The Quiet Cost of Growth

When I got home from Chicago, I spent the weekend doing almost nothing. Which, if you own a business, you know isn’t really nothing at all.

I still went to the gym each morning. After that, I came home, turned on the television, and gave myself permission to slow down. I thought about the conversations I’d had, the people I’d met, and the follow-up emails waiting for Monday. The business never completely leaves your mind, but for a couple of days, I stopped asking anything more of myself than to recover.

A few days earlier, I had spent four days doing exactly what the business needed me to do.

I attended sessions, walked into networking receptions where I knew almost no one, introduced myself to people I had never met, and started conversations that, with any luck, will become relationships. At this stage of Brite Strategy Group, those relationships are not separate from the work. They are the work.

From the outside, it probably looked effortless.

It wasn’t.

I’m an introvert. I love meaningful conversation. Give me a one-on-one conversation over coffee, and I’ll happily spend an hour talking about leadership, asking questions, learning someone’s story, brainstorming big ideas, or working through a business challenge. I could do that all day.

The networking reception after the session is different.

Before I walk into a room like that, there’s usually a quiet conversation happening in my own head. Where do I start? Who do I need to meet? Which conversations are worth joining? How do I make the most of the next two hours? None of that comes naturally to me.

Part of leadership is recognizing the difference between your primary role and your temporary responsibilities. If you had asked me why I started Brite Strategy Group, I would have told you it was to help organizations build stronger leaders, create healthier cultures, and solve meaningful operational challenges. I wouldn’t have told you it was because I wanted to spend evenings introducing myself to strangers in networking receptions. And yet, at this stage of the business, that’s exactly what the work requires.

I don’t think every entrepreneur wants to build the same kind of business. Some people intentionally remain solo practitioners for their entire careers. Others build organizations with hundreds of employees. Neither path is inherently better than the other. Every leader has to decide what they’re building and what success looks like for them.

What doesn’t change is that every vision asks something of the person responsible for building it.

For me, in this season, that means walking into rooms that don’t naturally replenish me because I know the conversations inside those rooms matter. It means understanding that business development isn’t separate from the work I’m trying to do. It’s one of the ways the work becomes possible.

Leadership has a cost.

Sometimes that cost is making an unpopular decision. Sometimes it’s having a difficult conversation. Sometimes it’s letting go of work you’ve always done yourself. Sometimes it’s simply pushing through the discomfort of doing something that doesn’t come naturally because the mission matters more than your preference.

I don’t expect every season of leadership to ask the same things of me. If Brite Strategy Group becomes the organization I believe it can become, my role will evolve, just as the organization evolves. Today I walk into every networking reception because that’s what this stage requires. I’m not building a company where I have to do that forever. I’m building a company that earns the opportunity for someone else to do it better than I can.

Until then, I’ll keep showing up.

Not because networking receptions have suddenly become my favorite part of the job. Not because I’ve become someone different. But because I want to be proud of what I’m building, and I’ve learned that the future I’m hoping to create occasionally asks something uncomfortable of the person building it today.

The quiet cost of growth isn’t becoming someone else.

It’s becoming willing to do what your vision requires before it becomes what you naturally prefer.