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Join for freePosted: Mon 5th Oct 2026
Your business is growing and going well; your customers are really happy, and you feel that should be enough.
But lately there's a nagging feeling that you're just busier, not better off, and it's all feeling a bit messy. Growth isn't one thing, and it's easy to keep reaching for more, more customers, more people, more hours, without asking whether it's the kind of growth you actually want.
Using a real example of an owner who was growing fast and still felt something was missing, Bethan Miles looks at the different ways a business can grow, why the wrong kind wears you out, and the one question worth asking before you grow further.
Why growth isn't one thing, and the different ways a business can actually grow
Why the wrong kind of growth wears you out
The one question to ask before you grow further, so you know what you actually want more of
Bethan spent 30 years working out why capable businesses stall. She has worked inside organisations like Pfizer and the NHS, run her own healthcare innovation consultancies, and contracted with Deloitte and academic institutions.
She also sits as a non-executive director, currently with WM5G and the Willow Tree Foundation CIC.
For the last 20 years, her work has been inside owner-led businesses. Bethan has mentored more than 350 of them internationally, from healthcare to construction, on publicly funded growth programmes and her own.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Ryan: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Ryan, and I will be your host today.
For those attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses. Today, I’m pleased to introduce the brilliant Bethan Miles, who is a business mentor.
In this session, Bethan looks at the different ways a business can grow, why the wrong kind can wear you out, and the one question that’s worth asking before you grow any further. As always, if you’ve got questions, pop them in the chat, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end.
The webinar is recorded, and a follow-up email with the recording and any further resources will go out later today, so keep an eye out for that. On that note, I will hand over to you, Bethan.
Bethan Miles: Thanks, Ryan, I really appreciate it, and hello to everybody out there. As Ryan said, I’m Bethan, but please do call me Beth. I run Simplify and Scale, a business growth consultancy, and I’m a business mentor.
That means I’m currently supporting about 20 businesses at a time on a one-to-one basis, and I also run some small cohort programmes. How I like to describe my work is that I support businesses in that messy middle of growth.
These are typically businesses that were doing well and have just hit that point where they think, “Why isn’t it feeling any easier? I’m past the startup phase, I’ve been trading for a few years, and it’s actually starting to get a little bit harder.”
It’s quite a challenge for me to choose something to speak to you about for 30 minutes. But what I’ve chosen is a question, or a concern, that just about every business I work with has hit: whether your business is growing in the right direction.
A lot of businesses I work with hit a point where, to be honest, they just question themselves – what’s actually going on, and what does growth mean to them? So that’s what we’re going to cover today.
I’m going to make it as practical as I can. Bearing in mind we won’t be going in-depth, hopefully there’s an opportunity for you to get in touch so we can follow up afterwards.
The first thing I would say – if my screen will move forward... oh, that’s challenge number one. So here’s the good news: when you’re thinking about whether your business is growing in the right direction, it’s actually an answer only you can give.
The reason this is true is that it comes down to a number of things. The first is: where do you actually want to get to as a business? That could be you as a business owner or founder, or the people you work with.
Secondly, what is the impact you want to make? And remember, all of our businesses also sit in a context, and I’m going to go into more detail about what we mean by that.
This is why only you can determine whether your business is growing in the right direction. But it’s not a case of me sitting here in my ivory tower saying it’s all over to you – there are some really practical things you can do about it.
It’s about defining the end result you want to get to, and I’m going to talk a little bit about an ideal versus a dream client. It’s also about taking an honest stock of where you are and, importantly – this is where we’ll kick off fairly soon – defining what growth actually means for you as a business.
Time and time again, I work with businesses – in fact, it’s probably fair to say nearly every business I work with – who come to me saying they want to grow, but find it really difficult to even define or describe what they mean by growth. So we’ll go into that in a little more detail now.
Think about how it probably feels when you’re in your business, and you’ve got this urge to get more out of it. Maybe you’re slightly frustrated – things have been going well, but you’ve just got a feeling that there’s more in your business, and it’s feeling messy.
But let me reassure you – and this is one of the biggest confidence builders I find with a lot of the businesses I work with – growth is messy, and that’s entirely normal. The way you’re feeling is entirely normal.
