The college closure crisis is getting harder to explain away as a series of isolated institutional failures. Higher education institutions are facing a difficult mix of declining enrollment, rising operating costs, mounting debt, financial deficits and accreditation pressures across the country.

The challenge is that these pressures rarely show up one at a time. A college may start by losing students, but fewer students quickly means less tuition revenue. Add rising operating costs, debt, limited financial reserves, changes in government funding and growing competition from online and alternative education, and the pressure starts to compound. 

For smaller, tuition-dependent institutions, there may be very little room to absorb years of enrollment decline. In many cases, a closure isn’t the result of one bad year. It is the end point of financial and enrollment pressures that have been building for years. 

The college closure crisis is bigger than it looks

According to an Inside Higher Ed report, at least 16 nonprofit institutions announced closures in 2025 because of enrollment and financial challenges.

The pattern suggests that 2025 was not an anomaly. It was another year in which institutions found that their existing financial models could no longer absorb sustained pressure.

The historical data make it harder to dismiss this as a recent problem. An analysis of federal data by The Hechinger Report found that 28 degree-granting institutions closed in just the first nine months of 2024, compared with 15 during all of 2023. 

The current wave of closures didn’t come out of nowhere. Nearly 300 colleges and universities offering associate degrees or higher closed their doors between 2008 and 2023. And this trend goes back much further: 861 colleges and 9,499 campuses closed between 2004 and 2022. 

So, perhaps the more important question is not whether the enrollment crisis is coming, but how long it has already been here. The demographic cliff may be making the problem more visible, but the underlying pressures have been building for years. For colleges with little financial cushion, fewer students aren’t simply a demographic challenge. Instead, they can quickly become an existential one. 

And 2026 isn’t looking much different. University Business reported previously this year that another group of institutions is heading toward closure, including University of Valley Forge, Anna Maria College, Hampshire College, Lourdes University and California College of the Arts. 

The numbers behind some of these closure announcements are even more telling. University of Valley Forge has lost half its enrollment since 2007. Limestone University fell from 3,214 students in 2014 to roughly 1,600 in 2025 and was facing a $20 million deficit. Hampshire College brought in just 168 new students against a target of 300, while carrying $21 million in bond debt.

At what point does declining enrollment stop being an admissions problem and become an existential business problem? For an increasing number of colleges, that line appears to be getting closer. 

Delineating the reasons behind college closures 

It is tempting to look at a college closure and say the problem was simply a lack of students. But the more you look at what is happening across higher education, the more complicated the picture becomes. Declining enrollment sits at the center of the problem, but it rarely works alone.

When an institution depends heavily on tuition, has rising operating costs, limited financial reserves or significant debt, losing students can quickly become a much bigger financial problem. 

In the CNBC discussion, Robert Franek of The Princeton Review points to the coming “enrollment cliff” and notes that roughly 95% of U.S. colleges rely on tuition revenue. Fewer students, then, don’t just mean fewer people in classrooms; they mean less revenue to support the institution. But demographics are only part of the story.

Emily Wadhwani, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, describes the challenge as an “unsustainable operating platform”, one where costs continue to rise while enrollment and tuition revenue become harder to sustain. Colleges can’t keep raising tuition indefinitely, particularly as students and families scrutinize the value of a four-year degree more closely.

What makes the situation more difficult is the cycle that follows. Colleges facing enrollment pressure may offer more financial aid, increase marketing, add new programs or invest in the student experience to remain competitive- all of which cost money. 

If those investments don’t generate enough additional enrollment, the financial gap widens further. That is why I don’t see the closure crisis as simply a demographic story. It is also a test of how resilient an institution’s operating model is when growth can no longer be taken for granted. 

A college may have enough students to remain open today and still be heading toward trouble if its costs, debt and revenue model aren’t aligned with the size and needs of its future student population. By the time a closure makes the news, the underlying problem may have been building for years.

The enrollment problem is also becoming a financial planning problem. A 2025 Inside Higher ed survey of 169 college chief business officers found that enrollment declines ranked among the top financial risks facing institutions, alongside rising personnel costs and infrastructure and deferred-maintenance expenses. 

More than half of respondents were also concerned about the sustainability of their tuition discount rates. The question, then, isn’t simply whether colleges can attract students. It is whether they can attract enough students at a price that makes the institution financially sustainable.

Then there is the cost side of the equation. A college can lose enrollment without being able to proportionally reduce its expenses. In fact, Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 survey found that seven in 10 chief business officers believe their institutions have too many academic programs for their current enrollment, up from 59% the previous year. 

Academic offerings were also the most commonly cited source of cost-revenue misalignment. That raises a difficult question for higher education: how long can an institution continue maintaining programs, facilities and infrastructure designed for a larger student population?

And then there are pressures colleges have less control over: changes in federal funding, international enrollment, student financial aid, state support and changing perceptions of the value of a degree. In 2025, 42% of chief business officers said they were concerned about structural cost imbalances, while 46% identified enrollment declines as a top financial risk. At the same time, students have more alternatives than they once did, from online degrees and short-term credentials to workforce pathways that don’t require a traditional four-year experience.

A deeper enrollment crisis is awaiting

What if the next enrollment crisis isn’t just about fewer students entering the market, but colleges failing to connect with the students who are already interested? As the pool of prospective students gets smaller, every inquiry becomes more valuable. Yet the basics are still getting missed. UPCEA’s 2025 Enrollment Process Review, based on 1,000 inquiries to higher education institutions, found that 44% of prospective-student inquiries received no response at all. For those that did, the average wait was 14 hours and 23 minutes.

