In this episode, Michelle breaks down why small business growth shouldn’t look like a hockey stick and why a slower, more intentional “switchback” path can lead to something far more sustainable.
Fast growth can look like success right up until you realize you’ve built a business you don’t actually want.
In this episode, Michelle breaks down why small business growth shouldn’t look like a hockey stick and why a slower, more intentional “switchback” path can lead to something far more sustainable. She talks about the lessons we miss when we move too quickly, how relationship marketing fits into that bigger picture, and why knowing which stage you’re in can help you keep moving without chasing quick wins that don’t actually get you anywhere.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 plus years I've been doing this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to the season three premiere of Sequence Over Strategy. Welcome back. I'm so happy to be here.
If you've been tuning in over the summer, we ran a best of series all summer. I handpicked the six episodes that I thought given the time and space that summer 2026 was presenting us, you most needed to hear again. So I hope you like that.
And I hope those refreshers really helped. But I've missed you and I've missed doing this. And today we're back with new episodes and I cannot be more excited about it.
So let's start season three with a question actually nobody asks me, but you should, right? Usually we're asked, I'm responding to questions that you have asked me. This time we're going to respond to a question that you should be asking me.
And it's around the pace of growth, right? I feel like people just assume that they should be growing fast. And instead we should ask, like everything else, Sequence Over Strategy, what question should we ask first?
I would love that we start asking the question, how fast should my business grow? And here's where that came from, right? All summer I have been thinking about relationship marketing and the time that it takes and just the general pathway of how all of our businesses grow.
I do this every summer as a way of just reflecting back on what's going on and thinking about how I can best serve you in the coming year, to be honest. And so this year I was really thinking a lot about something, again, that comes out of my mouth often, which is like simple but not easy, right? And how that related to relationship marketing.
And I've been saying it because of this pattern I keep running into where someone kind of does the Sequence Over Strategy correctly. We do that work correctly and they have that aha because we're talking or they're coming to a training or whatever that, you know, they do have a service-based business. They're a small service-based business and that relationship marketing is the choice that they should be pursuing, right, over traffic marketing.
Like it's very obvious that they should be relationship marketing. And so they make that call right then and there. They know in their gut, oh, now that I've come across this information and I've realised relationship marketing is the thing, amazing.
Like this is absolutely the thing that I've been looking for that fills in a gap and now I understand it. And that's exactly what I want, right? I want small service-based businesses to recognise that relationship marketing is what you should be doing over traffic marketing.
And then they start doing that. And I'm not going to lie, it takes a minute, right? Relationship marketing, it involves other human beings.
It just takes a minute to get it up and running. You can't just immediately decide I'm going to relationship market and then log into Instagram and start putting up a bunch of posts or log into LinkedIn. Like it takes a minute to get organised, to start making connections, to be reaching out.
And in that time, they start to get nervous, which is totally normal. I get it. You're wondering like, okay, where's the payoff?
And the thing is like when that happens, nobody's doing this wrong, right? You're just waiting for a payoff that doesn't quite do yet. And nobody's told them that, including myself, like raising my hand of understanding what this takes to get relationship marketing up and running within the scope of what maybe a 2026 expectation is.
So this got me again to think about something that's kind of embarrassing, which is that I've been doing this work for 10 plus years now. We're getting close to 15 years. I've done almost 60 episodes of this podcast, and I have never once told you how I actually think small businesses grow.
Like what's the shape of it? What's the philosophy underneath? We've talked about the business stages and that's totally crucial, but what does the shape of that growth actually look like?
Why the Pace of Growth Matters
So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're kicking season three off, talking about pace of business growth. And I want to be clear about why this matters, because it would be easier to hear like, oh, I'm probably going to talk about maybe growing a little slower or not trying to be an overnight success and think that this is some kind of episode about like patience and being kind to yourself.
And it isn't. Not to say I don't believe in all that, because please give yourself grace. I 100% believe in that.
But this isn't just saying, okay, take your time and see when it happens. This is more about the fact that the cost of getting this wrong is not that you grow slower. The cost of getting this wrong is that you may grow fast.
And when you do that, you actually grow into a business that you don't like most of the time and that it's really difficult to get out of. And so I've watched this happen to a tonne of people. I don't want it to happen to you.
And so let's talk about what small business growth and those curves kind of look like. Okay, first, we need to talk about the hockey stick, because it's the picture that's stuck in most people's heads, whether they know it or not. And let me explain a little bit more.
You may know that I come out of the startup world. And in startups, everyone is chasing what they call hockey stick growth. What that means is if you got a hockey stick in your head, right, picture it, like the blade is flat on the ground, right?
