There are a lot of reasons something in your business can start to feel disconnected, whether that shows up as resentment around what you’re doing or who you’re working with, an offer you sold that you now don’t want to have to deliver, or simply a growing distance between what you want and what you currently have.
But underneath that feeling, one of the most common root causes I see is compromise.
It doesn’t really matter whether the business is wildly successful or struggling, whether it’s a Fortune 10 company or a very small business, or what industry it’s in.
A little compromise here and there can feel completely harmless, and sometimes the compromise is the right choice or even the only choice available to you in the moment, but…
The problem is when those compromises stay in place and start to compound, because over time they can shift the entire way you run, lead, grow, and scale your business.
That’s where the disconnect starts to grow.
How compromise starts shaping the business
Let’s say you adjusted one of your offers because of something a specific client needed, and years later you’re still delivering it that way.
Or maybe you structured your schedule around a particular client or team member and kept following that same schedule even after the original reason behind it changed.
The same thing can happen in bigger ways, where maybe there was a season when you wanted to take a significant risk or go all in on something, but because of what was happening in your business or personal life, you needed to play it safer.
That may have been exactly the right choice at the time, but then safe decisions start becoming your default and you stop even considering some of the bigger risks you once would have taken.
I also see this when you start editing down your own instincts, intuition, dreams, or desires because of the influence of people who are important to you.
They may have a different level of risk tolerance, different priorities, or a completely different vision than you do, and because you care about them and their perspective matters, you compromise what you really wanted.
Over time, you can start adopting their filter of the world instead of your own.
And sometimes it’s much more practical than that.
Maybe you had a certain standard for how you wanted something done, but you didn’t have anyone on the team who could do it that way, so you shifted the standard or kept the work yourself.
Maybe you started using a tool because someone on your team preferred it, even though it never worked particularly well for you, and now that person isn’t even there anymore but you’re still using the tool.
Or maybe you were in the middle of a launch or growth spurt and had to hack something together because there simply wasn’t time to build the right system before 100 people came through something you expected 20 people to buy.
In that situation, you’re going to do what needs to get done so people get what they need and have the right experience.
The compromise itself isn’t necessarily the problem… the problem is when you never go back to address it.
When temporary solutions become the way you operate
This is where things start to compound, because the band-aid solution never gets cleaned up, the schedule never gets shifted, the offer never changes back, or the system you meant to put in place never gets built.
You get busy and before long the compromise has simply become part of how the business operates.
Every time that happens, you move a little further away from what you wanted, which is why a business can start to feel heavy, complex, and increasingly disconnected even when it is very successful.
It usually isn’t one dramatic compromise that creates that feeling. It’s one compromise left in place that influences the next one, and then another one, until eventually the gap between where you are and where you want to be starts feeling much bigger than it ever needed to become.
I see the exact same pattern in the large-scale businesses I work with, where Fortune 500, Fortune 50, and Fortune 10 companies invest millions of dollars every year cleaning this up.
They may talk about it through the lens of waste, complexity, technical debt, or something similar, but underneath a lot of it are shortcuts, temporary solutions, and compromises that made sense when they happened and then stayed in place.
Over time, those things make the business more expensive to run, harder to sustain, and harder to scale.
Although smaller businesses experience the same pattern in ways that may look less dramatic, they can still have a significant impact.
You’re often moving so quickly, trying to hold everything together, and making what feels like the logical choice in the moment, that over time you can end up with a business that makes sense on paper while feeling increasingly disconnected from what you originally envisioned.
The answer obviously isn’t to stop making compromises altogether because that isn’t realistic.
The answer is to recognize where the compromises have accumulated, challenge the ones that no longer need to be there, and make sure the next temporary compromise doesn’t automatically become permanent.
Step 1: Recognize where the disconnect is coming from
If you really dig into an area of the business that feels disconnected, you can often trace the path of how one compromise led to where you are now.
This comes up all the time in the work I do with people, where they’ll tell me what feels misaligned or what they want to change.
As I start asking questions, what eventually comes out is some version of, “Well, I did this because…” followed by another reason, another person, another constraint, or another choice that shaped what happened next.
Maybe someone wanted something different, maybe your spouse wasn’t comfortable with something, maybe your coach advised you against it, or maybe your team couldn’t handle what you originally wanted to do.
The common thread underneath all of those situations is compromise, and some of those compromises may have been the best choice you could make in the moment.
The point is not to judge any of them or go into ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’ thinking. It’s simply to recognize where that’s happened in the business.
One thing I would especially listen for is the language you use around constraints, because phrases like “I want to, but…” followed by “I can’t because…” or “that wouldn’t work because…” can sound like constraints even when the often aren’t.
Sometimes the compromises you’ve made shift your thinking so much that something starts to feel like a fixed reality when it doesn’t actually need to be one anymore.
Step 2: Challenge what you’ve stopped questioning
Once you recognize where something feels disconnected, start challenging the things you’ve been treating as fixed.
You didn’t get disconnected from your business all at once, so you don’t need to fix everything all at once either.
Look at the parts of your week that frustrate you, the pieces of an offer you wish you didn’t have to deliver, or the things you keep doing simply because that’s how you’ve been doing them, and question if they are still needed.
I had a 7 a.m. meeting on my calendar twice a week because I once had team members in the Philippines who needed that time, and long after that was no longer true, I kept the meeting there because I was used to it and moving it felt like a pain.
When I finally stopped and realized I didn’t have a single person on my team who needed to meet at 7 a.m., I changed it and got one of my most productive and creative blocks of the week back.
It sounds small, but it made a much bigger difference than I expected.
Some changes will be more significant than moving a meeting, but the principle is the same… challenge the things you’ve stopped questioning and see what’s still true today.
Step 3: Keep the next compromise from becoming permanent
There are going to be times when a compromise is the right choice in that moment, and there are also times when it is the only choice you can make based on what is happening in the business.
If you suddenly have 100 people buy something you expected 20 people to buy, you are going to do whatever you need to do to make sure those 100 people get what they need and have the right experience rather than stopping everything to build the perfect system first.
The compromise may be exactly what needs to happen in that moment.
The problem is when you never go back.
In my businesses, we use an optimization backlog and an innovation backlog, which are simply places where we capture things we know we want to improve and things we want to explore.
If we make a compromise in the moment and don’t have the capacity to address it right away, it goes into the optimization backlog so we don’t lose sight of it.
The tool itself doesn’t matter. What matters is having somewhere to capture the things you know you want to come back to and a regular cadence for revisiting them.
Sometimes the compromise was exactly the right choice, or the only choice, at the time. You simply don’t want to forget that it was a compromise.
Start with the disconnect you already feel
If there is an area of your business right now that feels off, unfulfilling, heavier than it should, or disconnected from what you really want, start there and look at what compromises led you to where you are.
Recognize them without judging yourself for making them, challenge what is still true and what only feels fixed because it has been that way for a long time, and then start with either the highest-impact change or the simplest one you can make.
If the disconnect has been building for a while, the gap between the business you have and the one you want can start to feel so big that you want to burn it all down and start over.
But as you begin unwinding some of the compromises underneath that disconnect, you may realize that the shift required to get closer to your vision is much more subtle than it seemed when everything felt tangled together.
That doesn’t mean every change will be small, but it does mean you may not need to do something nearly as dramatic as you thought in order for the business to start feeling like the one you actually want to run, lead, grow, and scale.