This summer, I've been building out a balcony "victory garden" of sorts. My friend, Dusti Arab, launched her new venture, Hearth & Hollow (a plant CSA in Vancouver), and she's been helping me navigate the growing seasons of the Pacific Northwest. While we were living in Portland this summer, I got some tomato plants and a marigold from her - because companion planting keeps the bugs at bay.
I had to leave one of the tomatoes behind when we came across the bridge from our temporary digs to our new apartment in Vancouver. I kept the cherry tomato and the marigold. Both of them have grown like crazy this season! I've donated SO many seeds to our local seed library.
While my garden isn't yet able to feed two of us, it's a good start. The jalapenos and bell peppers have topped our pizza and found their way into salads and salsa with the tomatoes. My basil plant gave up enough leaves for pepita pesto (THAT was an adventure!), and I learned how to use a vibrator to make light work of hand pollinating my tomato plant.
My strawberries put out enough of a crop to make a few smoothies, and my other herbs gave me mint jelly, bug spray, and enough oregano to stop buying it entirely. I have fresh and dried oregano galore! I also have found a handy way to do composting on the balcony without any stink.
I am proud of me!
As the weather got cooler, I knew I'd need to bring plants inside. I've been making room in my office for them. I brought the peppers in two weeks ago. My bell pepper is covered with baby fruits right now, so I want to see how long I can keep it going. And that one little marigold is now in two pots, it got so big! So I brought it in to keep the bugs off my peppers. The Jalapeno has one fruit that's just starting to turn red. I don't see any more flowers on it, so I may plow it under when the pepper is done growing. I've got plenty of seeds to grow more (or I can just call Dusti in the spring).
But that cherry tomato is an interesting story.
Not long after I filmed that video about hand pollination, I found myself with a ton of baby tomatoes on the vine. With the growing season winding down, I could either pick them all or try to keep the plant alive long enough for them to get some color. Once they're plucked, they're not likely to sweeten up and turn red.
So I decided to bring it in.
When I went to move the plant, the whole thing lurched over to the side. Kind of flopping over the pot. I thought for sure it was broken, the main stem seemed fine, just twisting under the weight of all that fruit. The little stick I had put in the pot to help support the vine wasn't doing the job of holding it together anymore.
Boy, can I relate.
Growth is supposed to feel exciting — like momentum, freedom, and possibility. But sometimes, it starts to feel heavy.
More clients. More revenue. More moving parts. And somehow… less spaciousness, less ease. More frustration, and sometimes more doubt.
There was a time when I believed you just have to hustle through the hard parts. I mean, it's not like I don't have plenty to do, right? There's always time pressure or financial pressure, or some other kind of pressure trying to squeeze you.
Maybe that's just me?
Much like the tomato, things can look good at first: your efforts are starting to bear fruit - maybe even LOTS of it. But fruit needs time to ripen, and you're in that waiting stage. Meanwhile, more fruit begins to appear: new opportunities, new possibilities, new connections.
While it still feels manageable right now, it's getting harder to know where to put your limited focus. Pretty soon, you'll recognize that other resources are feeling stretched: time, energy, money, effort.
When you’re finding that growth is costing you emotional or physical energy faster than you can replenish it, that's a red flag that something's out of alignment.
And I get it. Sometimes it feels like you're barely doing anything and you're already depleted. Or maybe you've just come down off a launch or a big push to complete a project, but it didn't turn out the way you hoped. Which means... you've got to do something else to cover the gap. Which feels like way more than you can handle right now.
If you’re starting to feel like you’re carrying everything - decisions, execution, that “buck stops with me” mindset - that can signal growth pressure rather than expansion ease. Solopreneurs can get caught in this "bottleneck" trap on the regular - because the buck does stop with you.
Startup Snapshot released a report surveying over 400 founders and CEOs that revealed about 72% face mental health issues - with high stress, anxiety, burnout, depression, and panic attacks topping the list. When your business growth begins to feel like a personal weight, rather than a creative expansion, it's a red flag you shouldn't ignore.
Then, there are the structural warning signs:
If it feels more like you're "steering" versus being "pulled" by your business, that's a healthy stretch. A sense of having some control over the way things are going makes a difference. There's excitement, maybe a little uncertainty, but it still feels manageable.
It doesn't take much more for that stretch to start feeling like something's snapped, so keep paying attention and check in regularly. Are balls getting dropped more often? Are plans getting pushed? Does it feel like you're putting out a lot more fires? That's unsustainable.
Assess the stretch not just by outcome (revenue, clients) but by experience: how is it landing in your body, energy, and relationships? As founder/owner you want growth that expands your capacity, not growth that asks you to carry more with the same capacity. When growth triggers system upgrade, you’re in the expansion zone; if growth means “more hours, more doing”, you might be in strain. Ask yourself: Does this next step stretch me into more capacity (with support) or stretch me into more risk of breakdown?
More - adding more tactics, more deals, more clients is often the first response. How do we create more money, hire more help, or take on more work to calm the storm? The instinct here is that more revenue will unlock freedom or make the load feel more “worth it”. But, as I mentioned in a recent post, your brain is probably lying to you.
Hacking - rather than addressing systems or deeper structure issues, you look for a “quick fix” (tool, app, automation) to get more done. Assuming the learning curve isn't too steep, it might help you in the short term, but sooner or later, that "band-aid" won't stop the bleeding anymore.
Delaying - waiting until things get “really bad” before shifting structure or identity. Meanwhile you keep doing business‐as‐usual. Except, it's NOT business as usual, and it's about to get painful for everyone.
