Note: This is the second article in the series Scaling with Grace. If you missed the first article, you can read it here.

When CEO Marquel Russell’s fast-growing Inc. 5000 business went from "everything I'm touching is killing it" to nothing is going right,” changing his foundation was the key to rebuilding in a way that he, his team, and his business can now flourish. 

It’s a solid example of the power of grace in action.

The foundation of grace-empowered leadership is: Ground (leading from the margin). Last week, I shared how Marquel created intentional space and ongoing rhythms that allow him to access rational, emotional, and spiritual intelligence. This week, I want to highlight what that made possible, starting with a decision many business advisors would have told him not to make.

Standard business wisdom says that if your revenue is declining and overhead is cutting into your margins, you can alleviate the pressure by reducing some of your largest expenses. For many companies, that’s payroll.  Marquel knew that. It's likely what many business advisors would’ve told him to do.

He didn't do it. 

He wanted to make an aligned decision, not a fear-driven one.

While Marquel ultimately reduced his overhead, he approached it with clarity rather than fear. He asked himself, “What do we really require?”  

That’s a different and better question than, “How can we quickly reduce as much of our expenses as possible?”

Focusing on the wisdom he gleaned from spiritual intelligence led him to retain his key people while still reducing overall team size and cutting unused software subscriptions and a monthly $10,000+ text messaging bill.

Grace improves the quality of your decision-making and enables you to be responsive vs. reactive.

Ground roots you in your true identity and focuses you on untangling your worth from your results, anchoring yourself in something that doesn't move when the numbers do.

Marquel's arbitrary income goals were a version of that same entanglement. He wanted to hit $100,000 a month at one point because others were saying they were making that much. Then it was $200,000. Then a million dollars a month started to feel like a real target instead of a fantasy. 

Arbitrary goals rarely lead anywhere sustainable. They can push any leader, and any team, toward relentless grinding and decisions made from forced pressure rather than clarity.

Letting go of those borrowed benchmarks freed him up to lead from a healthy place.

These days, Marquel is playing what he called “an individual infinite game.” There's no score he's trying to reach in order to have won. He feels like he's already won. Nothing to prove. Nothing to gain.

That may sound like a contradiction. After all, he continues to scale his own company and says he still sees himself focused on building and supporting better businesses for decades to come. But I don't think it's a contradiction. 

I think it's what it actually looks like when your identity has come untangled from your outcomes. He’ll still set goals. He's just no longer asking those goals to tell him who he is. And that freedom makes it possible to dream and build for decades of impact.

On the other side of “pruning season” is multiplication, and for Marquel and Strategic Scale Institute, it is a flourishing business, not just a fast-growing one. 

You can’t multiply what you don’t carry yourself, and what Marquel has spent time cultivating is now moving throughout his team culture.

Speaking of culture...

Whenever I ask a room full of business leaders what company culture is, I get many different definitions. My favorite definition and the one I use came from what I first heard from my friend Steve Gandara at Excellent Cultures Inc. He defines culture as:

The beliefs that govern how people behave (individually and collectively) at work.

We can unpack that more in a future series, but I wanted to share that because it gives you context for how powerful Marquel’s grace transformation is for the present and future of his business.

Grace empowers a shift of your beliefs from lies, often rooted in fear or pride, to truth. 

One of the most foundational lie-truth exchanges for Marquel was overcoming the lie that if he didn’t protect himself and control every outcome, things would fall apart. He now operates his business from a place of trust and surrender, which helps him lead with peace.

He put it simply: "The energy from the leader kind of sets the energy for the rest of the team." Anxious leadership tends to produce an anxious team. Calmer leadership sets a different tone, one the whole team picks up on.

And for Marquel and his team, they can now help other business owners scale from that same trust and calm, rather than fear.

If any part of Marquel's story felt like your own — the survival mode you didn't know you were in, the identity a little too tangled up in what you've built, the exhaustion from trying to refine what isn’t yet clear — I invite you to start where he did.

Ground is the foundation. 

Marquel and I have more in store together this fall to help small business CEOs scale with grace. For now, here's where I'd invite you to start.

If you've completed ROOTED, you already know what it uncovers. Consider forwarding this article to a leader in your circle who could benefit from it!