And there's so there's like a little bit of movement to start. And then the stick, right, the handle, it almost goes straight up, right? Like you have the blade, and then boom, up you go.
That's the shape, right? Flat, flat, flat, vertical. And in startups, that shape makes sense, right?
That's the kind of growth we might want to look for. Like there's capital, there's teams, there's cover, there's people in the building that are doing jobs. And it doesn't have to be only on you, right?
But you as a small business owner, like you don't have that cover. And so in a small business, you are the business. I talk a lot about like product market founder fit, like this matters that that fits for you, because you can't just ask somebody else to do it.
So if you don't like the clients, which I kind of laugh about, but also I gotta say like 90% of my one on one clients come to me and they're like, I don't like my clients anymore. And that's okay, right? This doesn't mean they're bad people.
It just means you've outgrown them in some way. There's like no department to hand them off to. You can't go hand them to customer success or client management or whatever.
If you don't like their work, there's nobody else who does it. And so we can't take growth patterns from corporate or from startups and drop them into what you're building because this is just like a different animal. But here's the part I really want you to take with you in the actual trade that you're making when you kind of chase that shape, or you may not even, again, know you're chasing that shape.
You just know that you think you're supposed to be going fast. And that is that, that speed, it costs you lessons. So when I talk about sequence over strategy, and then when I talk about the stages of business, part of what makes up that order is what you need to learn along the way, right?
The part of the reason we go in order is there are a series of micro lessons you have to learn as you go and you iterate off of those. So the sequence that we're talking about, as you build a business, it isn't arbitrary and it's partially defined by those stages of business growth, right? That came out of Harvard and that I constantly refer back to and have adapted for you.
And we'll make sure that we link to that in the notes because I've done an episode on that as well. But we need to move through those stages. We need to move.
And then the steps within those stages, we need to move through them in intentional ways. So it's partially a list of lessons in the order that you can like actually absorb them. And so when you're growing too fast or when you have that expectation, you end up skipping those lessons.
So you don't get to find out if you like the work, if you like the clients, what you should be changing, what little iterations you should be making along the way. You skip all of that. And skipping it is fine right up until it isn't.
From Hockey Stick Growth to Switchbacks
So that's all fine and great. I've hopefully convinced you that we're not looking for hockey stick growth. But if hockey stick isn't the shape, what is the stage?
What is the shape? And for a long time, I've kind of off the cuff of my head, like, oh, it's a ramp, right? It's slow and steady, kind of up and to the right, which is accurate, but it's also like kind of boring.
And I think undersells what's actually going on. So let me give you a better picture. I'm a backpacker.
I'm an outdoor person, as you know. And when you climb a mountain, right, or I use mountain, you know, when you're climbing, well, we're climbing mountains, right? I backpack in Colorado all the time.
When you're climbing, the trail almost never goes straight up the face, right? It goes back and forth. We call them switchbacks.
And most people assume switchbacks exist because, like, we get tired and we don't want to just, like, walk straight up because we couldn't handle that. And like raising my hand here, I definitely don't want to walk straight up a mountain, straight up that vertical. And that's part of it, but it's not the main reason.
The main reason is that trails that would go straight up a mountain, like, would destroy the mountain. Every time it rains, that water runs right down the line that you cut, and it takes all the soil with it. So that fast route, and eventually, like, there will be no trail there.
The mountain's still there, but the path is gone. So that's kind of like the hockey stick. It's the fastest possible way up, but it kind of erodes everything underneath it, and you build something that you're not sure what you built, and it doesn't go well.
But switchbacks, you get there the same way, right? You gain the same elevation. You get to the same ending place.
You just get there on a trail that's still there when you're done, which matters, because you're only going to want to climb it again. You're going to want to be there. You're going to want to have moments along the trail where you're iterating and saying, hey, is this working, or do I need to change things a little bit?
That's kind of what we're talking about. And let me tell you where I learned this, because it certainly wasn't from going to business school or all that. Even though I did those things, like, they're not teaching you this stuff.
You have to learn this stuff when you are out doing this yourself, and when you are someone like me who has watched other entrepreneurs do it for, like, 20 years, right? I started this business 15-ish years ago. I always get the dates wrong.
I need to really look this up. But before that, I was watching entrepreneurs for a while, and I was my own entrepreneur. But when I started this particular business, I was essentially a fractional CEO.
I worked with businesses whose founders didn't have a lot of operating experience, and I would get in behind them, behind the scenes, and I would run the thing. And this was back around, like, 2015. So if you were around then, you would know that it was the Wild West out there, right?
Online businesses, we could just grow absurdly fast. Like, overnight million-dollar businesses, they were a real thing that really happened. And it didn't really shock me, because, again, I was coming out of startups.
