What A Knee Injury Taught Me About Growing My Business
I didn't expect to learn something about growing my business from nursing a knee injury on a Scottish mountainside, but sometimes the best lessons come from unexpected places.
The Mountain That Taught Me Everything
I'd never climbed a mountain in my life when I decided to tackle the National Three Peaks Challenge—Scotland, England, and Wales in 24 hours.
After three months of training, I felt ready. My cardio was solid, my determination unshakeable.
I conquered the first two peaks. Then reality hit hard on the descent of mountain #2.
My knees screamed. My quads were shot. I pushed through on painkillers and finished under 24 hours, but paid the price with two weeks of recovery.
The brutal truth: It wasn't the obvious challenges that nearly broke me. It was weak foundations.
My cardio was fine. I'd neglected the supporting muscles—the quads that would carry me when everything else failed.
Your Business Has the Same Problem
This mirrors what I see with business owners every single day.
They think they're ready to scale. They craft what they believe is a brilliant message. They go all-in with their marketing. Then they get little to no results.
Here's why most marketing fails:
Most business owners obsess over the sexy stuff—perfect websites, stunning branding, clever social media posts. They spend thousands on the visible elements while completely ignoring the foundation that makes everything work.
They skip the deep, unglamorous work of truly understanding their customers.
The result is predictable: Burnout. Overwhelm. The crushing urge to quit.
Without deep customer knowledge, your content will never resonate. Your messages will fall flat. Your campaigns will fail. Every single time.
What Strong Foundations Actually Look Like
When I say "foundations," I'm not talking about logo colors or website fonts. I'm talking about the structural elements that determine whether your business thrives or dies.
The 3 steps that most business owners ignore but that move the needle when it comes to growing your business:
1. Understanding your customer's actual problems - Not what you think they need, but what keeps them awake at 3 AM. What they complain about to their spouse. What they've tried and failed at before.
2. Crafting messages they desperately need to hear - Not what you want to say, but words that make them think "This person gets me." Messages that speak directly to their fears, frustrations, and secret desires.
3. Testing before you spend big - Running small experiments before betting the farm. Learning what works in the real world, not just in your head.
The Foundation-First Approach
Here's what happens when you get your foundations right first:
Your marketing messages hit like lightning. Prospects respond immediately because you're speaking their language. Your content gets shared because it resonates deeply. Your sales conversations become easier because trust is already built.
Growth flows naturally because you've done the hard work upfront.
Most business owners do it backwards. They build the pretty stuff first, then wonder why nobody cares.
The Critical Question
Do you really know your ideal customer well enough to step into their shoes and feel their pain points?
Not their demographics. Not their job title. Their actual, raw, human problems.
If you can't answer that question with specific, emotional detail, you don't have foundations. You have guesswork.
Where to Start
Stop building and start listening. Talk to your existing customers. Find out what was happening in their life when they decided they needed your solution. Learn their exact words for describing their problems.
Document everything. Create customer profiles based on real conversations, not imagined personas.
Test small. Before you launch that big campaign, test your messages with a handful of people. See what resonates.
Build on what works. Scale the messages and approaches that get real responses from real people.
The mountain taught me that supporting muscles matter more than the obvious ones. Your business success depends on the same principle.
What foundation do you need to strengthen in your business?
That's where predictable growth begins.
