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Join for freePosted: Thu 9th Jul 2026
You built your business through expertise, hard work and being deeply involved in everything.
At first, that's exactly what the business needs. But as the business grows, those same habits that made you freelance can become the same things that hold you back.
Many founders find themselves trapped between delivering work, solving problems and making decisions, while also trying to lead a growing business. The result is often longer hours, slower progress and the feeling that everything still depends on them.
In this session, Mark Elliott explores the transition from freelancer to owner and the changes needed for the next stage of growth.
Learn how to recognise when your role has become a limiting factor, what successful founders stop doing as their businesses mature, and practical ways to create more capacity, freedom and momentum.
Whether your goal is growth, more time, greater flexibility or preparing for a future exit, this session will help you identify what needs to change next.
How to recognise when the business has outgrown your current role
What successful founders do differently at the next stage
How to create more capacity without working harder
Mark helps solo business owners overcome the challenges that come with starting a business.
With more than 15 years of experience, he uses tools like the Lean Canvas, Customer Factory and RAISE goals to turn learning into action that sticks.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Lunch and Learn: What to Do When Your Business Outgrows You
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses. I'm very pleased to introduce Mark Elliott, who is a leadership coach. In this session, Mark explores the transition from freelancer to owner and the changes needed for the next stage of growth.
Beth: If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Just so you know, the webinar will be recorded, and we will send further resources later today. So, over to you, Mark.
Mark Elliott: Hello, everyone. My name is Mark, and I guess I'm part of the vibrancy of the community. I was just thinking, how many iced coffees is too many iced coffees? Has anybody asked GPT yet today?
Mark: Anyway, we're here to examine the question: what to do when the business outgrows you. And that question is really – has your business outgrown you already?
Mark: How would I know if it's outgrown me? Well, you might find that things are not operating the same way that they were for the last couple of years. There might be that time is the only thing you're short of, that you're not short of other things. It might be that other clients' expectations of you have changed.
Mark: Maybe it's gone from personal connections to you working with businesses as a whole and not individuals.
Mark: But when we look at whether your business has outgrown you, I'm not saying it's your expertise, and I'm not saying it's your ambition. What I'm saying is it might be your role within the company which has been outgrown.
Mark: One point to note: you are a superhuman if you've created your own business, then hurrah. Well done. You created it with your knowledge, your passion, your qualities, your drive, and your responsiveness. It's all been your hard work. Yay for you.
Mark: But you know that what got you here may not get you there. Now, actually, if you don't know that, then perhaps this is something for you to reflect on, to ponder on. Another question for you to think about is, are you still indispensable to your business? Are you indispensable all the time?
Mark: Because that is a real trap for getting more business, for growing in the business in the way that you want to grow it. Now, these traps may be different if you're a solo person, if you're just on your own, or if you already have a team. Maybe they're employed, maybe they're subcontractors or freelancers that you use to help you out, maybe colleagues from different businesses. But it's really the same trap, but in a different form.
Mark: How do I know this? Well, I've been working with a few thousand businesses over the last 10 years, and perhaps 757 or something over the last 5 years. Yes, I'm sorry, I collect details like that.
Mark: So part of the outgrowing things is a single point of reference. Single point, not necessarily a single point of contact, but a single point of decision-making.
Mark: So it may be that if you've got a team, decisions all come through you, or you are the approver, you have the quality. Maybe, I know, we have the best person – hustle culture is great. It's what we aspire to, and then it isn't. Not all the time, not 24/7, not seven days a week.
Mark: That way is the sure path to mental ill health, to overwhelm and breakdown. Amongst those thousand people, some 15 per cent of the people I work with have already been through a breakdown at some point in their career.
Mark: So this is here for you, to protect your future, for your family, for your children, for the rest of your life. So this trap may be a blocker to you making the business do what you want it to do.
Mark: So, are you still indispensable? Well, I thought – getting out of that indispensability – I thought I'd tell you a bit about Selena.
