When you first start building your business, the world feels wonderfully simple. You sit down, work, and get a result.
You might not know exactly what will happen ahead of time, but when an opportunity appears, you can, to some degree, steer what happens next.
Then, your business gets more complex. You grow big enough to have multiple projects in flight…
…and suddenly the immediate actions you take stop leading directly to visible results.
Now, instead of dealing with every client, you’re meeting with partners, vendors, contractors, employees, and event coordinators, among others, that act as an intermediary between you and your customers. Then, once you’re meeting is over, those people take actions based on your conversations that you’ll never fully see.
Hopefully, those actions cause your business to get even bigger until you’re serving a crowd of hundreds or thousands. With a bigger customer base, multiple projects, and a messy internet between you and your audience, you have an ever-dwindling ability to predict who will buy your product, when they’ll be ready to hire you, or what will finally nudge them over the line.
Your decisions still matter, but the connection between your actions and the outcomes gets fuzzier.
This is tough to stomach since most of us grow up with a small-system model of how effort works:
- Study → pass the test.
- Submit the assignment → get the grade.
- Complete the project → get the paycheck.
The loop between effort and outcome is short and legible. If things go well, it feels like control. If things go badly, you might fail, but at least you can see the link.
I remember the days when I could name every person who bought from me. Most of the time I could even recount where we met, and how many times I saw them.
When you’re early in your journey, the system is tiny and the sample sizes are small, so you can easily see the cause and effect of every action. Then, your business scales, and the system stops behaving like it used to in the days when you were small.
Russell Nohelty
I once met with the marketing director for a Mercedes-Benz dealership who told me they thought in 35-year time horizons, so that when somebody is ready for a Mercedes, they are the obvious choice.
I’ve been running businesses for 20+ years.
During that time, my career has flipped and turned a dozen times. I’m an old salt at this and still Mercedes is thinking on a time horizon almost double the age of my first business.
How do you control for somebody seeing an advertisement when they’re 12 that makes them fall in love with a car they won’t buy for over 20 years? You don’t.
You have faith that by controlling the inputs you get the outputs you want…eventually.
Entrepreneurs love feeling like they control their own destiny. After all, isn’t that why we went into business for ourselves? So, when something goes south, they naturally try to force certainty back into the equation. Even when they’re not trying to brute force a fix, they:
- Refresh analytics obsessively.
- Check email stats after every send.
- Watch social media numbers hour by hour.
- Dissect every product launch in painful detail, convinced they can find “the one thing” that broke it.
They watch the results more and work less, hoping that enough attention will make the system feel tight, legible, and obedient.
It won’t, though, and tracking it more closely will only succeed in driving you bonkers. No amount of dashboard-staring can turn a complex, growing business back into a tidy cause-and-effect classroom assignment.
The bigger your business gets, the less influence you have over who stumbles across your work this week, whether a particular prospect is in the right mood when your email lands, what algorithm decides to surface, or bury, your content, or which customer quietly recommends your service to their entire network six months from now…
…and that’s the kind of good chaos you want.
Growth engines are chaos engines. You can’t control the chaos, but you can increase the odds that chaos will work in your favor.
What you can control, fully, is what you do, how you do it, where you do it, who you do it for, and how much of it you do.
The better you are at controlling those inputs, the better your outputs will become.
In practice, this looks like: