How to move past the muscle and feel stage: A deliberate business growth strategy

As business owners and leaders, it’s easy to get stuck doing things based on instinct and “feelings” in the early stages of your company. This is called the “muscle and feel” phase. You work hard, make decisions based on experience, and see progress and growth.

However, there comes a point where you start to plateau, and solely relying on hustle isn’t enough anymore. To get to the next level, you must transition to managing your business more deliberately, with clear goals and metrics.

In this blog, I’ll cover the common pitfalls that cause companies to get stuck in the muscle and feel stage and share a framework for evolving your leadership and planning to drive growth to the next curve.

The allure and limitations of muscle and feel

When you first start a business, it’s exhilarating. You have an idea and begin selling, delivering, and learning. Progress comes from working hard—putting in the hours and grinding it out. I call this the “muscle” phase.

As you gain experience, you develop instincts about the right things to do to acquire customers, hire people, and keep projects moving. Decisions start to feel right. This is the “feel” aspect.

This works great at first. Revenue grows, you scale your team, and profitability improves. Your energy and smart decisions are fueling expansion.

But there’s a problem—eventually, you plateau. There are only so many hours in the day. You get stuck in the weeds of day-to-day operations. Business health depends completely on your personal efforts.

This is where most companies get stuck—relying on the founder’s energy and instincts, not able to break through to the next level of growth.

Why muscle and feel has its limits

There are two main reasons muscle and feel falls short after the early stages:

1. You become a bottleneck
   To grow, you need to delegate and hand off responsibilities to other leaders, but this is tricky. Promoting people too fast or micromanaging creates problems. Attempts at delegation often backfire. You may dump too much responsibility on someone too quickly. If they fail, you take the work back. Or you delegate but hover over people, which prevents actual relief.
2. No process for deliberate growth
   You need clear metrics and plans for what success looks like, not just working hard. But most founders don’t take the time to put these in place.

Because you haven’t defined goals and targets, people lack direction for decision-making when you’re not involved. They don’t know how to identify the right opportunities or course-correct challenges.

Without addressing both delegation and planning, you can’t move past reliance on muscle and feel. The business only grows as big as your personal capacity.

Making the leap: Shifting to “managing to what good looks like”

To break through plateaus, you have to transition leadership in two key ways:

1. Hire and develop managers to lead departments
2. Create plans with metrics for success

These two steps allow you to let go of control while also giving people guidance via goals and guardrails. I call this “managing to what good looks like.”

Here is how to make this transition:

Know your ultimate destination: Create a legacy plan

Legacy planning starts with envisioning your ideal future. This includes:

• Personal wealth target for lifestyle
• Target business valuation for exit
• Ideal future business vision

This gives you a North Star—something to work toward. It guides other planning.

Define “what good looks like“: Build a business plan

With your legacy plan as a foundation, build one and three-year business plans. Ideally, these business plans set targets that help achieve your legacy financial goals. The business plans account for:

• Revenue, margins, and profitability
• Client profile and growth goals
• Marketing and sales objectives
• Operations metrics

Now, you have a detailed definition of success and priorities to drive growth.

Find the right drivers: Build a leadership team

Assess your current team—do they have the skills and mindset to execute your plan? Identify gaps where you need new managers or more training.

Create leadership plans for yourself and each manager. Outline their development path and how you’ll invest in growing their skills.

Also, assess your own leadership skills. Great businesses have great leaders at all levels. As the owner, you must improve alongside your team.

Empower managers to lead departments

With goals defined and the right leaders in place, you can truly hand off responsibility for meeting objectives. This requires:

• Giving people the authority to make decisions without micromanaging
• Training managers on how to nurture team members through the stages from novice to master
• Holding people accountable to metrics while being patient as they learn
• Accepting missteps will happen and using them as teaching moments

By elevating managers and loosening your grip, you empower people to drive results and growth.

Stay the course through disciplined planning

Managing a plan is challenging. Markets shift, and people make mistakes. It’s tempting to abandon plans and return to “muscle and feel.”

Avoid this by reviewing metrics regularly with your team. Revisit plans quarterly to adjust as needed. Use peer groups, such as IT Nation Evolve™, to stay on track.

With consistent review and adjustments, you’ll build institutional momentum vs. reliance on one leader.

Keep perspective—even a bad plan executed well is better than a perfect plan gathering dust. Progress comes from discipline in following the blueprint.

Overcome resistance to let go of control 

For many founders, the biggest barrier is mindset—avoiding the tendency to lead via muscle memory. Here are some tips:

• Be honest about what your Mode is—are you really a value builder if you make balanced builder choices? Alignment between belief and action is key.
• Use planning sessions as a forum for debate. Managers will spot where you overrule their authority. Discuss these areas openly.
• When you feel the urge to take over, pause and reflect on what result you want and how to achieve it through guidance, not control.
• Celebrate manager successes publicly. This builds their confidence and influence.
• If you find yourself thinking, “I could have done this better or faster,” reframe it to “they did this well given their experience level.”

Letting go takes constant vigilance. But it’s worth it. You can’t grow without elevating leaders and planning success.

The rewards of evolving beyond muscle and feel

Transitioning from the startup phase to a planned, metrics-driven business is hard but rewarding work. Here are some benefits:

• Less reliance on you as the bottleneck which lowers risk and stress.
• Ability to scale without sacrificing quality. Good plans and managers prevent chaos.
• Increased value for future exit. Investors reward mature leadership and consistent growth.
• More pride and fulfillment from developing people and hitting targets.
• A platform for rapid growth into new markets and revenue streams.
• Respect as an expert from peers for leading a high-performance organization.

Just like people, companies move through stages of maturity. By following the steps outlined here, you can guide your business to the next level and reap the rewards.

It takes letting go of the “genius founder” mentality and embracing a new phase of leadership, but the freedom and success on the other side make it worthwhile.

If you invest the time to plan well and build great leaders, your company will continue to prosper for years to come.

Conclusion

Evolving past reliance on muscle and feel is a pivotal transition for any founder ready to take their organization to the next level.

It requires foresight to envision your goals, discipline to plan deliberately, and patience to develop a leadership team. But with a commitment to elevating managers and metrics-driven growth, you can break through plateaus.

The great news is you don’t have to do it alone. There are many resources available to help, including management training, peer groups, coaches, and conferences such as IT Nation Grow™.

I encourage you to take that first step. Assess where your business is currently at using our Modes Theory™ framework. Identify gaps holding you back from getting to where you want to go. Then, start your journey today toward the next curve.