Why the routines that built your business could be holding it back

There’s a saying I often share with the SME leaders I work with – ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’.

It sounds obvious, yet it captures one of the most common reasons growth stalls. Keep selling the same products to the same markets in the same way, and significant growth is unlikely to come – unless you’re sitting on a surge in demand from existing customers. The barrier is rarely a lack of opportunity – far more often, it’s a hesitance to step into the unknown.

The threat of the comfort zone

In business leadership, a comfort zone is essentially a behavioural state where tasks, routines, and challenges feel safe, familiar, and predictable. It offers low anxiety and steady performance, but can stall innovation and organisational growth.

This ‘comfort zone’ can often be rooted in how a business began. Take an entrepreneurial founder who has built their product themselves. They know their offering inside out and often build multiple roles around that initial knowledge – chief product officer, sales director, client retention etc. That expertise is where they feel most comfortable, and early on that’s a strength.

The catch is that being the person who does every job can quietly stop them stepping up into the one a growing business really needs – leading it. It shows up in smaller ways too. When you’re that close to something you’ve created, exposing it to honest feedback or challenging its purpose can feel uncomfortable – but that’s exactly the step that’s needed to grow.

At the other end of the spectrum sit the more analytical, financially minded leaders. They live in the data and the numbers, which is a strength, but they can become so caught up in risk aversion and whether the figures stack up that they miss opportunities as they arise.

Both types of leaders end up stuck, just for opposite reasons.

A heavy weight to carry

It would be wrong to pretend the caution is irrational; business leaders carry real weight. After all, it’s not only their own livelihood at stake, they’re also responsible for people’s wages, and behind those wages sit mortgages and families.

What’s more, change requires not just a leader to step outside of their comfort zone; the whole team faces new ways of working and new targets. Once you consider these layers, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses quietly retreat to what they know.

Pushing through the comfort zone

The good news is that breaking out doesn’t have to mean a reckless leap.

On the Help to Grow: Management Course, for example, we encourage leaders to work out what they can comfortably risk rather than betting everything on an uncertain outcome. They focus on what’s within their control and take a step from there.

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Below are some key tips that leaders have found effective in doing this:

• Robustly weigh up the options: one model we use is Rose, Bud, Thorn – a simple way to weigh up a potential project or change by identifying what’s already working, where the genuine opportunities lie, and what the real barriers are. It prompts the right questions – who to talk to, where to do more research – so that when you move, it’s an informed decision rather than a blind one
• Cut out what isn’t moving you forward: sometimes the boldest move is to stop doing something. It’s easy for a founder to become a busy fool when they first start out – chasing every contract and client, never pausing to analyse where their time goes or which work drains their resources for little profit. I’ve seen SME leaders make the genuinely uncomfortable decision to close down parts of what their business does – and it’s often exactly what frees them to grow. It feels counterintuitive until you analyse it properly
• Remove yourself as a bottleneck: leaders can quietly become a bottleneck – with almost every contract, client, and decision running through them. They’re usually brilliant at it, but if everything depends on them, the business can’t grow strategically. The first time a leader steps away and makes themselves uncontactable for a few hours can feel deeply uncomfortable, yet they almost always return to find the team handled things perfectly well. You hired capable people; growth means trusting them
• Leverage the power of peers: what helps most of all, in my experience, is not doing this alone. Again and again on the Help to Grow: Management Course, I’ve seen that when leaders sit alongside their peers and hear how others have tackled the same fears, they realise they’re not taking nearly as big a risk as they imagined. In fact, when we ask people to sum up what they’ve gained through the experience, the word that consistently comes back is “confidence”
• Share what you learn with your team: as I touched on earlier, this isn’t only about a leader stepping out of their comfort zone – real change asks the same of their team, and they won’t always have the bigger picture of why it matters and where it’s heading. So you have to bring them with you. Research has found that 90% of leaders who complete Help to Grow: Management shared what they learned within six weeks of finishing it – and that kind of knowledge-sharing is exactly what gets a team as ready to adapt to move the business forward as their leader is

Avoiding the temptation of comfort zones in challenging times

One final, but crucial, point – tough economic conditions can make the comfort zone more tempting than ever. Yet these are exactly the moments when leaders most need to think creatively, not just to survive but to thrive.

Looking at your business on a single page, and challenging what it does, can often be a lonely and daunting task.

But you don’t have to transform everything overnight. Often a single, well-judged step beyond the familiar is enough to put you on much firmer footing. And the moment you take it and open yourself up to new opportunities, you tend to find there’s far more support around you – peers, mentors, the right programmes – than you may have expected.