Entrepreneurs should walk but never run. Growth takes patience, like farming and healing. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ambitious.

It’s good to be ambitious, set bold targets, and reach for the stars.

But farmers know you can’t grow a tree in a year. Farmers also know that growing a tree takes a lot of setbacks — dry years, thunderstorms, pests.

For some reason, entrepreneurs inspired by unicorn stories and other fantasy creatures forgot the logic of down-to-earth farmers.

You can look at a business from any angle, and you will realize it takes time to grow a great business – finding the right people, attracting sales, and scaling your tech.

This article is not about the hard facts of growing a business, but about the quiet, hidden factors that slow down business growth.

Let’s look into a couple of examples from my experience as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

1. The Wrong People

When your business grows, you need to find the right people to support you on your mission. However, hiring is arguably the most difficult challenge for founders. Lots can go wrong, even if you hire diligently.

Speaking for myself, I have made a few bad hiring decisions during my career as an entrepreneur. However, most of those hiring decisions were wrong only retrospectively: Just like growing a tree quickly, it’s impossible to assess an employee’s suitability and performance in weeks or months. An employee’s true strengths and weaknesses become visible only in times of problems or crisis. Plus, not all employees are made to thrive in a fast-paced environment like a young company.

Letting go of employees is never easy, not even if their performance was unsatisfactory. But the difficult part starts once the employee has left your company: Even if it was you who decided to terminate an employee, filling the hole he or she left will take time. Just like healing a wound.

I had to let go of my CTO because he spread too much chaos in the development team. Cleaning up the chaos was a heavy-lift team effort, and it took us around one year to get back on track.

I also had to fire one of my co-founders due to attitude problems. Whilst the attitude problems were gone immediately, communicating to the rest of the team that certain attitudes are intolerable took time, too. And believe it or not, even a couple of years after the event, we still find some unpleasant legacy from that co-founder that we need to clean up. Healing wounds takes time and leaves scars; there is no fast track to overcoming a bad hiring decision.

2. Gaining Clarity

From the two bad hiring decisions mentioned above, quite a bit of the remaining work landed on my desk. I took back control over product decisions, and I also led the development team until we groomed a couple of good tech team leads from within.

Taking back control sounds glorious. But it isn’t. At the beginning, I had to go through product stories and development tickets over and over again, just to find out what’s going on and what the priorities are (or should be). With a 10-strong product and development team and 30-odd customers requesting features, that’s a very messy endeavour.

Nevertheless, two years after taking back control over product decisions, I have gained some level of clarity on technical dependencies, customer priorities, and new features that will lead us into the future.

What took me so long? I focused on solving the pressing problems first, making some further changes to the team organization. I worked with the reconfigured team to make product stories and development tickets more understandable to both customers and the development team. Only then could I start to cluster issues and look ahead. This took a few solemn trips to the mountains, where the awesome view undermined the clarity in my mind.

Conclusion

Whenever you think you’re not getting anywhere with growing your business, remember the last wound you had and how long it took to heal.

And just like when recovering from a wound, don’t run.