Mark: Selena is a digital web designer who came to me and said she wanted more good business. But she was very busy doing everything all the time for everybody. Every offer was shaped from scratch because she was responsive, because she listened to the client's problem, what they wanted, and their perception of what they wanted. So, for her, she had outgrown, if you like, the need to start from scratch for everything.
Mark: So with Selena, we made her offer clearer. It became more focused for her, more focused for her potential clients. And a key thing, it became more repeatable. By building up a library of things that were already started, Selena didn't need to start from scratch every time, and she could still produce the same quality even without starting from scratch.
Mark: So, Selena was able to do more with her time by making sure more of her time was repeatable, reusable, and the offers for the clients were much simpler and much easier to understand.
Mark: And Lisa started a business in corporate events: big corporate events, with budgets running into the hundreds of thousands, up to a quarter of a million pounds, that kind of thing. Her original clients came with her. High standards, high quality.
Mark: When it came to finding new clients, new business, she was delivering so much that it was difficult for her to also focus on finding new people, new clients. She had a team of people to help on the day and with the planning.
Mark: But what we uncovered was that she was a single hub – everything came back to her, including the things she wanted to do more of, the outreach activities. And because everything came back to her, she had no time, energy, or headspace to experiment, to do new things.
Mark: So what we did very early on was to decide what actually needed her: what could be documented, what responsibility could be passed to the people working with her and for her.
Mark: There's this element of habit here. Because when you start a business, you do things in the way you've already done them. And when other people join you, they join in on those habits too. So in recalibrating your business – re-engineering, redesigning your business - working out what habits you keep and what habits you let go, how you communicate the unspoken pieces of your business, is really what we did with Lisa.
Mark: And what helped Lisa grow her business tenfold within 2 years was really what, underneath, she wanted to do – to bring a stable foundation for when her kids were older. She changed her business into something she could do more full-time, and we made that all happen.
Mark: But when I think across all of the clients I've ever worked with, there are some fundamental models that I think are really useful, and that's what I'm here to share with you. I'm sharing with you this one, which is: clarify, simplify, multiply.
Mark: So when it comes to the shift from freelancer to business owner – from a single-person, single operation to perhaps multi-person, multi-delivery – clarifying what genuinely needs you, what is only you, and what could be other people, process, decisions, or boundaries, helps to simplify what's happening, to get it out of your head and into a form which is more easily communicated.
Mark: Now, it may be simplifying your offer. That may be simplifying things that are moving forward. And then, and only then, multiply. Once you have things that are repeatable and scalable, then repeat them and potentially scale them. So: clarify, then simplify, then multiply, in that order.
Mark: So when you're a freelancer, starting the journey from being the person who finds out what the customer needs and gets it delivered, to being a person who looks at their business separate from themselves and allows the business to do more things more easily – it's not really a personality change.
Mark: It's relieving you of those things you don't need to do every time for everybody. So it's not a personality change, but it's a structural change in how you approach the business, really.
Mark: But now I want you to have a quick think. Within this model, what do you think your biggest blocker is? What's your biggest block at the moment? Is it you? Is it perhaps your offer - the simplicity of your offer, the complication of your offer? Is it the systems you have – the selling systems or the delivery systems? Is it your team, or your team communication?
Mark: I'd like you to pop that in the chat: what's the biggest blocker to you extending your business, to taking your business to the next level? I can't really see where anybody's putting things in the chat, but I will have a look at that later. So put that in the chat, and we will come round to it.
Mark: So, clarify, simplify, multiply, as a framework for you to grow into a new business if your business has outgrown you as you are at the moment.
Mark: It's not do less, do differently. It's making sure that you can do more, but simply. And that may be doing more of what you love, or what pays the best, or what clients appreciate. Or it may be doing more of managing your business, managing your subcontractors, your freelancers, your staff, in order to make that happen.