And speed isn’t the only issue. Students want relevance, too. A 2024 Niche survey found that just 15% of students said colleges were sending information that was very relevant to them. That should give enrollment leaders pause. If students have more choices and are comparing institutions based on the experience they receive, how much patience do colleges really have for generic emails, delayed answers and disconnected interactions?

Think about what an inquiry actually represents. A prospective student has taken the time to raise their hand and say, I’m interested. Tell me more. What happens next matters. If the response arrives too late or doesn’t address what the student actually needs, that initial interest can quickly disappear.

This is why personalization and responsiveness are becoming enrollment issues, not just marketing issues. Colleges can’t control the size of the future student population. But they can control how they respond to it. They can make it easier for students to get answers, understand their options and know what to do next. When every student matters more, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity isn’t failing to find another student, it’s failing to recognize the one who already found you.

The college closure crisis is getting harder to explain away as a series of isolated institutional failures. Higher education institutions are facing a difficult mix of declining enrollment, rising operating costs, mounting debt, financial deficits and accreditation pressures across the country.

The challenge is that these pressures rarely show up one at a time. A college may start by losing students, but fewer students quickly means less tuition revenue. Add rising operating costs, debt, limited financial reserves, changes in government funding and growing competition from online and alternative education, and the pressure starts to compound. 

For smaller, tuition-dependent institutions, there may be very little room to absorb years of enrollment decline. In many cases, a closure isn’t the result of one bad year. It is the end point of financial and enrollment pressures that have been building for years. 

Suze Orman has spent the past few decades urging Americans to save more and invest wisely. The best-selling author and longtime TV and podcast host has also amassed a fortune of her own, reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars. 

Despite her financial success, she has repeatedly spoken out about one everyday expense: buying food and beverages, especially coffee.

The 75-year-old millionaire has said she won’t spend money at coffee shops. Instead, she chooses to make her own brew at home. 

“I do Cafe Bustelo coffee every morning,” she told The Wall Street Journal in 2024. “I would drop dead before I bought a coffee — I do one cup a day and that’s it.”

Orman said that repeated small purchases can add up over time. She noted that money spent on coffee each month could instead go into an investment account, such as a Roth IRA. 

Orman broke down the math: If someone spends around $100 on coffee each month and instead put that money into a Roth IRA, the funds would grow to around $1 million after 40 years. 

“You need to think about it as: You are peeing $1 million down the drain as you are drinking that coffee,” Orman said to CNBC in 2019. “Do you really want to do that? No.”

She told the outlet that she would never buy a cup of coffee, despite being able to afford it, because she would “not insult” herself “by wasting money that way.” Takeout coffee is a “want,” not a “need,” she added. 

Extending that philosophy to food

In a more recent interview with the Journal, published earlier this week, Orman called eating out one of the biggest wastes of money.

“We still to this day eat at home,” Orman said in the interview, noting that her wife, television producer Kathy Travis, had prepared congee rice for lunch and meatloaf for dinner that day. The two of them sometimes eat at restaurants, but not because they want to. They view eating at restaurants as a way to meet friends and catch up. Orman added that she still worries about how the restaurant bill could impact her friends, and routinely pays for dinner. 

“If we go out to eat, the deal is we have to pay because I am not going to let people, who I know don’t have the kind of money that we have, waste their money on food eating out,” she said.

Orman’s aversion to dining out may resonate even more now that restaurant meals have become noticeably pricier. From December 2024 through December 2025, the cost of “food away from home,” the category that includes restaurant and takeout meals, rose 4.1%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That outpaced both the 2.4% increase in grocery prices and the 2.7% rise in consumer prices overall during the same period.

“Look up McDonald’s. Look up Taco Bell. Are you kidding me? $23, $30 just to go to McDonald’s for whatever you eat there,” Orman said.

Suze Orman has spent the past few decades urging Americans to save more and invest wisely. The best-selling author and longtime TV and podcast host has also amassed a fortune of her own, reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars. 

Despite her financial success, she has repeatedly spoken out about one everyday expense: buying food and beverages, especially coffee.

The 75-year-old millionaire has said she won’t spend money at coffee shops. Instead, she chooses to make her own brew at home. 

Beyond all the jargon, digital advertising is now at a watershed moment: The transactional end of the marketing funnel isn’t simply the endgame; it’s the critical touchpoint where demand is generated, gathered and fulfilled.

For quite some time now, digital marketing has relied upon a well-known separation of responsibilities. Brand awareness has been handled by social media and digital video, search engines facilitated discovery, and trade promotions have been conducted in brick-and-mortar stores. Not anymore.

If you are a corporate executive, brand marketer, or investor operating in the current media environment, grasping this transition will be essential for grasping two inter-related ideas: retail media and commerce media.

Retail media at its most basic level is defined as an advertisement placed in a retailer’s digital or physical property by leveraging their own shoppers’ data at or close to the time of purchase.

Retail media covers anything from branded product searches on Amazon or Walmart and display ads in a mobile application to loyalty email marketing and sophisticated digital signage in brick-and-mortar aisles.

As I have covered in depth in my article on what retail media is and how to be successful with it in 2026, retail media is the digital version of conventional shopper marketing. It’s not that end-cap and aisle displays aren’t around anymore; they’ve become addressable, measurable and biddable.

Retail media sits across three main formats:

1. Onsite media: Sponsored search and display ads on a retailer’s site or app — the highest-intent digital real estate available.
2. Offsite media: Ads on programmatic web, connected TV (CTV) or social channels, targeted and measured using the retailer’s first-party purchase data.
3. In-store digital media: Smart cooler doors, digital shelf screens and self-checkout displays that bridge the digital-physical store divide.

