We develop and grow in stages
2025 Reflections, after being in business for four years
Do you ever feel stuck, like you’re not making as much progress as you should?
As proud as I am of my company, there are times I feel frustrated that we're not growing as much as I'd like. After recently visiting my friend and his new baby, I realized that just like humans have stages of development, so do businesses. Babies have to learn how to sit on their own, to crawl, to walk. Similarly, startups have to figure out what their product or service is, who their prospective customers are, and how to make money.
Getting to the next stage isn’t guaranteed. Although the infant mortality rate in the United States is very low, miscarriages occur in 10-25% of all pregnancies. Twenty percent of businesses don't make it past their first year. Half of companies don’t survive to Year 5. CuriosityBased is in the lucky 50%.
Whatever challenges we’re facing and how we approach them can usually be explained by the stage of development we’re in for any given life journey we’re on.
I learned that businesses go through these five stages of growth: existence, survival, success, takeoff, and resource maturity. Last year, my company, CuriosityBased, began to transition from existence to survival. “Existence” was about discovering whether we have a viable service, while still relying heavily on my investment. “Survival” is about reaching and maintaining self-sustaining profitability.
When we recognize there are intermediary stages, we can appreciate the effort it takes to get anywhere. Survival as a stage for business owners is unavoidable, just like puberty is for humans. Few people are overnight successes, though social media would have us believe otherwise. Many small businesses don’t reach the success stage until their seventh or even tenth year. Maturing doesn’t guarantee we retain everything we gained. My family’s newspaper reverted to “survival” after decades of “success” when the print news industry started its permanent global decline during the Great Recession. Unpredictable external factors outside our control can impact our growth too.
Aside from my business, I’m experiencing the stages of development in my other growth journeys, such as taking care of my aging mother and learning how to be a CEO for the first time. Every time I write a new essay or speech, I go through these stages: thesis development, drafting, revising, and editing. Whatever we’re experiencing, there is probably some development model for it. Other examples include the stages of romantic love, grieving, and formal education.
So, what are the different growth journeys in your personal and professional life that you are experiencing concurrently? We may feel very confident in one part of our life and clumsy in another part. We go through some stages really quickly and others slowly. Different people and organizations move through the stages of development at different rates. Think about how people born in the same year can show the signs of aging very differently.
Instead of trying to downplay this stage, I’ve learned to describe survival as part of my business’ natural growth, one that all “resource mature” companies have gone through to get to where they are today. Just like a baby can’t walk before they can crawl, we can’t just skip ahead a stage.
In our first meeting of 2025, I acknowledged to the CuriosityBased team that being in survival can feel stressful and frustrating. I reiterated my faith in our ability to learn and to eventually advance. I thanked them for persisting. Finally, I asked us to have grace for one another amid these growing pains. Aside from what we’re going through together as a company, we as individuals are experiencing a multitude of growth journeys outside of work.
It was also a quiet reminder to give ourselves some grace.
Bonus questions:
If you looked into the developmental model for each of your different growth journeys, ask yourself these questions for each one:
What stage are you in?
Are you at peace with the stage you’re in? Or do you envy people who are “farther along”? Do you let that envy distract you?
How does the stage you’re in for one journey in your life influence the other ones you’re on?
Such an important post, Julie! I'm in the phase of learning from some frustrations over the past year . . . realizing the economy will always be in flux, and it's a constant practice of adapting and bending the light (which is likely going to be coming from many, and changing directions!).