You might be busier, but you just don’t feel you’re any better off. You’re thinking, “I’m busier than I was a few months ago, a few years ago, but are we actually better off as a business?”
Is everything still running through you? That isn’t necessarily a problem, as long as it’s by design and you’re consciously being the filter for things.
A number of you in the audience might be solopreneurs, so of course everything’s running through you. But you need to think about what you’re holding on to – is it by design or just by accident?
Importantly, one of the reasons growth feels so messy is that what got you here isn't holding you now. What I mean by that is all those systems and processes that worked perfectly well when you were a startup, in the early days of your business – quite often, you outgrow them.
It’s the number one thing people forget to take stock of: what isn’t right for my business now? Systems and processes are critical to review, and we’ll go into that in a bit more detail.
The other thing you might be feeling in this messy middle of growth is that you have less time to step out. Even this lunchtime – is it feeling time-critical? You have less time to step out and work on your business, rather than the constant firefighting that seems to dominate your day.
The businesses I work with often don’t only have a full head and a long list – they have a list of lists, different lists to prioritise different things. The lists get longer, and you never feel you’re getting on top of things.
But there’s also another kind of messy middle for some businesses, where on the face of it, things feel quite calm. You might be feeling real frustration that your business isn’t moving forward.
It’s not that everything’s falling apart, as such. It’s just that everything feels stalled and sticky, like you’re moving through treacle, and it might not be everything you require.
These are normally the symptoms of growth being messy. And to reassure you, you’re not doing anything wrong when things feel like this – it’s just that something needs attention.
All of the things I’ve just talked about are signals, and they’re signals to pay attention to. In the preamble for this session, we said we’d talk about some types of growth, and I want to spend a little bit of time on that.
As I mentioned earlier, this is something many of us don’t even take time to consider. We default to what we believe growth should be.
Probably the common thing is, “I should be selling more; I should have more customers, more clients.” Growth means adding more, adding more, adding more to our business – and that isn’t always the case.
Let’s think about a few different ways you can grow your business, beyond the traditional way you might consider it. Yes, you can have more customers and more clients, but you can also have higher-paying customers.
That might be the same number you have now, or even fewer – you could have fewer high-value customers and clients. You might need to consider higher prices.
One thing I hear from a lot of people is, “My clients would never pay higher prices. My customers will not pay any more than we’re already charging.” But have you tested that?
One of the biggest things we need to consider when we’re growing our business is testing assumptions – and there actually aren’t any rules. For example, you might have existing clients you absolutely love working with, and you don’t want to put your prices up or disincentivise them.
That’s okay. But maybe consider putting your prices up for new clients. This is your business, and it’s up to you how you serve the people you work with.
It’s okay to have favourites, and it’s okay to adjust prices however you want to. Things don’t have to be done in a blanket way – these are your rules to make.
Another thing you might consider is better margins. That isn’t necessarily about putting your overall price up – there might be some cost-cutting you can do elsewhere, within your product or service development.
Growth can also be stronger retention and more repeat business – making sure you’re really serving the people you currently work with, maybe in a new way, with different offers. That could be repeat work, or fewer, clearer offers.
My business is called Simplify & Scale, and that’s not by accident. I don’t believe it’s just about simplifying the superficial things in your business. For me to be able to grow what I do, I feel I need to simplify many aspects, and some of that is about getting clarity on what I do as a business.
Better delivery is also growth – finding new ways of serving your clients better – and, as I mentioned, taking complexity away. These are all aspects of growth. So try to think of things differently within your own business, and don’t be constrained by the idea that growth is always about adding.
I’ll explain why that’s important in a minute. Growth really can be whatever you want it to be, and importantly, it will change – it doesn’t happen just once.
You’re not sitting in your business now thinking, “I want to grow,” and that’s it forever – it will come again. These things can be cyclical, and what your business needs in terms of growth could be incredibly different in a matter of days, months or years.
So it’s important to always consider these things. And this list isn’t exhaustive – I’m sure you can think of other ways to grow your business once you start thinking beyond just adding things.
I wanted to share this quote from a client I’ve worked with because it’s so typical, and I also want to use it to show that there isn’t a right or wrong here.
The quote is: “I keep employing more people, and all it ever does is just keep that machine turning. My turnover’s higher, but the profit’s no different. And more families depend on me. So I’m still awake at night, but just for a different reason.”