Why is capital pouring into retail media so aggressively? Three forces are driving it:

• Closed-loop attribution: Connecting an ad impression directly to a verified receipt eliminates the guesswork of traditional attribution models.
• First-party data durability: As third-party cookie signals continue to degrade, verified transaction records remain the gold standard for audience targeting.
• Margin expansion for retailers: Retail operates on notoriously thin margins, whereas selling media provides exceptionally high-margin revenue streams.

Nonetheless, brand executives should ignore the headline statistics. Branding investments are highly skewed toward the high-end platforms such as Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect. For success at the point of sale, you need to fix your digital shelf (optimize title, image and review), differentiate between defensive branding investment and offensive category investment and demand normalized incrementality metrics.

Whereas retail media is limited to retail and CPG ecosystems, it is actually a part of a bigger trend in structural shifts: commerce media.

Commerce media takes the notion way beyond the supermarket aisles or the app. It includes any organization that possesses a first-party transaction ledger and constructs advertising infrastructure to capitalize on it.

In the process of creating a strategy for multi-channel growth, it is important for media executives to analyze the operational structure that works best for their product cycle. According to Kontrol Media, it is useful to look into the main types of commerce media network models in order to understand how they work in various industries. The types include:

• Retail media networks (RMNs): Powered by SKU-level purchase data within a single retail platform (e.g., Instacart Ads, Walmart Connect).
• Financial media networks: Leveraging cross-merchant transaction histories from banks and payment processors to capture wallet-share signals and conquest opportunities (e.g., Chase Media Solutions, PayPal Ads).
• Travel and hospitality networks: Monetizing travel itineraries, seat selections and hotel bookings (e.g., Marriott Media Network, United Airlines Kinective Media).
• Delivery and rideshare networks: Capitalizing on hyper-local, real-time location and order data (e.g., Uber Advertising, DoorDash Ads).
• Marketplace & White-Label Networks: Aggregated multi-seller commerce infrastructure and custom-built enterprise networks for niche verticals.

Where retail media delivers granular, SKU-level conversion precision within one retailer, broader commerce media models give advertisers cross-merchant intelligence and deep consumer intent signals across everyday life experiences — from booking a flight to paying a bill.

Strategic takeaways for business leaders

With changing search behaviors, AI-assisted shopping and new privacy settings that affect traditional tracking technologies, retail and commerce media is no longer optional; it forms the base layer of the contemporary commerce strategy.

For securing market share in today’s world:

• Integration of search, AI and retail media: Your product detail page and reviews contribute to both retail algorithms for conversion and AI-powered answer algorithms. Look at SEO, AEO, GEO and retail media at point of purchase as one demand engine.
• Category-specificity over network hype: Spend your money on where your category works versus trying to buy every single media network that pops up.
• Rigorously audit measurement: Create a standard layer of reporting for all commerce and retail media networks for measuring incremental revenue so that your media spend contributes towards making those additional sales.

With this approach, brands will be able to get their hands on a high-intent audience through connected discovery platforms.

Beyond all the jargon, digital advertising is now at a watershed moment: The transactional end of the marketing funnel isn’t simply the endgame; it’s the critical touchpoint where demand is generated, gathered and fulfilled.

For quite some time now, digital marketing has relied upon a well-known separation of responsibilities. Brand awareness has been handled by social media and digital video, search engines facilitated discovery, and trade promotions have been conducted in brick-and-mortar stores. Not anymore.

If you are a corporate executive, brand marketer, or investor operating in the current media environment, grasping this transition will be essential for grasping two inter-related ideas: retail media and commerce media.

There was a time when putting your face on a billboard in the right zip code was basically a business strategy. You locked in the placement, picked the busiest intersection and waited for the phone to ring. Bus benches. Postcards. Magazine covers. The industry built an entire culture around the idea that showing up consistently in front of enough people was the same thing as earning their trust.

For a long time, it was.

Social media extended that logic for another decade. Follower counts became a version of the same signal. Volume of content, reach, engagement. If enough people were paying attention, something worth paying attention to must be happening. The loudest players in a market usually won, and the rest tried to figure out how to get louder.

That equation is breaking down, and most agents and brokerages haven’t fully reckoned with it yet.

Attention used to create trust — now it starts a research process

Scroll through Instagram on any given day and the content blur is real. Listing videos, market updates, sold posts, team photos, motivational quotes over sunsets. Every agent looks more or less the same. Every brokerage posts variations of the same five content categories. Social media reach still matters, but it stopped being a differentiator the moment everyone figured out how to do it adequately.

The same thing is happening in search. Showing up isn’t the hard part anymore. What people find when they show up is.

The moment a potential seller sees your name, they look you up. Not to find your website, but to find what other people say about you. They want to see reviews, yes, but they also want to see whether your name shows up in a local news segment, whether you’ve been quoted in a real estate story and whether anything exists in the world that validates you beyond what you put out yourself. An agent with a trail of third-party credibility behind them walks into that search result differently than one who just has a good headshot and a consistent posting schedule.

Most agents are competing hard on the channels everyone else is competing on. The ones pulling away are building something that lives outside those channels entirely.

The first meeting rarely starts when the first meeting starts

Sellers have usually made up their minds before anyone walks through the door for the listing appointment. They’ve read the reviews, looked at days on market and asked two or three people in the neighborhood. The appointment itself is often just confirmation of a decision they’ve already mostly made.

