Every business owner loves momentum. Growth feels good… revenue’s up, headcount’s up, energy’s high. You’re hiring, launching, expanding. The engine’s running hot, and it feels like you’ve finally cracked the code.
But then something shifts. What used to work… stops working. Margins tighten. You’re busier than ever but somehow less profitable. The team’s worn down, and the spark that fueled your early years fades into exhaustion.
That’s because growth is only one part of the system.
And when you live in growth mode too long, it catches up to you.
A few years ago, I worked with a company that had been in permanent “go” mode. Since day one, they’d grown fast. Every year was bigger than the last. Revenue doubled, then tripled. They built new departments, added new locations, and hired people as quickly as they could find them.
And for years, it worked.
Then the plateau hit.
Revenue flatlined. Profit dropped. Systems cracked under the pressure. The business that had once been a rocket ship suddenly felt like it was sinking.
They were stuck in what I call the Growth Cycle. They were always chasing more, never stopping to reinforce the foundation beneath them.
When we stepped back, it became obvious what had happened: They’d skipped two critical steps.
They’d never stopped to reenter the Planning Cycle, where you clarify direction, reset goals, and rebuild alignment.
And they’d never gone through the Operating Cycle, where you shore up systems, refine processes, and stabilize cash.
Instead, they’d been sprinting on a treadmill. The harder they ran, the faster it wore them out.
When we finally hit pause and rebuilt from the ground up with vision, budget, structure, cash systems, growth returned almost overnight. From the outside, it looked easy. From the inside, it was a lot of hard work and foundation setting.
That experience drove home a truth I see in every healthy company: Business isn’t linear. It’s cyclical.
Every business lives inside three repeating cycles:
- Planning: Setting direction and priorities
- Operating: Executing with discipline and efficiency
- Growth: Scaling capacity and capitalizing on opportunity
You can move through them in order, run two at once, or loop between planning and growth for a while. But you can’t skip any of them forever.
When you do, the business ejects out of the loop and all of a sudden you find the business struggling. That’s when revenue shrinks, stress compounds, and the business languishes. It seems sudden, but it’s often the fruit of the long ignored reality that businesses cycle.
The key is to recognize which cycle you’re in, and when it’s time to transition to the next.
THE THREE CYCLES OF BUSINESS
PLANNING CYCLE
This is where everything starts (and restarts).
The Planning Cycle is where you zoom out, reflect, and set direction. You define your 5-year vision, set annual goals, and turn that into a real financial plan. You align your leadership team, budget for the next stage, and decide what success actually looks like.
This is the work most owners intend to do, but rarely make time for. Yet it’s the foundation for everything that follows.
We talked about this last year at this time with our PlanningOS series.
When talking about the planning cycle, there are a few things that stick out in helping keep a company healthy:
- Annual Reset: At least once a year, step away from operations for a full-day (or multi-day) planning retreat with your leadership. Reflect on the past year, define next year’s goals, and update your 3–5 year vision.
- Quarterly Reviews: Every 90 days, zoom out to measure progress on your annual goals. What’s ahead, behind, or irrelevant now? Adjust your budgets and priorities as necessary.
- Monthly Financial Reviews: Review your key metrics, not just the P&L. Discuss with your leadership team what’s driving performance and what needs attention.
- Personal Thinking Time: Block space for reflection… it could be a morning each week or a few hours each month. Clarity starts with thinking, not reacting.
The short-term cycles make sure that you keep headed towards your long-term north star.
Without consistent planning rhythms, the business drifts. Teams lose focus. Urgent replaces important. You find yourself saying “yes” to everything because there’s no clear filter for what actually matters.
Cash gets spent reactively. Opportunities appear and disappear because you’re too busy to notice patterns. Before long, you’re working harder than ever, but you’re not actually going anywhere. The business feels busy, not purposeful.
As we move toward year-end, this is the perfect time to re-enter your Planning Cycle. If you need a roadmap, revisit the PlanningOS series and it’ll walk you through the process step-by-step:
OPERATING CYCLE
The Operating Cycle is where you take that plan and turn it into a machine.