And so that was the growth that I was familiar with. But then I started noticing this pattern in who was calling me. And it was interesting, because the businesses that were growing the fastest, they were the ones that were the most miserable and the most in trouble over and over.
And this wasn't, like, an occasional thing. This was over and over and over again. And it always looked the same, where we had a founder who had grown overnight.
Maybe they had charisma. Maybe they had some sort of special market timing where they got lucky. They just had some sort of advantage that they took advantage of, whether they knew it or not, that allowed them to do that growing overnight.
What Fast Growth Can Cost
But when they grow overnight, all of a sudden, you have to very quickly hire a team, right? Because you have to keep up. You have people depending on you for your income.
You build this infrastructure. You build this whole thing very, very quickly to support a thing that you, like, haven't ever figured out whether you actually like or whether it actually is sustainable for your life. And then all of a sudden, somewhere you just sit down and you're like, this is completely unsustainable.
I can't keep this going. But what has happened in that time is all this infrastructure and all these teams are around you. And it's really hard to turn your back on that because now you have responsibilities.
There's more at stake. When you grow overnight, there's a lot at stake to be able to have the courage to raise your hand and be like, I don't like this. And so that is a really hard place to be.
There's too much on the line to just change it. The revenue is there. The team is there.
Like the clients, all that is real. And you can't just turn that ship around because everybody involved has that stake. So one thing I want to be like really clear about, like, none of these are bad people, right?
Nobody like is a villain here. It was just cases of misalignment that I talk about all the time, but it was misalignment that had been scaled. And so once that happens, it's just really, really difficult to reverse.
And it causes a lot of extra things to get uncomfortable and just think that we don't want to deal with. So compare that to like a business that grows on our switchback analogy. If you're making smaller decisions one at a time and you're able to iterate, you're making them with more information and you're making them with a size of information that you can react to.
You find out that you don't like delivering things in this way or you find out that you don't like this type of client or to bring it back to relationship marketing. You find out that maybe you got your ideal connection avatar a little bit wrong or you find out that these people aren't very collaborative. So you need to look in a different way.
You have time to respond. So that's why I'm telling you about this in an episode that kind of started out being about relationship marketing is this stuff. It's all intertwined and it all comes back to the same pace of growth because it's the same problem, right?
Wearing a different hat. When you make the right sequence call, right? I'm a service business.
So relationship marketing is aligned to my choice. Like, correct. Great.
We're moving in the right direction. And then you start doing it and it comes back again to our original question. It can take a minute to build some momentum.
Meanwhile, it's very tempting to look at traffic marketing because it's sitting right over there offering you like hits of adrenaline around the way, along the way, and your ability to say like, yeah, got that right or got that done. You can post, you can complete a to-do list. You can look at that checked box and pat yourself on the back and say, yeah, I got it all done.
The problem is checking the box doesn't mean the box did anything, right? It just means that you can tell yourself you did it. But that feeling is real and it's still addictive.
And when relationship marketing hasn't paid off yet, that feeling is exactly what kind of pulls people off the path and gets them back and be like, oh, I'm just going to go start posting on LinkedIn. So the fix is not to like white knuckle it and be patient. I don't believe in willpower.
I think that it's really unfair to ask people to have willpower and to just say, oh, just keep going. You know, it'll pay off. I promise.
The fix instead is to kind of know where you are. Where are you along that relationship marketing, right? We have the stages of business for actually growing your business.
The Stages of Relationship Marketing
So when I'm talking about your stages of business, I'm always like, are you in stage one, two? You know, and a lot of people are in stage two. And we talk about the sub stages within stage two so that you can see your progress.
And we haven't really done that for relationship marketing. I shouldn't say we, me. I haven't really done that for relationship marketing.
So I've started describing this in kind of four steps that you're going to take as you make progress. Step one, you're going to be scouting. You're figuring out who you should be building relationships with.
You're doing a little bit of experimenting and then you move on and you can actually do the connecting. You can be thinking about reaching out to those people who you scouted and the types of people. And then you can be figuring out how to collaborate with them.
And then you can be figuring out, oh, what does even a compounding relationship look like? Right. Not just a one time collaboration, but if they're a really good fit and we work together and it makes a lot of sense, how can we build this over the years?
And I want to be careful here, right, because I don't want to hand you a framework to memorise. Like, that's not the point. The point is that you don't have to kind of reach step four to be winning.
And step four isn't the only place that you can win. So this is not like I think when a lot of people start relationship marketing, they start thinking immediately about the big grand slams, like kind of the step four. What are these big compounding relationships and how can I make one start by tomorrow?
And when you're doing that, you're kind of taking too big of a swing. You're asking for the hockey stick when instead we want to kind of deliberately go through these steps because as you go through these steps, you build momentum, you make sales, things start to work. It's not that nothing happens.