Recruits evaluating brokerages do the same thing. So do investors looking at proptech founders. The due diligence that used to happen during a relationship now happens before one starts, and the inputs people use aren’t the ones you hand them. They’re whatever already exists out in the world with your name attached to it.

This is the part most marketing budgets aren’t built to address. You can control your own content completely. You can’t control what a reporter writes, what a client says in a review or whether your name comes up when someone asks a colleague who the serious players are in your market. Those signals carry more weight precisely because they’re not coming from you.

The agents and brokerages that understand this are investing differently. They’re getting in front of local media and showing up as a source in market coverage rather than just producing their own. They’re having properties featured in publications rather than just posted on their own channels — they’re essentially building the kind of record that exists independently of their own marketing.

Reputation reduces friction in ways that compound

The practical difference shows up in how business actually moves. An agent known for being the go-to source on their market, who shows up in local TV segments and gets quoted in housing stories, walks into a listing appointment with a credibility baseline that another agent has to spend the first 20 minutes trying to establish in real time.

Deals close faster when that foundation already exists. Referrals arrive warmer. Objections are fewer because the trust question has already been partially answered before the conversation started.

For teams and brokerages, the compounding effect shows up in recruiting. Agents considering where to go are evaluating culture and leadership through whatever information exists publicly. A brokerage whose leadership shows up regularly in the industry conversation, whose name carries weight outside its own zip code, has a recruiting advantage no internal pitch can fully replicate.

For proptech founders, it affects whether investors take the meeting, whether partners want to work together and whether consumers trust a new platform with something as personal as their home. A company with a trail of credible third-party coverage starts every conversation several steps ahead of one that’s still explaining who they are.

Reputation doesn’t replace competence. But it allows competence to get a fair hearing instead of spending its energy overcoming doubt.

What AI changed

AI didn’t create any of this. People have always researched before they engage, and what they found has always shaped what happened next. What changed is the speed and accessibility of the aggregation.

When someone asks an AI tool who the credible agent in a specific market is, the system pulls from what’s already out there. Reviews, mentions, coverage, consistency. It doesn’t generate an opinion. It surfaces the record that exists. That record is now being surfaced faster, to more people, with less effort on the consumer’s end than ever before.

The implication is simple. The signals that used to live in scattered corners of the internet are getting pulled together and evaluated in ways that were harder to do two years ago. If the record doesn’t exist, the absence is noticeable.

Treat reputation like infrastructure, not a trophy

Most businesses treat reputation the way they’d treat a plaque on the wall. Something accumulated over time, displayed occasionally, referenced in a pitch. What it’s actually becoming is closer to infrastructure. It does continuous work underneath everything else, quietly affecting how quickly someone moves from aware to interested to ready.

In an industry like real estate, where the decisions people are making involve their financial security and where they’re going to live, this matters more than in almost any other category. Whether you’re an agent competing for listings, a brokerage building out a regional brand or a platform like Ownli helping consumers navigate decisions tied to their most significant asset, public credibility shapes conversion in ways that attention alone stopped being able to do.

Real estate spent decades rewarding the loudest voice in the room. That’s changing. Attention still gets you seen. Reputation is what determines what happens after.

There was a time when putting your face on a billboard in the right zip code was basically a business strategy. You locked in the placement, picked the busiest intersection and waited for the phone to ring. Bus benches. Postcards. Magazine covers. The industry built an entire culture around the idea that showing up consistently in front of enough people was the same thing as earning their trust.

For a long time, it was.

Social media extended that logic for another decade. Follower counts became a version of the same signal. Volume of content, reach, engagement. If enough people were paying attention, something worth paying attention to must be happening. The loudest players in a market usually won, and the rest tried to figure out how to get louder.

For Ken and Sarah Barlow, the idea to open a frozen yogurt franchise started during a simple family moment. Their young daughter asked if she could go somewhere to “make her own ice cream” or choose her own flavors and toppings. The couple realized that their hometown of Forest Acres, South Carolina, did not have a self-service frozen yogurt business at the time. 

“That gap mattered not just to her, but to families like ours who loved that experience,” Sarah tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “That moment planted the seed.”

The couple realized that bringing a self-service frozen yogurt shop to the area wouldn’t just fulfill a need; it would also open the doors to “something joyful” and “community-centered,” Sarah says. 

“This community has always been home for us,” she adds. “We’re total foodies who love frequenting our favorite spots in Forest Acres. Supporting other local businesses is something we genuinely enjoy.”

The Barlows decided on a 16 Handles franchise in early 2024 and opened their store in June 2025. Within six months of opening, they had done $1 million in sales.

The interview below has been edited for clarity and concision.

Going into franchising

Walk me through the moment you decided, We’re actually going to buy this franchise.
Sarah: There wasn’t really one dramatic moment where we just woke up and decided to do it. It was more a series of conversations and research that gradually gave us confidence that this was the right opportunity.

As we learned more about 16 Handles, talked with the franchise team, reviewed the numbers and learned about their vision for the future of the company, we started to feel more comfortable with the decision. We could see how the concept would fit in our market and felt like the brand had room to grow.

What assumptions did you have about franchising going in that turned out to be wrong?
Ken: One assumption we had going into franchising was that because there was an established corporate structure, everything would run very smoothly all the time. We quickly learned that franchises are still operated by people, and like any business, there can be challenges and hiccups along the way. What surprised us is that being a franchise owner still requires a lot of flexibility and problem-solving. The franchise system gives you a great foundation and support, but you can’t just put things on autopilot. You still have to adapt when issues arise and work closely with the corporate team to find solutions. That’s probably been one of our biggest lessons as owners.

