Why I only take on two or three new clients a month

I now take on two or three new clients a month, and then I stop. I said it out loud to my business adviser recently, along with a sentence I've been repeating to myself ever since: If I have to put in double the effort to double my business, I'm not doing something right.

The plan I had before

For most of this year the plan in my head was a straight line. Keep doing what I'm doing, keep adding clients, and the business grows. My cash flow forecast had been built around the idea of ten or fifteen clients coming on board, and on paper it worked.

The thing is, every new client at my size arrives with a lot of me attached. There are the first conversations, the discovery work, the proposal and the check-ins while the build runs. I work with developers and partners for the building itself, but the start of an engagement is where most of the risk sits, and that part is still mostly me. So a straight line of more clients meant a straight line of more hours, and there isn't a second one of me to add.

Which means I'd been working towards a business that could only ever grow as fast as I could work. Said plainly, that's a job with more paperwork.

What the cap is for

The cap keeps enough of the week free to build things that give more back for each hour I put in. That means tools I can build once and use for many clients, and systems that keep the business moving without me remembering every step. None of that gets built in the gaps between new starts, because there are no gaps.

I put it to my adviser as a ratio, and I still think it's the right one: it needs to be 1.5 times the effort to make it four times. There's a book called 10x Is Easier Than 2x that makes roughly the same argument. If you keep repeating what you're doing, you grow at a snail's pace. Growth that multiplies needs a different kind of work, and that work needs time you can't find when the diary is full.

What it costs

There is a trade-off and I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise. Some months somebody good will get in touch after the slots have gone, and they'll have to wait. Some of them won't wait. That's real work walking out of the door, and I'm choosing it on purpose, on the bet that the time buys something bigger. I could be wrong about the bet. I'd rather find out than spend another year proving I can work longer hours.

There's a side effect that matters more to clients than to me. With two or three new starts a month I can still be properly present at the beginning of each one, asking the awkward questions myself. The beginning is where projects are won or lost, so that's worth more than it sounds.

A business that can only grow by taking more of my hours has a ceiling built in, and I'd rather choose where that ceiling sits than find it by hitting it.