Mark: Doing things differently means creating your new role, which includes all of the things you love about what you do, but at a scale that allows you to move your business upstream: bigger, more sustainable, easier, with better clients, with better-value clients.
Mark: So that may be moving away from solving every problem yourself, to creating decision boundaries. That sounds very grown-up, doesn't it? It may be shifting stuff that's in your head into processes, activities, pro forma models, or infographics, to make that information usable by other people more simply.
Mark: It might be not saying yes to everything, but saying yes to those things which match what you actually want to do, and where you actually want to be.
Mark: It sounds a bit hippy-dippy, but what I love to see with small business owners is that you're enabled to do more of the work that only you can do. There's the alignment: doing the things you love, and the things that only you can do, and redesigning the business so that you do the things you love, and take away from yourself, or devolve, those things which only you can do.
Mark: That's all very well, but what does that mean in practice? I thought I'd give you a couple of tools that you can start using now to help you and your business grow into the next scale. So, I thought I'd give you some teeny-tiny first steps that you can take.
Mark: The first thing you can do is protect something that you only want yourself to do, forever, or for the next three years, for the next stage of your business. So decide what your 'you only' things are. It's like deciding a not-doing list, but it's what things you're going to keep with you – what things you love.
Mark: The next simple thing is to make one process that you do visible. It might be documented or put up on a whiteboard so that everybody can see it. But make one recurring process visible, so that anyone could come in and follow it.
Mark: Just one process. One process will relieve you of the mental burden of doing that, and it'll allow someone else, at some point in the future – maybe tomorrow – to do it too.
Mark: And another thing is to transfer one outcome to somebody within your team. Transfer the responsibility for the delivery of the outcome – not just the job, but the outcome, the quality of it, the delivery of it – to someone else. Just deliver one thing, so start small.
Mark: Especially if you're not used to doing it, start small and move forward. Protect one 'you only' thing. Make one thing you do repeatedly visible – document it, make it visible to somebody else to follow the process. And transfer the responsibility of delivery of the outcome – your quality, your time controls, whatever is important to you – to someone else.
Mark: The guiding light here is: what still comes to you should only come to you because you haven't redesigned it yet. Take the mental model that everything can be handed over to other people, so you can step back, which brings me to the next tool you might like to think about.
Mark: So the next tool is a 30-day experiment. Set yourself a mental challenge to reflect: if you were unavailable for 30 days, for whatever reason – you were ill, had a bereavement, had a caring responsibility, were co-opted to do some brilliant work in Bora Bora, or went snorkelling for 30 days – just have a look at each of the business areas, and see whether they would stop, whether they would slow down, or whether they would continue without you actually being there.
Mark: Just think: would they totally stop? Would they slow down but still keep going in some way, like scheduling posts on social media, for example? Or would they continue as if you weren't needed? So, think about this – and really, that's not a judgment from me, certainly not a judgment from me.
Mark: But what it does is give you a map of how indispensable you are in everyday life. By considering these areas, you'll think: do I actually want to do these things, or is it that I have to do these things? That's creating a 30-day experiment: if this happened, what would happen? You might even try it – I do it on some holidays every year. How good is my business at running without me? You might like to try that too.
Mark: And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it. So what I wanted to say in summary is: your business may have outgrown you. It may be tougher than it should be. It may not be as rewarding as it used to be.
Mark: But remember, this is a really common phase within solo small business operation. It's really common. You're not broken. The business isn't broken – I firmly believe that. The business has just outgrown how you used to do things, and it could do with some pruning, some fertiliser, some redesign – all of those lovely garden similes and ideas.
Mark: So, to repeat: what got you here won't necessarily get you to where you want. So, I will now have a look at the chat.
Mark: So some really interesting questions are coming through in the chat. Caroline has a challenge about shifting from a single-person to multiple-person use of a physical space.
Mark: Hello, Caroline. Yes, that is a challenge. The step of taking on physical space is often bigger than your business needs to take. And when you're hiring freelancers, in a way, the world has changed – people's expectations of what they do have changed in relation to in-person working.