Growth strategies

You built a $1 million business in just six months. How did you do it? What were some of your tactics for growth?
Sarah: A big part of our growth really came down to two things: location and being active in the community from day one. We were very intentional about securing what we felt was the best possible location for our store in a highly trafficked shopping center in a densely populated part of town. That visibility and steady flow of foot traffic made a huge difference early on. It put us in front of people constantly, which helped us build awareness quickly and consistently bring in new guests. 

The second major factor has been how deeply we’ve tried to plug into the community. Since opening, we’ve hosted over 70 fundraising events for local nonprofit organizations, and we’ve also made it a priority to support local sports teams, schools and dance companies directly. Those relationships have been incredibly meaningful, but they’ve also helped drive real, repeat traffic into the store. For us, growth hasn’t been about one single tactic — it’s been about being in the right place and making sure we’re showing up for the community in a real, consistent way.

Ken: Community partnerships and local events have been a huge part of our business. I wouldn’t say they’re just “nice to have” — they’ve had a real impact on our revenue and, just as importantly, on building a loyal customer base.

Advice for potential franchisees

What action steps did you take when you decided you wanted to explore franchising? What do you recommend for people who don’t know where to start?
Ken: Once we decided we were serious about exploring franchising, the first thing we did was get our financial situation in order. We looked at what we could realistically invest, talked with lenders and made sure we fully understood the total cost — not just the initial franchise fee, but build-out, working capital and everything that comes with opening a location. 

From there, we spent a lot of time researching different franchise brands and really trying to understand the systems behind them. We asked a lot of questions, talked to existing franchisees and tried to get a realistic picture of what day-to-day operations would actually look like. 

We also went into it knowing it wasn’t going to be a quick process. Between discovery calls, approvals, site selection, leases, construction and training, it takes time. Probably longer than most people expect at the beginning. For anyone just starting out, our biggest recommendation would be to get financially prepared early and be patient with the process. Don’t rush into it. Take the time to really understand the brand you’re considering, talk to as many people as you can and be ready for a learning curve. Franchising can be a great path, but it’s not an overnight decision; it’s a commitment that takes planning and persistence.

Advice for their past selves

If you could talk to yourselves the week before signing the franchise agreement, what would you say?
Sarah: I think we’d tell ourselves two things: First, trust your instincts, and second, be patient. There are so many unknowns before you sign a franchise agreement, and it’s easy to second-guess yourself or wonder if you’re making the right decision. Looking back, all of the research, questions and due diligence we did gave us a solid foundation, and we’d remind ourselves to trust the work we had already put in. 

We’d also tell ourselves that everything is going to take longer than expected. From site selection and construction to permitting and opening day, almost every step of the process takes more time than you think it will. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just part of building a business.

Most importantly, we’d tell ourselves that the long hours and challenges will be worth it. Seeing the store become a part of the community, supporting local organizations and watching customers make 16 Handles part of their routines has been incredibly rewarding. The journey won’t always be easy, but it’s one we’ll be glad we took.

How much do you have to make to consider yourself working class? The targets keep moving. 

According to a recent Pew Research analysis, 60% of Americans think of themselves as working class, up from 54% in 2024. 

Working class has traditionally referred to lower-income workers. For many Americans, the term has become less about a specific income bracket and more about if they feel financially secure. 

Pew Research Center classifies middle-income households as those earning roughly $51,900 to $155,600 annually, with the precise range adjusted for household size and local cost of living. People in that group are especially likely to embrace the working-class label: 67% say it describes them extremely or very well.

The finding is not limited to middle earners. Fully half of upper-income adults, those above Pew’s $155,600 threshold, also say they are working class.

Why more Americans identify as working class

More Americans identify with the working class label because the phrase has no universally accepted definition. For some people, it means lower-paid workers. For others, it refers to people without a four-year college degree or those in trade jobs. 

Yet another group says that the term means anyone who depends on a paycheck rather than investment income or inherited wealth. 

Pew found that 77% of workers in blue-collar occupations identify as working class, but so do 61% of people working in other kinds of jobs.

The label also appears to capture something broader than income alone: a sense that even a solid salary does not automatically translate into financial ease. Pew found that half of people who say they can pay their bills, have at least several months of emergency savings and live comfortably still consider themselves working class.

That perception persists even as wages have outpaced inflation over the past two years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, median weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary workers rose from $1,139 in the first quarter of 2024 to $1,233 in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of about 8.3%. Over the same period, consumer prices rose by roughly 5.5%.

The middle class is feeling more financial strain

For years, middle-income Americans tended to report feeling closer to higher earners than to lower earners in their ability to save, spend and manage day-to-day expenses. 

That gap has widened. Middle-income households are now increasingly likely to express the same financial unease as the lowest-income group, while higher earners have pulled further ahead.

Still, financial stress is not the only reason Americans adopt the working-class label. Pew found that for many, the term appears to be as much about earning a living through work as it is about income, savings or spending power. Many Americans use the term working class to describe people who rely on a paycheck, regardless of salary, education or occupation. 

How much do you have to make to consider yourself working class? The targets keep moving. 

According to a recent Pew Research analysis, 60% of Americans think of themselves as working class, up from 54% in 2024. 

Working class has traditionally referred to lower-income workers. For many Americans, the term has become less about a specific income bracket and more about if they feel financially secure. 

He was the propelling force behind a massive ad campaign that garnered billions of organic views. Now Alvaro Gellings, a serial entrepreneur born and raised in Spain, is revealing his growth secrets.

