Feed the business you have, not the business you’re watching online.

Social media has done something very interesting to entrepreneurship: it has made every business look the same size. A block!!

Think about it. On your screen, the startup operating from somebody’s spare bedroom occupies exactly the same little square as the company turning over hundreds of millions. The entrepreneur with two employees appears right underneath the entrepreneur with an executive committee, five departments and 200 employees. You scroll from one to the other without necessarily stopping to think about the enormous difference between the businesses behind those posts.

And I think that is starting to mess with entrepreneurs’ understanding of what their own businesses should look like.

You see another entrepreneur hiring a CFO and suddenly you think you need a CFO. You see somebody moving into beautiful new offices and suddenly the office that was perfectly adequate yesterday feels too small. You see another company doing a massive rebrand and now you're spending money on branding when what your business desperately needs is customers. You see founders talking about international expansion, leadership teams, sophisticated technology, AI, automation and scaling, and suddenly you're trying to solve problems your business hasn't even earned yet.

My friend, before we do all of that, can I ask you one question?

What size is YOUR business?

Businesses have life cycles. There is startup, early stage, growth, expansion and maturity, and every stage requires something different from the entrepreneur and from the business itself. What makes sense for a business doing R100 million a year may make absolutely no sense for a business doing R1 million a year. Not because one entrepreneur is better than the other, but because they are solving completely different problems.

The problem with social media is that it doesn't always give you that context. You see the 40-person team, but you don't see the years when the founder was the salesperson, administrator, receptionist, debt collector, and tea lady before 10am. 😂 You see the beautiful headquarters, but you don't see the years of protecting every cent of cash flow. You see the expensive marketing campaign, but you don't necessarily see the revenue base underneath that campaign that allows the company to spend that money.

So we start comparing outcomes without understanding the journey, and worse, we start copying the behaviour of businesses that are at completely different stages from ours.

And this is where I think many entrepreneurs are unintentionally choking their own businesses because they are feeding them the wrong food.

Think about a baby. You don't feed a three-month-old baby the same food you would feed a 30-year-old adult. There is absolutely nothing wrong with steak. Steak is good food. But give it to a three-month-old baby and suddenly something that is perfectly good becomes dangerous because it has been introduced at the wrong stage of development.

Businesses work the same way.

A large executive team can be fantastic when your business has reached the level of revenue, complexity, and scale that requires one. Sophisticated systems can be brilliant when the volume of transactions and operations requires them. Beautiful offices may make complete commercial sense when your business can comfortably afford them. Expansion can be exactly what the business needs once you've proven the economics of what you already have.

These aren't bad things. They can simply be the wrong things at the wrong time.

An early-stage business has very different nutritional requirements. It needs customers. It needs revenue. It needs cash flow. It needs to understand its numbers. It needs to know who its customer is and whether that customer is actually willing to pay for what it sells. It needs a repeatable way of finding customers and delivering consistently. It needs basic systems, discipline and, most importantly, enough runway to survive while it learns.

Those things aren't always sexy enough for Instagram, but they are the things that build businesses.

As the business grows, its needs change. You start introducing stronger structures, management layers, governance, delegation, specialist skills and better systems. Eventually, the conversation may become acquisitions, new markets, institutional capital, sophisticated governance and succession planning.

Different stage. Different food.

The danger is standing at Stage 1, watching somebody at Stage 4 and asking yourself, “Why don't I have what they have?”

That's the wrong question.

The question should be: “What does a healthy business at my stage need to get to the next stage?”

Because your objective isn't to look like the bigger business. Your objective is to build your business properly enough that one day it can become the bigger business.

And while we're here, can we please stop borrowing expenses from our future businesses? 😂

Some entrepreneurs are running R2 million businesses with R20 million lifestyles and R50 million organisational structures. The business is carrying salaries, offices, systems, subscriptions, consultants and expenses that belong to a version of the business that hasn't arrived yet.

Your future business may absolutely need the CFO, COO, fancy headquarters, expensive software, large marketing budget and management team. That's wonderful. Let your future business pay for them.

Today's business has enough responsibilities of its own.

There is no shame in running lean. There is no shame in being small. There is no shame in doing some things yourself while you're building the financial capacity to hire. There is no shame in saying, “We aren't there yet.”

Small is not an embarrassment. Small is a stage.

The danger is when you refuse to respect the stage you're in because you're trying so hard to look like you've already arrived. You can very easily kill a perfectly good business by forcing it to carry the weight of a business five times its size.

So perhaps every entrepreneur needs to conduct a little diagnosis.

What stage is my business actually in? What is my current revenue? What can my cash flow genuinely afford? What are the biggest constraints stopping me from moving to the next stage? What capabilities does my business need right now? And, perhaps most importantly, what am I currently spending money, time and energy on simply because I saw somebody else doing it?

That last question might sting a little. 😂 But answer it anyway.

Your responsibility as an entrepreneur is not to keep up with somebody else's Instagram feed. Your responsibility is to diagnose your own business correctly and give it what it needs to grow.

Not what looks impressive. Not what everybody is currently talking about. Not what the entrepreneur you admire is doing. Not what makes you feel like you've arrived.

What your business needs.

Social media may have made every business look the same size, but they aren't. Behind those identical little squares are businesses with completely different revenues, resources, histories, teams, challenges and levels of maturity.

Respect your stage. Build according to your stage. Spend according to your stage. Hire according to your stage. And most importantly, feed your business according to its stage.

Because if you feed the business you have today properly, you give it the opportunity to become the business you're dreaming about tomorrow.

Yours in feeding businesses what they need to grow,

The Business Doctor Keitumetse Lekaba