One of the patterns I've noticed in nearly fourteen years of advisory work with business owners is that, regardless of whether the KPIs say you're winning or not, anxiety, fears, and doubts can dominate your thoughts and agitate your soul.

The effects of this are tough enough when you're a founder and the primary one impacted by the decisions you make regarding your business, but they are multiplied when you're a small business CEO leading a team of employees and have 5 to 6 figures of monthly operating expenses.

Today's article is the first in a series I'm calling Scaling with Grace, to help those who are currently in the throes of the transition from growth to scale mode and those who already went through scaling, but still find themselves feeling like they're in the grind all the time (even if it’s mostly what I call “the mind grind”).

I want to kick this off with some reflections from a conversation I had with Marquel Russell. He is the CEO of Strategic Scale Institute. We met over a decade ago when he interviewed me on his podcast, but I've watched his journey closely, and I've witnessed how the power of grace has shifted his personal and organizational leadership over the last few years.

Marquel built Client Attraction University into a business that grew rapidly and even landed on the Inc. 5000. It seemed like everything he touched worked…well, until it didn’t. 

He had a 30+ person team, and a few hundred thousand dollars a month in overhead at the peak. The company had software subscriptions nobody was using anymore. At one point, they were spending over $10,000 a month just on text messages. He had four salespeople who needed a constant stream of fresh leads, which meant more ad spend. The lead quality started to slip, which meant they needed even more leads to make up for it.

It kept piling on, one thing after another. He put it simply: "As you grow, you get bloated."

The overhead problem was fixable, and he fixed it.

But the deeper story wasn’t really about the P&L. It was about identity, and that was harder.

When the business started to shrink, something in him started to shake right along with it. “If this thing fails, who am I then?”

He didn't really have anywhere to take that question. He'd paid to be in masterminds with other high-level entrepreneurs, but he couldn’t find any conversations that were talking about the real deal. He was going through “a pruning season” in his business, and it was painful, and he didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.

Today, Marquel’s team is smaller than it was at the peak, and by his own account, better. It’s leaner, they hold fewer meetings, and he is no longer the bottleneck every decision has to pass through. 

He's not chasing arbitrary revenue targets anymore. He’s intentional and focused on building for the next ten to twenty years, instead of solely the next quarter. He quoted Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A: "If you focus on getting better, your customers will demand that you get bigger." That's the posture he's building from now. Better first. Bigger follows, or it doesn't. Either way, his identity isn't tangled up in the outcome.

And he says his business is fun again.

So how did Marquel get from there to here?

It was grace, and it started with the first element I talk about in The Grace Effect framework: Ground, Lead from Margin.

This is about creating intentional space to pause, reflect, and renew. It’s leading from peace and rest. Margin helps you to access rational, emotional, and spiritual intelligence. It’s not a nice-to-have feature of your leadership; it’s the foundation and the soil that everything else grows in.

Marquel shared that he'd trained his body to always be in survival mode. So when he was actually resting and still, his body would panic. Years of the grind will do that to a nervous system. It doesn't know how to stop just because you do.

Instead of pushing and forcing his way through it, he shifted his priorities and his rhythms. 

Before: He used to jump out of bed at 3 or 4 am with a long list already running in his head, because somewhere along the way he'd developed a belief that if you're serious about this, that's just what you do. 

Now: His mornings are protected. No email, social media, or team messages before his time of devotion, prayer, meditation, and spending some time outside with his feet in the grass. He started doing somatic therapy, work aimed at the body and nervous system directly, not just the mind. His stated goal now is “a regulated nervous system.” 

None of the rest of Marquel's business transformation could have held without Ground going first. Everything in his “After” picture and all the goodness that happened to get him there sat on top of a foundation he had to lay first, in the stillness, before any strategy could work the way he wanted it to.

In the next article, I’ll share more about the other benefits that came from shifting his foundation, including how he learned to make decisions from a deeper place, even when it went against standard business advice.

That’s the power of grace. You can keep scaling a business without losing what truly matters in the process. And while you can shift your business operations, delegate and empower your team, and install automated systems, your leadership and team culture will be the difference-maker. 

Grace offers power beyond you that will help you, your team, and your results flourish.

With grace,
Shae Bynes
Executive Advisor
Creator of The Grace Effect™