Gellings recently spoke at the OOAK Mastermind conference in Castelfalfi, Italy. He talked about his business ventures and how he created multi-million dollar companies. 

Before becoming deeply involved in the creator economy, Gellings built and scaled a gaming company that grew through paid advertising. It’s a concept familiar to many of the founders who were in the room. “That’s all I knew,” he says. “Buying reach and selling the product.”

Then, in 2021, he sold that company and moved into an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. By chance, he lived above a Twitch creator. At the creator’s birthday party, he had a conversation with a popular streamer that shifted his understanding of marketing.

“You have to buy your reach,” the streamer told him, according to Gellings. “I have the reach.”

That difference became the basis of Gellings’ next chapter. He began asking why brands were willing to pay creators so much, concluding that their influence must have substantial commercial value. He ended up founding a fashion business, Ama Studios, with two of Germany’s most popular online personalities, Trymacs and Amar. By collaborating with them, he learned just how powerful a creator-led launch could be.

Gellings planned the launch of Ama Studios in three months in 2021. In its first hour, Gellings says the business generated €1.2 million (about $1.4 million) in sales.

“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s insane,’” he recalls thinking as he sat at his laptop.

A new resolve

Ama Studios continued launching collections. The experience gave Gellings a new conviction: Creators could be much more than paid media channels. They could become the narrative engine behind a brand, especially in categories where consumers are not urgently searching for a product.

That belief later shaped Day One, the sportswear company Gellings launched with German creator and endurance athlete Arda Saatçi. Gellings knew that in sportswear, a product alone is rarely enough.

“Nobody’s looking for the next gym tank to buy,” he says. “Nobody’s in urgent need of the next T-shirt, the next socks, the next shoes. You have to create a story.”

From paid reach to gathering attention

Gellings had a background in clothing and understood product development, but he was looking for a way to test more ambitious growth and launch ideas. Sportswear was the obvious fit. He was passionate about the category and had been developing concepts for campaigns that could produce a broader cultural impact than conventional advertising.

He met Saatçi while discussing a possible investment in a sports-teaching app in 2024. At the time, Saatçi had about 100,000 followers, far lower than the 2.9 million he would later accumulate, but Gellings saw unusual potential. “He’s a superstar,” Gellings recalls thinking. “He’s super good in front of the camera, and he’s crazy in terms of sports.”

Within 48 hours, Gellings had put together a complete pitch: a deck, samples, models and a film illustrating the potential brand. His pitch to Saatçi was not primarily about equity or a traditional influencer partnership. It was about visibility.

“One thing I learned about being in constant contact with creators and influencers and celebrities,” Gellings says, “the one thing that they like more than money is audience and reach and being even more famous.”

His proposal was intentionally extreme: Saatçi would run from Berlin to New York, and the team would document the journey, turn it into long-form video content and then distribute clips across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and other channels. Once he reached New York, Day One would launch.

The Berlin-to-New York concept established the creative logic that defined the business. The brand wanted to build a high-stakes story around a real athletic feat, let audiences follow it in public and attach itself to the journey rather than interrupting the audience with a conventional sales message.

The Cyborg Season campaign

Day One’s signature campaign became “Cyborg Season,” built around Saatçi’s ultra-endurance challenges. One of the most prominent efforts involved a 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) ultramarathon, with teams documenting his progress and converting the footage into a high-volume content operation.

Gellings says the company hired around 200 content clippers to repackage Saatçi’s material for short-form platforms. The team also activated its creator network, encouraging Twitch stars and other influencers to react to the content. This created a system: Official clips attracted audience attention, reactions generated further material, and eventually independent clipping accounts began distributing the content without direct involvement from the company.

“Everything you put his face on was going viral,” Gellings says.

According to Gellings, the campaign produced more than 1.5 billion impressions in German-speaking markets. Saatçi gained more than 800,000 followers in Germany during the campaign, while individual YouTube videos regularly drew 400,000 to 600,000 views.

The commercial impact was equally striking. On the day of Saatçi’s arrival, Gellings says Day One recorded close to $1 million in revenue. In the following days, the brand sold through its entire inventory. Gellings had started the company with a €500,000 ($582,517) personal investment to fund marketing and operations. 

Across three Cyborg Season campaigns, Gellings estimates the company generated roughly 3.5 billion impressions. He also describes a later live-streaming peak that reached more than two million concurrent YouTube viewers, alongside 1.2 million viewers on Twitch. He says a YouTube livestream generated 50 million views, while TikTok live activity produced three billion likes.

The numbers helped make Saatçi a recognizable public figure in Germany, but they also exposed a strategic risk. A brand that depends entirely on one person can grow quickly, but it may be hard to sell, finance or sustain if that person leaves.

“You have a huge human risk,” Gellings says. “Nobody’s going to invest in you. What if he doesn’t want to do it anymore?”

His answer was not to remove the creator from the business. Instead, it was to reduce the creator’s share of the company’s total relevance over time. “Our goal is to increase the total amount of revenue,” he says, while ensuring “the top line is growing so much faster than the creator’s revenue.”

Building a brand that can stand alone

In his keynote speech, Gellings outlined a framework for creator-led companies to follow. In his view, “founder is the brand” comes first. Then, “the founder curates the brand.” Eventually, “the brand stands alone.”

Day One used premium seeding campaigns to move into its second phase. The company sent limited-edition boxes to athletes, footballers, musicians, streamers and other influential figures. One box included a fragment of a shoe Saatçi wore during an ultramarathon, displayed in glass with a numbered metal plate. Each recipient received a personalized video message and letter.

