The Founder’s Evolution: Why Your Business Cannot Grow Beyond You

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Stage 1: The Dissatisfied Employee

Before you ever file an LLC or design a logo, there is stage one: the dissatisfied employee.

You are in a job. It may not be terrible, but you are haunted by a nagging question:

“Isn’t there a better way to do this?”

Scott Ritzheimer makes a crucial distinction here. Many future founders try to use entrepreneurship as an escape hatch.

• Escaping a bad boss
• Escaping corporate politics
• Escaping boredom

But simply running away from something will not sustain you when things get hard.

As Christian Brim put it, you cannot just be running from something. You have to be running toward something.

That means transforming all your “how not to’s” into clear “how to’s”:

• Not just “I hate how they treat clients”
• But “Here is how I will treat clients differently”

The shift is from escape to purpose. Only then are you ready for stage two.

Stage 2: The Startup Entrepreneur

Stage two is where you officially become one of the “crazy ones” and start your own thing.

You probably imagine a life of freedom. Maybe a four-hour workday and time to sip something cold on a beach while your “business runs itself.”

The reality:

• Everything costs three times as much
• Everything takes three times as long
• Everything is three times harder than you thought

The defining question of this stage is:

“What was I thinking?”

You put on the “entrepreneur smile” when someone asks how it is going:

“Great. Things are great.”

But inside, you are thinking, “We might not be here tomorrow.”

In this chaos, there is one job that matters more than anything else:
Find a profitable, sustainable market.

Scott breaks it down simply:

You must know:

• What problem you solve
• For whom
• And how much they are willing to pay

Christian jumped in here with a critical insight he has seen over and over with owners: we tend to define ourselves by what we do, not the problem we solve.

“We do bookkeeping, we do taxes, we do payroll”
instead of
“We remove this specific pain from this specific kind of client.”

If you cannot articulate the problem from the customer’s perspective, your marketing, pricing, and positioning will always feel uphill.

And for creatives, there is another tension.

Are you doing your work primarily as self-expression?
Or are you doing it in service of others?

Businesses exist to create value for others. Without that, it is a hobby with invoices.

The Power of Story in Bridging Wants and Needs

Scott makes a subtle but powerful point: your clients will always buy based on what they want, not what you know they need.

That gap between wants and needs is where many founders get stuck. You see the deeper problem. You know the real transformation you could create. But your prospects are focused on something more surface level.

One of the best tools to close that gap is story.

By telling stories of clients like them, before and after, you help them:

• See themselves on the “map”
• Recognize their own stage
• Understand the real problem they are facing

Christian referenced Donald Miller’s StoryBrand work here, because when you make your client the hero and simply tell the story of people you have helped, they connect at a level that no technical marketing copy can match.

Stage 3: The Reluctant Manager

If you survive long enough in stage two, you start to feel some momentum.

Work is coming in. You are busy. Actually, you are too busy.

So you do what every founder eventually does: you hire help.

At first, you hire by pulse and proximity. If they are nearby and breathing, they are a candidate. A niece, a neighbor, a friend-of-a-friend. No real hiring experience. No clear role. Just, “Can you help?”

It works a little. Then you add another person. And another. Until one day, you have 5 to 15 people on the team, and you wake up on a Monday already exhausted from fixing their weekend mistakes.

You look around and ask:

“What is wrong with these people?”

They do not think like you.
They do not take ownership like you.
They are not as driven, creative, or careful as you.

Welcome to stage three: the reluctant manager.

As Scott says, no founder ever says, “I started this business so I could manage a half dozen people.”

But here you are.

The required shift in this stage is moving from:

• “I” to “we”
• Player on the field to captain on the field

And the only way to do that is to get serious about three things:

1. Clarity
   People need clear outcomes, not just tasks.
   What does success look like? How will it be measured?
2. Authority
   Do not just delegate tasks. Delegate authority.
   Christian shared a great framing he learned: do not just delegate, deputize.
   The sheriff cannot be everywhere at once, so he gives deputies a badge. When they are on the scene, they act with the sheriff’s authority.
3. Too many founders say, “You own this,” then quietly walk away with the keys.
4. Accountability
   People will mess up. That is not a possibility, it is a guarantee.
   You must enforce accountability consistently and calmly, not as a last resort explosion.

Scott argues you can actually run this whole rhythm of clarity, authority, and accountability in as little as two hours and fifteen minutes per week if you structure meetings well. The time savings on the back end can be 10, 20, even 40 hours.

Christian layered one more crucial nuance: before you delegate or automate, eliminate.

• Eliminate what should never be done
• Automate what can be done without you
• Delegate what must be done by a human

Especially coming out of the survival mode of startup, many founders hang onto work the business no longer needs. Letting go is where scale begins.

Stage 4: The Disillusioned Leader

If you nail those management fundamentals, what happens next is exhilarating and dangerous.

From the outside, it looks like you have made it.

• Revenue is up
• Headcount is up
• Opportunities are up

People start writing about your “success story.”

But inside, something feels off. The bigger the business gets, the heavier it feels. Problems have gotten bigger, faster than profits. You are tired in a different way now.

Scott tells a story that captures this stage perfectly.

He finally lined up a babysitter who could handle his three kids and took his wife out for the suburban pinnacle of romance: dinner and a movie. They went to see Top Gun: Maverick.

As the movie rolled, it felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Planes crash, relationships strain, bosses hate him, the mission looks impossible.

Right as things hit peak tension, the babysitter called. SOS. They rushed home. Everyone was fine, but the baby would not sleep. He did not see the end of the movie for two years.

When he finally watched the end later, he saw how everything turned around. The mission succeeded, relationships were restored, and the story landed in a satisfying place.

Founders, he says, often live in the pause before the ending.

They get stuck in that moment where:

• The stakes are high
• The pressure is heavy
• The identity questions are loud

This is stage four: the disillusioned leader.

All the illusions you had about business, freedom, and success are stripped away. You look at the business you have built and ask:

“Is this really what I wanted?”
“Is this as good as it gets?”

Many of us would have quit, Scott admits, if we did not own the business.

The central question of this stage is not tactical. It is deeply personal:

“What do I actually want now?”

The answer to that is what moves you into stage five, which Scott describes as the biggest single transformation in the entire process and one that allows you to actually enjoy the business you have built.

He unpacks all seven stages in his book, The Founder’s Evolution, which you can get through Scale Architects.

What This Means For Creative Founders

If you are a creative professional, agency owner, or founder who built a business around your talent, you are almost certainly somewhere in these first four stages:

• Dissatisfied employee
• Startup entrepreneur
• Reluctant manager
• Disillusioned leader

The throughline in Scott’s story and Christian Brim’s commentary is simple and brutally honest:

Your business cannot sustainably grow beyond you.

• If you stay a dissatisfied employee in your own company, it will stall
• If you stay a hero startup operator, you will burn out
• If you refuse to become a leader of people, your team will choke growth
• If you never confront your disillusionment, you will sabotage what you have built

But when you:

• Define the problem you truly solve
• Tell stories that connect wants to needs
• Give clarity, real authority, and consistent accountability
• And honestly answer what you want your role and life to look like

You unlock the ability to scale without losing yourself.

That is the heart of The Profitable Creative: turning passion into profit without destroying the creator in the process.

Now, Do This

Ready to turn your passion into profit with systems that keep the clients you work so hard to win. Book a call to CORE and subscribe for new episodes from host Christian Brim.