Why do founders who have the capital, experience, and market opportunity to grow reject the next move because of an assumption they never have tested? The business can spend months trying to extract more growth from familiar strategies while a viable opportunity remains off the table without its commercial value ever being assessed.
Growth strategist Terri Maxwell has helped build more than 50 brands and is the founder of Share On Purpose (a holding company for purpose-driven businesses) and Succeed On Purpose (a training company for individuals and leaders). Through that work, she has seen how a founder’s beliefs can determine which growth opportunities a leadership team considers at all.
Your business grows as you evolve.
For Terri, that evolution includes questioning the beliefs that define what the founder considers possible. Those beliefs set the starting point for strategy: which opportunities fit the business, which capabilities can be developed, and which ideas deserve further investigation. When a belief is treated as fact, the leadership team never gets to test it and the opportunity disappears before the commercial decision begins.
By the time Terri considered establishing Share On Purpose, she had already led an internet company, built and sold her own business, and helped create dozens of brands. People around her still told her the idea was unrealistic, and she nearly accepted their judgement of what she should do next.
Terri found that preventing untested beliefs, including other people’s doubts, from deciding the outcome allowed her to properly assess the opportunity.
Melissa’s Take
I have people in my life who respond to a goal by asking how we’re going to achieve it. If I say I want to win the race, they don’t decide whether the ambition is realistic on my behalf; the conversation moves to the strategy, what needs to change, and what I still need to learn.
They aren’t promising that I’ll win or pretending the obstacles don’t exist. Taking the goal seriously enough to examine what it requires forces me to separate obstacles that can be measured from beliefs that would stop me before I begin.
When “we can’t do that” ends a leadership team’s discussion of a growth opportunity, the objection may reflect a genuine constraint involving capital, capability, demand, or timing. It may also be a conclusion that has survived because nobody’s asked what evidence supports it.
My gateway action is to choose one growth opportunity the business dismissed before conducting a commercial assessment and write down the exact statement that ended the discussion. Identify the evidence that would confirm or challenge it, and if that evidence wasn’t gathered, test the assumption before rejecting the opportunity again.
This is part of a fuller conversation with Terri Maxwell about building profitable and purposeful businesses, the relationship between persona, passion, and purpose, how beliefs influence action, and the Success Switch she uses to interrupt a disempowering response.
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