It’s about discipline and running the play week after week. This is where you build systems, refine processes, and tighten up execution. It’s where you clean up data, tune cash flow, automate the busywork, and give the team the structure to perform.
This is the unglamorous work of building stability. It’s the foundation most owners underestimate until it breaks.
This can look like:
- Weekly Team Cadence: Every team has a short rhythm meeting where you talk what’s on deck, what’s blocked, and what needs escalation. Keeps execution tight.
- Monthly Team Updates: This is getting your team together to celebrate wins, learn from losses, and talk about where the business is. This is essential keeping everyone moving in the same direction.
- Quarterly System Tune-Up: Build a culture of process documentation by regularly talking about them. Review your processes and tools. What’s slowing people down? Where are you seeing duplicate effort or recurring mistakes?
- Weekly Cash Check-In: A simple 15-minute rhythm to review the 13-week cash flow, upcoming payroll, and large expected inflows/outflows. Stops surprises before they start.
When we lose these operating rhythms and are in the growth phase, things can look great until they’re not. Like the wheels falling off a car as you drive down the highway.
You chase growth while ignoring rhythm. Deadlines slip, cash gets tight, and reporting falls behind. At first it’s small and doesn’t matter. But these things compound and it turns into missed deadlines, missed payrolls, and lost customer. It all happens in a blink.
This is about creating a culture that’s preparing for growth at all times. Doing the extra work today to protect from the slippage tomorrow.
When done right, strong operations can catapult you into the growth cycle even faster than you thought possible.
GROWTH CYCLE
The Growth Cycle is where opportunity expands.
This is when you use the systems and clarity you’ve built to grow capacity and you are adding new locations, expanding product lines, reinvesting profits, or taking on capital flawlessly. It’s exciting, but also dangerous if you haven’t done the work in the first two cycles.
This cycle is about leverage and turning solid operations and clear strategy into expansion, without losing control. This is where the reward should come.
Run well, this looks like:
- Controlled Scaling: Systems and cash flow are strong enough to handle the additional load. You’re adding capacity without burning out your team or draining your reserves.
- Capital Allocation Mindset: You’re deliberately putting profits back into the business and every dollar has a job, whether that’s funding growth, paying down debt, or rewarding the owner. Growth decisions are based on expected return, not excitement.
- Risk Awareness: You’re pushing forward, but you know what could break (key people, supply chains, customer concentration, or financing terms) and you’ve built cushions or contingencies.
- Personal Calibration: The owner’s energy, appetite, and risk tolerance are aligned with the next phase. Growth at odds with your personal bandwidth leads to resentment or burnout.
These are great, but when mismanaged, you stall… you overextend… you lose your focus. All of these things lead to burn out and loss of control.
The consequences are strain, tight cash, and complexity that drowns. That’s why the Growth Cycle always ends by feeding back into Planning and Operating.
Pulling back in the growth cycle is hard, because we never think the disaster is going to come. But, our failure to do so, actually invites the disaster we fear.
THE ACTION
When each cycle has its own rhythm, the business runs smoother.
Planning provides clarity. Operating provides control. Growth provides momentum.
These three cycles don’t just happen once. They repeat, and when done right, each time at a higher level.
Plan → Operate → Grow → Plan → Grow → Plan again.
Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes you run through them quickly. But the businesses that last learn to recognize where they are and commit fully to that phase.
Because when you honor the cycle, they feed into each other.
Growth leads to you outrunning the plan and needing new ones.
Operations and planning done well facilities faster growth.
When you master all three, growth becomes sustainable.
When you fight it, growth becomes fragile.
So as you head into year-end, ask yourself:
- Have I clearly defined where we’re going next year?
- Are our systems ready to support that plan?
- Do we have the right foundation for real, lasting growth?
If not, now’s the time to step back into your Planning Cycle.
The next surge of growth will look “sudden,” but it won’t be luck.
It’ll be the natural result of building the foundation first.