Many of us will read this and think, “Oh my goodness – all you’re doing is employing more people, and you’re not making any more money, so why cause yourself more stress?” We might default to thinking this business is growing in the wrong way.
This is a really typical example of how the wrong kind of growth for a particular business can wear the owner out – he’s still awake at night, just for a different reason. The business had only ever kept adding something and hadn’t thought about other types of growth.
But my caveat here, and this is what I started to explain, is that this particular business owner was feeling the burden of his business being really heavy. And yes, we do need to explore different ways of growing and different ways of making an impact because, as I mentioned, it’s also about the direction you’re going with your business.
But for some businesses, this might be okay. Nobody wants to wear themselves out without making more profit, but imagine if you’re a charity or in the public sector, where it’s not all about generating profit.
Profit allows you to reinvest in your business. But if you’re able to reach more people and make a bigger impact, it might be absolutely okay that your turnover isn’t increasing.
The point I’m trying to make with a lot of what we’re covering here is that things aren’t binary. As business owners, there’s no single place we can go and say, “Right, this is the scenario – if we want to get from A to B, this is what we do.”
There’s no binary decision-making when it comes to areas of our business, particularly business growth – it all depends on a number of factors. Importantly, what could growth mean for you? Once you realise you’ve got a choice, it opens the door quite considerably.
We’ve been covering the importance of different types of growth and appreciating that you may be in this messy middle. But even if you’ve intuitively started to think about the type of growth that might be right for you, you’ll never know if you’re truly growing in the right direction unless you know where you’re going.
So, where are you? Have you assessed where you are as a business today, and where you want to build it to? What do you want to build, what’s the end game of your business, and what is this actually for?
I get a sense that this is an answer most startups are pretty good at articulating. There’s been some fire in their belly, they’ve started their business, and they’ve got a vision of where they want to be.
It’s so easy to lose sight of that, isn’t it? We’ve got to take stock – and it’s okay if what drove us to start the business in the first place isn’t true anymore.
It’s okay to reassess and say, “Actually, the world has changed, and our circumstances have changed.” So let’s think about it: what do you want to build, what’s the end game, and what is this actually for?
The other key question to ask yourself is: who do you want to do it for? Again, this might have changed since you started your business, and I’m going to cover in a minute the difference between what I call an ideal client or customer and your dream client.
Then there’s the impact you want to make – on your customers, maybe on your people and your growing team, and even on your field. Do you want to be a key influencer, moving and shaking the sector you work in? Do you want people to know you in your local community?
All of these things need to be assessed, and they give you a sense of the direction of travel you want to be going in. The other word I used earlier was context – what does your business sit alongside?
I know I keep referring to your business, but I also recognise a number of you might be leaders in a business rather than owners, and it’s exactly the same for you. Think about the context in which you’re working, or the context in which the business founder or owner is working.
What does this sit alongside? Is your family life something you want to be considerate of? There may be other businesses you’re interested in or involved in – some people I work with have more than one business.
And then there’s the rest of you – what do you actually enjoy doing with your life? Where does your business sit in context now?
I’m pretty sure I’m not telling you anything brand new, but have you ever been asked all of these things in the context of growing your business? Because that’s what we’re talking about today – are you considering all of these things when you say, “My business, or the business I’m involved in, is ready to grow”?
I mentioned before that I want to talk about the difference between an ideal client and a dream client. I use the word “client” loosely – for many of you, these could be customers of your product or service, and you might use different terms.
One of the important things is focus. When we’re growing our business, we can’t spread ourselves absolutely anywhere, and I could probably give a whole other three-hour talk just on focusing our time in a business.
But I wanted to touch on this because the businesses I work with find this form of thinking quite helpful day-to-day. Whatever startup programmes, courses, leadership work or marketing you might be involved in, a lot of people talk about ideal clients.
There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s great, and we hear it everywhere. Quite often, we’re trying to be quite niche about what we do, because we can’t sell our product to everybody, so we think about ideal clients.
What I find is that when I use the word “ideal” – and language is so important, isn’t it? – I immediately start to filter it in the context of everything my business has been built for. Who’s our ideal client today?
In my business, it could be somebody who’s been running a business for maybe five to 10 years and is earning six figures. Based on the type of messaging I’ve got within my business, they feel quite ideal to me.
