04/22/2026
Most people think growing a business is just... doing more.
More sales.
More hours.
More output.
And sometimes that works.
But sometimes... it's actually the thing getting in the way.
There's a story I always come back to with Chick-fil-A.
Early 2000s, they were already winning. Growing fast, doing respectable numbers. From the outside, everything looked great.
But that success created a new problem.
They got big enough that companies like McDonald's and KFC started paying attention.
And when that happens, you don't get to just keep doing what you've been doing. You have to decide how you're going to compete.
They had the obvious options:
🤔Be the cheapest (which is a brutal game)
🤔Be the "best" (which sounds nice but is really hard to sustain at scale)
They actually made a different call.
They decided they were going to win on hospitality.
Not "best in fast food."
Just... best.
And a lot of people thought that was crazy at the time.
Like, "It's chicken. People just want it fast."
But they understood something most businesses forget:
People don't just want speed.
They want consistency.
They want to feel taken care of.
So they built the entire business around that.
Not just marketing.
Not just messaging.
Systems.
Training.
Language.
Expectations.
"My pleasure" wasn't a slogan. It was baked into how the company operates.
And that's what made them hard to compete with.
Because you can copy a product.
You can match pricing.
But you can't easily copy a culture that's been built on purpose.
I see this play out all the time with founders.
Things slow down... and the instinct is to just push harder.
"Let's do more."
"Let's add more."
"Let's hire more."
And sometimes that works.
But sometimes the better question is:
👉 Are we even playing the right game?
Because the companies that really scale don't just do more of the same thing...
They get really clear on how they want to win-and then build everything around that.
Curious where in your business are you just doing more... when you might need to rethink the game instead?
