I’m a web developer. In theory, my overhead should be a laptop, internet, software, and not much else.
Last year, I had employees, a nicer office, more revenue coming through the business than I’d had before, and somehow less money actually making its way home with me.
It took me about a month to realize I had made a pretty expensive mistake.
How I got there
I’d been working out of the same small office for a few years. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked. Clients could come in if they needed to, I had room to work, and the rent was reasonable.
I already had employees at that point, so this wasn’t my first attempt at building a team. But I decided to scale it much more aggressively.
I roughly tripled the size of the team, leased the larger office next door, and started taking on more work to support all of it.
At the time, it felt like the obvious next step.
The business had been around since 2019. It was growing. People would ask how big the team was, whether I planned to expand, what the next move was. After a while, I started looking at the business through everybody else’s eyes.
The office next door became available. It was bigger, nicer, and looked a lot more like what I thought a successful company was supposed to look like.
So I took it.
And once I had more space, growing the team even further felt like part of the same plan. More people meant more capacity. More capacity meant more projects. More projects meant more revenue.
On paper, it made sense.
What I didn’t account for was how much the entire business model would change once I tripled the team and dramatically raised the amount of money that had to go out every month.
I wasn’t just growing anymore.
I had raised the floor of what the business had to earn just to function.
And if I’m being truthful about what pushed me to do it, a lot of it still came back to wanting the business to look bigger and more legitimate from the outside.
I had already built something successful. I just convinced myself that successful wasn’t enough unless it looked like growth from the sidewalk.
What actually happened
My expenses went up immediately.
There was the bigger lease, payroll, software, equipment, and all the little costs that come with having employees that you don’t really think about until you have them.
Suddenly, the business needed a lot more money coming in every month just to exist.
That changed the way I worked almost overnight.
A slower month used to just be a slower month. Now it meant I was thinking about payroll, rent, and how many projects needed to close before the first of the next month.
And then there was the bigger problem: the work still ended up with me.
I would hand something off, review it, make changes, and a lot of the time eventually redo enough of it that I could have just done it myself in the first place.
That wasn’t because the people I hired were bad at their jobs. It was because I had misunderstood what I was actually selling.
My clients weren’t just hiring a company to build a website. A lot of them were hiring me specifically. They wanted my eye, my decisions, the way I approach a project, and the fact that they could talk directly to the person doing the work.
I had built the business around that and then tried to scale it as though the work was interchangeable.
It wasn’t.
So now I had more revenue moving through the company, but I also had significantly more money going back out. I was working more, managing more, reviewing more, and taking home less.
I remember sitting in that new office maybe a month after moving in and thinking, “This is stupid.”
That was pretty much the moment.
I didn’t need a year-end report to tell me. I already knew.
Getting out of it
Eventually I let everyone go.
Then I walked over to my landlord and told him I had made a mistake and needed to get out of the lease.
There wasn’t some big business presentation behind it. I didn’t try to spin it into a strategic pivot.
I had just gotten it wrong.
Thankfully, he was incredibly kind about it and let me out early, which he absolutely did not have to do.
That part of the whole experience has stuck with me more than I expected.
I had made a bunch of decisions because I was worried about how my business looked to other people, and getting myself out of those decisions required me to stop worrying about that and just admit the truth.
I work from home now.
And I like it.
What I would tell someone who is about to do the same thing
If people hire your business because they specifically want you, adding employees does not automatically create more capacity.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes you have work that can be delegated cleanly, documented well, and repeated without the client noticing or caring who completed it.
That is absolutely scalable.
But there are a lot of service businesses where the person is a huge part of the product.
Designers. Consultants. Photographers. Bookkeepers. Developers. Coaches.
If your client would care that someone else did the work, you need to think very carefully about what “scaling” actually means for you.
For me, adding people mostly added another layer between the client and the work, while I still remained responsible for the final result.
It also raised the amount of money the business had to make every month.
That is the part I think people underestimate.
When your overhead is low, you have choices. You can turn down a bad-fit project. You can have a slower month without panicking. You can be a little more selective.
Once payroll and a bigger lease are involved, that flexibility disappears quickly.
You start needing revenue instead of choosing revenue.
Those are two very different ways to run a business.
What I do differently now
These days, I care a lot less about how big the business looks.
There are around 150 businesses paying me every month to keep their websites running, and I’m far more proud of that than I ever was of having employees and a bigger office.
It is boring, predictable revenue.
And that turned out to be what I was actually looking for the whole time.
I thought the problem was that I couldn’t personally take on enough work. What I really disliked was the unpredictability that came from constantly needing another project to close.
Hiring people didn’t solve that.
Recurring revenue did.
It gave the business a floor. It meant I wasn’t starting every month at zero. It let me be more selective about project work and made the whole company feel less frantic.
I’m not against growth.
I just don’t think growth automatically means more employees, more square footage, or more revenue.
Sometimes growth is making the same business more profitable.
Sometimes it is getting better at saying no.
Sometimes it is deciding that you actually liked the small office.
The lease wasn’t really the expensive part of that year.
The expensive part was spending a year adding things to a business that didn’t need them because I thought I had something to prove.
I’d rather be wrong for a month than right about the wrong thing for three years.