There's a pattern that shows up again and again in business, whether you're running an established firm or still finding your feet as a start-up: when things get hard, the instinct is to retreat to what you already know. And this is completely understandable. When a business hits a setback, returning to familiar territory feels safe and it feels easy. You lean on the strengths that got you to where you are now and repeat what's worked before.

The problem is that when it comes to business, "the easy way" and "the right way" are rarely the same thing. This is even more true when you're trying to take your business to the next level. To do something you've never accomplished before you have to become someone who can accomplish something you have never accomplished before, which will involve going outside your comfort zone and growing personally. Dr Stephen Covey calls this "private victory" before "public victory" and every business owner who I have worked with that has achived great growth in their business worked on their own personal growth first.

Short-term comfort, long-term cost

Avoiding a difficult decision doesn't make it disappear, it just moves the cost from now to later and often that cost compounds with time. Reverting to the same approach you've always used to overcome difficulties might feel comfortable in the moment, but if that approach was part of what got you into the difficulty in the first place, doubling down on it only increases the problem. Leaning into your existing strengths is a reasonable instinct until those strengths stop being the thing your business actually needs to get over the hurdle or to take your business to the next level.

The "safe" choice is "easier" in the sense that it requires less immediate discomfort, however these kinds of decisions are never easier in the sense that truly matters, which is getting the business through the setback and out the other side.

Go through the storm, not around it

If there's a storm ahead of you, the fastest way to blue skies is to go directly through it. If you try to outrun it you generally end up spending longer in the storm, not less.

Business setbacks work the same way. The instinct to try to avoid a difficult period or overcome it by doing the things you usually do is natural, but the problem is that trying to avoid or deal with such situations in this way rarely shortens your experience of them. Facing the problem head-on, that is, making the call you've been avoiding or changing the thing that needs to change, is usually the faster route out, even though it's the harder one to start.

Becoming someone new

There's a simple piece of logic worth sitting with: if you want to get something you've never got, you need to do something you've never done and to do something you've never done, you need to become someone you've never been.

It's easy to talk about doing things differently. It's much harder to become the kind of leader, operator, or decision-maker that new results actually require.

The owner is the constraint

Having worked with more than 50 SMEs, one pattern stands out above all others: the single greatest constraint on a business's growth is the owner. Not the market. Not the competition. Not the economy. The owner; their habits, their comfort zone, their willingness (or reluctance) to change how they operate as the business around them changes.

The easy way is the hard way. The hard way, taken early, is usually the easy way in the end.