But then I was introduced to a slightly new way of thinking. To be honest, when I first heard the term “dream client”, it felt a little bit woo-woo – when we use words like “magic” and “dream”, it can often conjure those sorts of things, can’t it?
I was introduced to it by Jodie Cook. She’s an entrepreneur, a Forbes author, a multi-author who’s written loads of books, a mental coach and an athlete, and I would definitely recommend you check her out.
Jodie uses the term “dream client”, and the context she uses it in is to imagine how different your business could be if you could wake up every morning and have the joy of serving your dream client. Most of us can think back over all the customers and clients we’ve worked with in recent years.
There are the ones that just make our lives easier. They’re a joy to serve; you get great feedback, and your service is hitting the point where they get the most benefit from it.
Imagine a business where you get to serve those dream clients day in, day out. When we’re thinking about growing our business and the direction we want to take it, it’s a really interesting lens to see it through.
Start to think about how you can reach more of your dream clients, and how you can add value to the people you absolutely love to work with. It might feel like a slightly odd snapshot to pop in the middle of this – something some people might say is much more relevant to a marketing session.
But I think it’s really important, when we’re thinking about business growth, to consider who we’re trying to make an impact for. Imagine how different your business day could be if you had the opportunity to serve your dream clients more and more.
There’s one more thing, and I’m mindful of time because I want to allow some time for questions, but I really don’t want to miss this. It’s something so many business owners don’t recognise in themselves or in their business, partly because it’s something you stop noticing.
As a business mentor, one of the things I’m always looking out for in the people I work with is their edge. This is your expertise, your experience – all the amazing stuff you’ve built up over the years that you think is entirely normal, but is insight other people just don’t have.
As I’ve mentioned, it’s usually something you stop noticing, and that’s the beauty of my privileged position. I get the opportunity to draw that out of somebody, quite often by observing the things they say they do in their business.
It really is something that can’t be copied. That’s why one business will run a certain way and be successful in a certain way, while another can’t copy it, or it’s not right for them – because it’s that beautiful combination of skills and expertise that we’ve built.
It might be the edge the business owner originally had, which has penetrated the culture in a certain way. There’s so much happening within your business that you’ve stopped noticing – there’s a uniqueness you have, and the last thing you want to do when you grow is forget about it.
A lot of people say, “It’s really important that I stop doing all these things because I’m a business owner and I’m really busy.” But the things that really inspire you to bring to the business each day are the things people around you look to you for. It’s really important that you recognise that within your business.
This is a really important point. We talked before about the business owner who just kept adding more to his business, and was having sleepless nights thinking about all the individual families he’s now supporting through his employees.
The point I want to make here is that growth often comes in phases, and there are phases of growth that are just about strengthening. Remember I talked about processes, systems and the way things run? Strengthening those is still growth.
Some people say that when you strengthen those things, what you’re actually doing is maturing the business. It’s all the things that ultimately make your business able to take on more customers and more offers, and that’s why it’s important to think of this as a cycle.
When you’ve added more customers, more markets and more offers into your business when it’s strong, there will be a period when you need to strengthen it. So it is cyclical.
As I mentioned before, when you’re feeling this messy middle, it could be because you’ve added lots and lots to your business, and now it’s time to reflect and strengthen. Then things might be calm, and you’re ready to add again.
So we think about business growth as coming in phases and cycles, but there are two facets to that, and strengthening is the one most owners forget to consider. Just last week, somebody almost thanked me for giving them permission to see growth that way – that strengthening their business is still growing it, not stifling it.
So when you say you want to grow, what do you actually want more of? Hopefully, these are the things we’ve just been considering.
To wrap up, to consider whether your business is growing in the right direction: get really clear on where you’re going and who for, and define what growth means for you, bearing in mind it will change at different stages. Bring out more of what makes your business yours – the edge – and don’t let it go missing.
Be clear on what your business needs now: do you need to add, or do you need to strengthen? And let me reassure you, I know your business is already successful.
People come to these sorts of seminars because they’re feeling that frustration, and they know they can be doing more. You’re not doing it wrong – perhaps you’ve just not seen it this way before.