Mark: The question I would ask is: is it necessary for people to come together, or is it more about recognising what's really important about getting together? I know at Enterprise Nation, not everybody works in the office all the time. But when people do come together, there's something really important about the connection, about people working alongside each other, and that is absolutely valued.
Mark: So, not necessarily rethinking, but when you hire a space, it's likely to be too big for you in the first instance, unless you've squeezed into your dining room for so long that you're bursting at the seams. So the step to committed expenditure – hiring space, wherever you are in the country – it may be super cheap, or it may be super expensive.
Mark: So that is a big step, and it's not unusual to find that you can't build it back. My advice for people is normally: burst before you take on the extra expenditure. Obviously not in retail, but when you're working in a business, burst at the seams and use free and cheap space first.
Mark: For those of you in metropolitan areas, there are lots of co-working spaces, and lots of residential spaces coming up. And for those of you in smaller places, then Costa Coffee, or Caffè Nero, or whatever progressive cafe near you works, you can use those kinds of spaces in the way that works for you.
Mark: But Caroline, I hear you and see you. And if it's essential for your business type to work together, then that's not a downside – that's a quality to look for in the hiring process, when you're trying to find people to do things. That's an important part of what you need to do.
Mark: I can see Sharon has designed her business and is finding it difficult to maintain the vision and forward movement when there are crises, when there are people issues that happen to her that really affect her.
Mark: I see you, Sharon. And I would also say that the journey of delivering what you want, in the way you want, involves building boundaries with other people. You mentioned that other people have their boundaries. Well, boundaries are a two-way street here.
Mark: So building your own boundaries with regard to your own business is really important. And for those of us who have been pleasers, who have been super-quality people in the past, you may not have built up the boundary muscle that other people have. So be kind to yourself about building your boundaries, and experiment with how you express them.
Mark: Working those boundaries into your business is a journey, not a destination – especially if you've worked within a corporate or large environment, especially if you've worked within a reactive position, responding with immediacy and vibrancy to other people's issues with your own business. Then you will need to build up the protection of your new business – skills and experience to mark out your territory, to protect your boundaries.
Mark: So, you mentioned 30 years – oh, blimey. If you've done something in a certain way for 30 years, that's really habitual with you, and that's not a judgment. But it means that, at some point, it worked.
Mark: She says it worked, but now it needs to be different. And learning to understand and deliver on your boundaries and working out what your boundaries are is something that's a journey rather than a destination.
Mark: When we redesign a business, it's not that we have a weekend away, and then the new business is in place on Monday morning – it isn't like that. It's a journey, again, about moving from the way you operate to the way you want to operate: from identifying what's working in your current business, amplifying the things you want to do moving forward, and listening and learning from that path. That's really important.
Mark: So, what have we got in front of us? I would love you to stay in touch. This is the kind of stuff I talk about on LinkedIn. I'm a video person, but I also write. I'm a mentor on Enterprise Nation, and I have some free slots – if anybody is looking for a mentor, then do come along and choose me. I'm fun, I'm very direct, and I'm bouncy. If you feel you need bounce in your business, in your life, then do come along to me.
Mark: But I prepared something specifically for you. If you're unsure about what is holding your business back, I've created a checklist for you, so you can have an external view of what is stopping your business from growing. There's a checklist, and there's a QR code for that. And if you want to get straight to the point, then my calendar is there – so let's talk. You can book an appointment in my calendar, and we can get straight down to business.
Beth: Brilliant. Thank you, Mark. Thanks so much for the presentation today – that was great. So that is all we have time for today, but please do connect with Mark. I've also popped his Enterprise Nation profile and his LinkedIn in the chat, so please do feel free to reach out.
Beth: Just a reminder that the recording will be sent later, along with a few further resources. So, thanks again, Mark, thank you for that session. And thanks to everyone who joined us today. Bye, everyone.
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