The goal was not merely product placement. Gellings wanted recipients to feel they owned a piece of the story. “They felt very honored,” he says.

The strategy gave Day One visibility beyond Saatçi’s own audience. High-profile recipients posted the packages, which positioned the brand among athletes and cultural figures who had not necessarily been involved in the original endurance campaign. In later editions, the packages became collector’s items, according to Gellings.

Spending more for brand relevance 

The next step was to create brand-owned cultural moments. Day One helped create 99 Laps, an endurance event that brought together 100 elite athletes in late July. Competitors ran 99 laps of 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles) each, with the slowest runner eliminated after each lap. The concept combined athletic competition with entertainment and spectacle.

Gellings says the event brought in about €400,000 ($467,152) in sponsorship revenue while costing around €450,000 ($525,546) to produce. That short-term loss was intentional. “We didn’t want to make money,” he says. “We wanted to create relevance for our brands.”

The event reportedly attracted 30,000 concurrent live viewers and generated an estimated 100 million to 200 million impressions. Athletes wore Day One gear, sponsors included brands such as Garmin and Blackroll, and the company positioned itself alongside established premium names in the endurance ecosystem.

That association was part of the strategy. “Whenever they thought Day One, I was like, Oh, Day One, Garmin,” Gellings says. “Day One is a premium brand.”

The company also used the event as a launch platform for its Ultra line, a high-performance collection designed for racing. Rather than announcing it through standard advertising, Day One showed elite runners wearing the pieces during the competition and directed viewers to register for launch updates.

For Gellings, this is the practical lesson of creator economy marketing: Use creators to accelerate awareness, but do not stop there. Build stories, communities, events, cultural associations and performance-marketing systems around that initial reach.

“The creator is the first step of the rocket,” he says. “It helps you reach a certain height super, super fast.” The ultimate objective for him, however, was to go further and create a sportswear brand that people recognize at the gym even if they have never heard of the founder or watched the original campaign. 

“We’re still very early in the process,” he says. “I’m also at the very beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, even though I’ve been doing it for nine years now.”

This as-told story is based on a conversation with Joe Fiorenzo. Fiorenzo and his wife, Sheela Prakash, co-founded Sfizi, a food company curating Italian products in celebration of aperitivo culture. They launched their first product, ring-shaped snack crackers called taralli, in December 2025. Now, their business sees an average of $8,000 to $10,000 in monthly sales, on track for $100,000 in its first year, as it plans for product expansion. The piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 I started the business with my wife, Sheela. Sheela has studied and lived in Italy off and on for the past 10 years. We’ve been together for all that time, and we’ve traveled in Italy together. During that time, we fell in love with Italian culture. I also have an Italian American background, so I’ve experienced some of those Italian influences over the course of my childhood. 

Sfizi translates to “whims” in Italian. We like to refer to them as little pleasures. The goal is basically to celebrate little pleasures of Italian culture. We launched with Italian Taralli crackers, the small bagel-looking crackers. You do see them throughout the United States. A lot of times they’re in those clear cellophane bags. They’re often very dusty looking, at the bottom of a basket somewhere in the cheese section. We wanted to start with that product because it felt like an easy segue.

Starting a self-funded business without a CPG background

Neither of us have a CPG background. I worked in corporate insurance for 17 years. Sheela has a food background, but not in the CPG space. So we wanted to start small. We figured, if we can’t figure this out, then we probably are in the wrong business, so we should probably do something else. But it’s been good so far. We launched with three flavors; we wanted to make them fun, approachable and eye-catching. 

We started reaching out to brand design companies in early 2025. At the same time, we reached out to various producers in Italy to see if they could accommodate what we were looking to do. The first probably six months were mostly going back and forth on the brand identity and our vision. 

We sent out about a dozen cold emails to Italian producers to get a sense of what was possible. Then we spent two to three weeks traveling the Puglia region of Italy, visiting producers and sampling taralli and other products that they had, trying to develop a rapport in that short amount of time. Of course, there was a little bit of a language barrier, so we wanted to make sure there was somebody on their team who could communicate in English in case there was something that needed to be kind of articulated that we couldn’t necessarily translate. So that was a fun but long process. 

We’re completely self-funded. Total startup costs were around $50,000. We are looking at potential investors going into next year. So hopefully we have a little bit more support. We have a steady stream of revenue. We had a pretty aggressive launch and pretty good revenue stream the first few months. Then it kind of evened out a little bit, and now we’re pretty stable. Depending on the month, we’re averaging $8,000 to $10,000 gross sales. We’re targeting over $100,000 in gross sales for the first year. 

We have a social media person who works with us, a contract worker who’s a friend of ours. And we’ve been leaning heavily on her for putting inspirational, creative and fun posts out. We have 10 to 12 posts go out a week to keep that interest going. Also, we’ve done some partnerships with other brands. We’ll do a collaboration where we give away both of our products. There’s a lot of opportunity in that space because there are so many different CPG brands out there looking to gain exposure. We’re obviously willing to partner with anybody who’s willing to do the same for us. 

Now, we are fully focused on the business, with the exception of some side projects. My wife is a cookbook writer, so she’s been working on that as well. And side projects that I’ve been working on that are not CPG-related. The day running Sfizi can be very time-consuming, but it can also be less time-consuming, depending on what’s going on. So you have to put other things on your plate as well. 

Navigating timing and order flow for success

The biggest challenges have revolved around timing and order flow, both in terms of customer ordering and placing orders with our Italian producers for our product. It’s difficult because you can’t always anticipate what sales are going to be like. When we first launched, we had a relatively small volume because we really had no idea and we needed to have a baseline. So just in case we weren’t able to sell anything, we weren’t out of pocket a lot of money.