When these reflexes dominate, what you feel is: “I’m still busy, but I’m not free," or "I have more ‘stuff’ but less clarity. I’m playing catch-up." You might also have a sense that you're steering but feel like you're in the passenger seat. That's when you know you’re scaling the wrong things, trading leverage for volume, or your systems are under-designed for the load you want them to carry.
The healthier path isn’t just more, it’s smarter growth built on capacity, structure, and an aligned founder role.
When growth starts to feel heavy, it’s time for a Capacity Audit.
This process helps you identify where you or the business is overextended and how to rebalance growth with available energy and resources.
The Capacity Audit looks at three dimensions:
By auditing these dimensions, you can recalibrate growth — not to slow down, but to sustain momentum without depletion. And yeah, sometimes that means slowing down. But it's a temporary downshift so that the whole business doesn't shake apart while the wheels are wobbling down the road.
When my VA and video editor left the company for full-time gigs, there was no way in hell I could do everything they did for me in the same amount of time I'd been working. While I know some companies ask their employees to do the work of ten men, that's not how I roll. I stand for doing work and having a business that works for how you're wired to work. I'd be some kind of a hypocrite if I just doubled down and hustled harder.
It was clear that, as a team of one, I was the bottleneck for everything that needed to be done. So, Operational Load was beyond capacity. I had some decisions to make. Some things had to be shelved for a future date, while other things needed to keep going. Even if I took on some of the workload from my team members, there was no way I could do it all. How could I choose?
I was nearing the end of the season for Creative Freedom, so I hired some temporary help to get through the marketing of the show. That took some of my VA's work off my shoulders. But I also had to train this temp on how we do things, so I had to account for that in my time budget. Thankfully, the agency I worked with assigned me a quick study, making light work of the training process.
I kept filming for my new reality show. That was (mostly) easy enough. Instead of filming daily, though, I condensed my filming to just a few days a week, highlighting the important updates and a few real-time activities for B-roll.
No editing, no scripting, no new content creation. There simply wasn't enough of me to go around.
Over the summer, I had one client complete and another graduate from the Incubator into a legacy coaching contract. That impacted our already stressed financial situation. My husband's health issues compounded the toll on my Energetic Load... and there's really no way to extend beyond your capacity here. You either have it or you don't.
I was maxed out.
With no one but me to count on, I had to get ruthlessly honest with myself about what really mattered and what could wait. But I also had to look at the long-term affect of those decisions. Was I putting a band-aid on a gaping wound? I also needed to right-size my expectations about what was really possible, given everything else that was going on around me and asking for my attention.
There were weeks when I had all I could do to see my current clients, my therapist, and keep filming the show. Some weeks there were no client appointments at all, which allowed me to stabilize my Energetic Load.
That space also gave me the ability to re-examine my strategy and discern what needed to change to keep my Strategic Load viable for a one-person operation. I was still not feeling like I had the spoons to think about hiring a new VA or video editor. So what could I do, as I was able, with my available resources?
These are a few of my go-to questions for myself and my clients, when sorting out capacity issues:
Your mileage may vary. The goal here isn't to rake you over the coals like some late night police interrogation. It's about helping you see the gaps more clearly so that you can strategize how to resolve them before your red flags become a sinking ship. Pick 3-5 questions and use them as part of a monthly “capacity review” session.
The quality of your answers matters more than the quantity of questions. If any of the answers reveal “I don’t know / I don’t have a system / I’m doing everything myself” then that signals a capacity gap. Growth feels heavy when you skip these questions and push ahead without checking your capacity.
Once my husband's cancer surgery was complete and he was through his first week of recovery, "suddenly" I started to feel like I had more capacity to work. I was feeling like my old self again. Ideas were coming to me, and all I wanted to do was start writing.
You're witnessing some of that writing now.
When you right-size your growth, everything lightens. The same workload "suddenly" feels manageable because it’s aligned. You reclaim your creative bandwidth and your energy. Of course, there's nothing "sudden" about it. Youve had to do the work to get here.
But now, instead of scaling chaos, you’re scaling coherence.
This is sustainable success... where expansion feels like flow, not friction.
When systems, roles and boundaries are aligned, you've got more mental and emotional bandwidth to think beyond the day-to-day. Instead of simply reacting, you can create. You can transition from “keeping the lights on” to “designing which lights can come on next”.
With right-sized growth, there's space to experiment because the stakes shrink just enough (you’re not in survival mode) and your structure is able to support trying new things without the threat of collapsing the entire system.
As a leader, right-sized growth often means you stop being the bottleneck and become the orchestrator. That shift changes how others experience your presence. You’re not just doing, you’re designing, inspiring, delegating. Research shows that leadership attitudes and practices (not just tasks) play a key role in linking growth with capacity. Your presence changes — you’re less of a “hands-on doer” and step into the role of “guide, creator, and transformer”.
And that little tomato of mine? He now stands tall in a sunny corner of my office, supported by the wall. The fruit are slowly starting to get some color, and I supplement the sunlight with a small LED light in the mornings and evenings.
Growth: supported, right-sized, and ready for the future.
Next week, I'm hosting my Conditions for Success workshop. Similar to a capacity audit, we'll walk through seven domains of sustainable growth in detail. You'll get immense clarity on what needs to shift in each of these domains to help support your capacity to thrive. Build momentum that lasts, without losing yourself in the process, and create a business that fuels you. Registration is now open!