Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

BUSINESS IS HARD

3 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker explains why running a business becomes more challenging as it grows. Two primary reasons are presented: (1) the mathematics of scaling—absolute gains translate into smaller percentage increases as the base size grows, illustrated by lead generation examples; and (2) an identity or rule shift—tactics that succeed when a company is small (e.g., hustling, doing everything personally) become ineffective at larger scales, requiring delegation, role changes, and new operating principles. The combination of diminishing relative returns and a fundamental change in how the business operates makes scaling feel harder than the early stages.

Chapters

Why does the business feel harder now than it did when it was half the size? Two reasons. The first is math. When a business is first getting started, let's say it's getting 10 leads a month and then the next month it's able to get another 10 leads a month. So it goes from 10 to 20. Well, that's 100% increase in leads. Fast forward a couple more years. Now it's a lot bigger. It's getting 100 leads a month. It figures out another way to get 10 leads a month. Well, that's only a 10% increase. As companies scale, the same activities don't get you the same level of result from a relative gain perspective. The bigger reason though is just the identity shift. I mean, when companies scale, everything that worked when it was small completely flips on its head. The things that made you great in the beginning from 0 to 1 million stop working from 1 million to 10 million. So hustling really, really hard in the beginning, that doesn't work from 1 million to 10 million. So in the beginning when you're hustling and doing everything yourself, that's the right thing to do in the beginning. At scale, it's just kind of hoarding everything from your team. Between the math, between the rule changes, it gets harder because the game changes.