Before we go to Q&A, I want to leave you with one final thing to help, if you’d like it. I’ve got a little tool called Ready to Scale, and the URL is on the screen here – I know Ryan will share my LinkedIn details in a minute, and I can share this with you now.
It’s a way of asking yourself five questions and getting them out of your head. I’ve got a little Beth AI tool in there that’s trained on how I think, and it can ask you the questions, because I obviously can’t be in the room while you’re completing it.
Do feel free to use the tool. Ryan, should we have a look at the chat?
Ryan: Amazing, Beth, that was so good – thank you. Really interesting, and it was so nice to have some really good feedback coming in.
Someone said: “I’m really glad that you covered this as I’m just starting out, and every day I find myself getting overwhelmed with that business side of things. So it’s refreshing to hear that it’s normal.” It’s been brilliant, Beth.
We’ve got a couple of questions, so we’ll jump into them. What would you say are some of the warning signs that a business may be growing in the wrong direction?
Bethan: Hopefully, from what I’ve said today, it isn’t necessarily about right and wrong. But I do feel that, as a business owner, when something’s jarring, it’s a sign, and it’s worth exploring.
It might be as simple as asking, “Am I trying to add more into something that just needs strengthening first?” It really is about taking time to reflect – am I just adding more and more, when I could take stock and strengthen some of my processes and systems?
I classically talk to people who say, “I’m going to a conference next week, and I’m going to get loads of new clients.” And I say, “That’s brilliant, but can you cope with it? What have you done in the back office to make sure you can continue to serve your customers well and also cope with the new ones?”
That’s because people have been seduced into thinking, “I’m growing my business, and I’ve got to go and do that.” I wouldn’t call that the wrong direction, but the question is, have you really taken stock?
Ryan: Interesting – there’s no right or wrong. I think that ties in with the next question we got in the chat, Beth.
A member has an organic coffee company online, but despite all their efforts, it hasn’t picked up – and that’s after spending thousands of pounds on social media and digital marketing. In that instance, what would you suggest as the next step to look at why that growth didn’t work?
Bethan: I’m going to caveat this really heavily because, to give you context, before I would normally give advice, I’ve probably asked about four hours of questions. I don’t like to give out binary advice of, “This is what I would do.”
But what I do find with a lot of companies who are spreading themselves quite thinly and trying out different marketing strategies that aren’t really working is that many of them are trying to sell to too many customers. What I mean by that is they haven’t really defined their dream client – who it is they should optimally be selling to.
So they dilute their message – and I’m no marketeer, so I’ll caveat that – and then nobody hears them. When we market to people, they need to get that feeling of, “Oh, they’re talking to me. They really are talking to me.”
Quite often, we just don’t speak to that single person – the dream client we want to serve, and we know our product is amazing for. That’s notwithstanding all the other traps of social media and things like that – hence the caveat that I’m not a marketer.
But whoever’s put that question, I would definitely explore looking at their dream client. I’ve actually got a tool for that as well – it’s totally free and on my website, but on a hidden link. So if they drop me a message on LinkedIn, I’ll happily share it, and it might be something they can work through.
Ryan: Amazing, that’s really helpful – thank you, Beth. I think it’s about trying not to target everybody and reach everybody, because you’re just going to dilute things and spread yourself too thin trying to reach everyone out there.
Bethan: It’s more subtle than that, though, Ryan – it’s more the fact that nobody hears it. As a consumer, you want to feel that you’re being spoken to, and think, “That’s for me.”
Ryan: I agree – thank you, Beth, that was really helpful. We are just on time, and there’s some really great feedback coming in.
Great presentation – I really enjoyed it, and I think it went down really well. I’ve just re-popped your LinkedIn and Enterprise Nation profile.
Bethan: Yes, please. I’m very happy for people to get in contact with me – it’s a genuine, non-salesy thing. I’m very happy for people to get in touch, and I’ll share resources where I can.
Ryan: Amazing, thank you so much, Beth. That was a brilliant session, and thank you, everyone, for joining – a big thank you to Beth.
Please do connect afterwards if you have further questions or want to work with Beth, using the links I’ve popped in the chat. An email will go out later, so keep an eye out for that as well. A huge thank you again to Beth for a really great session, and thanks, everybody.
Bethan: Brilliant. Thanks, everyone.
Ryan: Bye, Beth. See you later.
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