It's just that you're going through the stages as you should. And that's what we want you to do. That's where we find sustainable growth.
And so this is why we've kind of long build into steps is that when the payoff is a few months out, you need a way to know that you're moving. You need a way to know that you're there. When we talk about your overall model, we talk about are you in sales or are you building your foundation or what stage are you in?
And now in relationship marketing, we're talking about the same thing. What stage are you in? Because that means that you are still progressing forward and you know the goal at the end of that stage.
And then you know what you're going to start doing in the next stage. And we can build in that switchback way. Over and over again, I've seen that is what works, right?
We don't need the hockey stick. We don't need the Grand Slam. How many sports metaphors can I use?
We don't need that out of the gate. And I think that's what people are going for. And so we want to think through what are these steps that are going through, because that's the other thing, like we're usually talking months here.
We're not talking years. I'm not asking you to give me five years until your marketing works. I'm just asking you to give me a little bit more time than tomorrow so that you can build something that is sustainable.
So let's pull all these ideas together, right? The hockey stick is a startup shape when we're talking about growth, whether it be the growth of your business revenue or whether we're talking about the growth of your relationship marketing outcomes. Obviously, those are tied together, but the relationship marketing outcomes, it's more of a task that we pull apart, right?
So the hockey stick is a startup shape for both of those things. And you don't kind of have that startup cover. So it's not the shape that you should be going for.
And the reason for that is because speed costs you lessons. And the sequence is partially made of making sure that you do learn those lessons, because if you don't learn them, guess what? You're going to be bounced back to the beginning.
Why Skipping Lessons Costs More
It's like a game show that's like, OK, back to starting point, right? What is it? Shoots and ladders like you can go so far.
Then we're going to send you down a ladder back because if you miss the lessons that you need to learn, guess what? You're going to have to learn them eventually. And so you don't want to skip them because skipping them is painful.
In the overall arc of your business's growth and of your ROI, if you skip those lessons, you're going to pay a price that is higher than the original cost of waiting to learn that lesson is essentially what we're saying, right? If you go too fast, having to slide back and learn lessons is going to cost you more than going a little slower and learning them along the way. And in that way, right, because you just have misalignment and it gives you a business that looks good on paper, but you can't turn around.
Same with relationship marketing, right? You might build some relationships, but they're in the complete wrong direction. And now you have to kind of tear things down and start over again.
And so that's one thing that I want to take with you in the phrase where I've been saying it all summer is like this simple, but not easy, right? Let's come back to the beginning. Relationship marketing is simple.
Generally, like the steps are not all that complicated. I can explain it to you in an afternoon. I've explained it a tonne of times and three different things.
But the path to building simple, it's not always easy. And that's not a flaw, right? That's just what simple costs.
Because think about anything in your business or even in your life that is running simply now, your onboarding, your delivery. I mean, maybe it's just your daily routine. All of that at the beginning, you can see how it's simple, but it's not easy.
It becomes simple because you do the unsimple work of getting it there. Simple is the reward at the end. It's never the thing that you start with.
So it's the same deal here, right? And that's the reason why it's worth that arc. When you get through the not easy part to the simple part, the return is bigger.
It's more profitable. It takes less out of you. That's the whole trade, right?
You pay early so it costs less forever. So this season, I want you to hold that line and we're going to be talking about it a lot and see that progress that you're actually making and to actually help you make things simple and make them easy. And as a way of that, to count that momentum and make sure that you are learning the correct lessons along the way.
So, my friends, thank you for being here today, as always, especially since it's our season opener. Thank you for sticking with me through the summer. Again, I hope you learned some great lessons.
I know that I did as I had time to think this through and what do I need to come with you at this year to help you. But mostly I missed you and I'm glad to be back. So if today made you actually want to build this thing out, the timing is good.
I have a Build Your Relationship Funnel Bootcamp running in October. We're going to run on the four Thursdays of October and I would love to have you join me. If you want to build and start building your simple but not easy system, right, and start getting in the right pathway, then don't do it alone.
I've been teaching it for a few years now and I absolutely love this format. We changed the format a little bit in the spring to these four days of consecutive weeks so that we weren't trying to cram it all in a week. It gives you time to process.
It was just such a wonderful format. So I'm really psyched to bring it back right away this fall. You can find more information on it at themichellewarner.com backslash Relationship Bootcamp or feel free to drop me an email. We're in early bird pricing right now, so you can save $500 through October 2nd if you jump in with us now. And I would absolutely love to have you if this is something that you want to build with us. And remember, if this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that might help or if you left us a review because that helps other small business owners like you find this show.
Thanks so much, guys, and I will see you back here in a few weeks.