking about what comes next. It’s easy to lose perspective.

While there’s enormous value in bringing in outside expertise, I think we sometimes overlook one of the most important sources of insight: the people already working within the business. Not necessarily the most senior people. Not always the most vocal. Sometimes it’s the employee who has been there for years and quietly notices that customers aren’t receiving the same attention. Or the person who questions a new process because they’ve seen what it changes. These are people who may understand the business in ways that don’t show up in their job descriptions.

We need to create space for them to speak and be willing to listen, even when the feedback isn’t delivered particularly well, or when it challenges a decision we’ve already made. Not all feedback will be right. But all feedback deserves consideration.

Knowing when to step away

Everyone knows the advice about working on your business rather than in it. It’s easier said than done, particularly for founders who have been involved in almost every aspect of building theirs.

Sometimes the most valuable thing a founder or leader can do is step away from the day-to-day operation long enough to look at the business differently. Not to develop another growth strategy or set another revenue target. Simply to ask some fundamental questions.

Why did we start this business?

What did customers connect with in the beginning?

What do they value about us today?

What have we changed, and what have we lost along the way?

And perhaps most importantly, are we still delivering the experience that made people choose us in the first place?

Working on the business also means making the time to ask these questions, even when the demands of running it make that feel impossible. And sometimes it means inviting someone else to help us see what we’ve become too close to recognize.

These aren’t questions we should only ask when something goes wrong. They’re questions worth revisiting precisely when things are going well, because success can make it remarkably easy to assume we’re doing everything right.

Growing without losing yourself

Businesses have to evolve. I don’t believe in preserving something simply because it’s the way it has always been done. Some practices need to change. Some become financially unsustainable. Others stop being relevant to the customers we’re serving. And sometimes a company’s original vision needs to evolve as well.

But those changes should be intentional. There’s a difference between evolving what you do and forgetting why you do it.

Looking back at the decisions we made at Etiket, what stays with me isn’t that we found a way to keep handwritten notes or offer personalized samples. It’s that we stopped to question what we were about to give up. We challenged the assumption that becoming a bigger business meant behaving like a bigger business, and we looked for a way to grow without losing something we believed in.

Growth should strengthen what makes a company worth choosing, not slowly erase it.

When I put this to founders, they don’t always want to look. The conversation drifts back to sales and the top line. But the experience may be exactly where some of those problems get solved.

If you looked at your business today through the eyes of the person who started it, would you recognize the experience you set out to create?

And if you don’t have the time to ask that question, that may be your answer.

Image: original concept sketch for Etiket, Montreal, by Scott Yetman Design.