Luckily, we sold out very quickly — in less than a month. So from there, we ramped up production and scaled that way. The timing of that plus the other elements that go into delivering the final product, whether it’s design for the packaging, printing packaging, etc. — coordinating the timelines of all those different vendors — can be tough. And then we have a third-party warehouse that stores our product and also fulfills orders.

It’s really been a learn-on-the-fly process because we didn’t have the experience with it. But we have a much better handle on it now than we did eight months ago. Now, we have enough order volume that we’re comfortable with ordering more product than we might actually need for the very foreseeable future. Our product does have a long shelf life right now, about a year. So if the product has to sit for a little bit, that’s fine. 

Expanding the product portfolio

We’re definitely looking to broaden the product portfolio. At least for now, we want to stay within the Italian aperitivo angle because that’s popular in the U.S. People are always looking for new, fun snacks or products to go along with their spritz or negroni or whatever the drink of the week is. So we’ve reached out to a few different Italian producers for a few different products, though we don’t have anything lined up definitively yet. But we’re pretty certain we’re going to launch at least a second full product early in spring of 2027. We just haven’t ironed out all the details yet. 

Down the road, we would certainly like to dip into the pantry element of things, whether that’s a fun pasta, sauce or even flour. These days, there’s such a focus on good flours, bread and healthful snacks. So we’re in a good spot for a lot of different directions from a product standpoint. Currently, we don’t import in bulk, but that is something we would consider because we’ve gotten some interest from restaurants and bars. 

Advice for other CPG founders

To anyone considering starting a business in the CPG space, don’t be afraid to ask people for help. Meet with other brands and companies doing similar things. Because what you really come to realize is nobody knows that much, but somebody might know just a little bit more, or maybe they’ve had a certain experience with something that you haven’t. So pick people’s brains and just try to understand how they’re doing things. You might be able to apply what they’re doing to your business, even if it’s not exactly the same thing.

You can’t be afraid to fail. We went into this business with good intentions, but we truly did not know how it was going to work out. So you have to have a little bit of humility. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable and ask questions. Because without the tips from some of these other founders, I don’t know if we would be where we are now.

This as-told story is based on a conversation with Joe Fiorenzo. Fiorenzo and his wife, Sheela Prakash, co-founded Sfizi, a food company curating Italian products in celebration of aperitivo culture. They launched their first product, ring-shaped snack crackers called taralli, in December 2025. Now, their business sees an average of $8,000 to $10,000 in monthly sales, on track for $100,000 in its first year, as it plans for product expansion. The piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 I started the business with my wife, Sheela. Sheela has studied and lived in Italy off and on for the past 10 years. We’ve been together for all that time, and we’ve traveled in Italy together. During that time, we fell in love with Italian culture. I also have an Italian American background, so I’ve experienced some of those Italian influences over the course of my childhood. 

Sfizi translates to “whims” in Italian. We like to refer to them as little pleasures. The goal is basically to celebrate little pleasures of Italian culture. We launched with Italian Taralli crackers, the small bagel-looking crackers. You do see them throughout the United States. A lot of times they’re in those clear cellophane bags. They’re often very dusty looking, at the bottom of a basket somewhere in the cheese section. We wanted to start with that product because it felt like an easy segue.

Founders face countless challenges. But one recent survey published by Wilbur Labs showed that loneliness may top them all — at least in terms of its near-universal presence among leaders.

The survey polled entrepreneurs about the realities they faced as they grew their companies. A full 87% of respondents admitted that being the head of a company involved more isolation than they expected. Furthermore, 90% said that the stress they experienced made them consider abandoning startup life.

These aren’t startling revelations. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know how often you can feel like you have no one who understands you.

Nonetheless, the statistics illustrate an important truth: Founders need to surround themselves with supporters, mentors, peers and likeminded entrepreneurs. In other words, they need both the intrinsic and corporate value that comes from being involved in communities. This support helps them overcome the harsh truths about entrepreneurship that rarely get discussed.

Indeed, being a part of many communities can help startup owners feel less lonely. These networks also provide other benefits, including the ability to gain insights, stay ahead of trends and keep a competitive edge.

That said, you may be unsure which types of communities to join and leverage. Below are three options to guide your next moves.

Peer advisory-style networks

Peers typically foster camaraderie between members by staying small so meetings can be very focused. Ideally, any peer group you enter should have some kind of structural element to it. Otherwise, you’ll just feel like you’re attending a freestyling network event. Those can be great, but they’re not designed to improve your skills and relationships at the same level of continuous focused feedback and support.

As you might imagine, these types of groups are unique and some serve distinct populations. For instance, BrainTrust is a peer advisory community aimed at bringing together women business owners and entrepreneurs to help build financial independence, wealth, and influence. However, their meetings aren’t set up to develop business pipelines. Instead, BrainTrust puts members into small, confidential groups called Vaults, where women discuss their business challenges and opportunities. In a highly structured environment, they hold one another accountable as they grow and scale their companies.

Looking for other entrepreneur network recommendations to jumpstart your success? The CFO Circle concentrates on helping senior leaders in finance upskill their abilities for their (and their organizations’) advantage. Front Row Dads helps fathers stay active as parents as they grow their businesses. There’s a peer group ideal for you to stretch into a new community.

Entrepreneur incubators

Many founders find it valuable to join startup incubator communities. These networks explain why smart startups are partnering with larger entities to unlock seed funding, future partnerships and talent pools. It’s not unusual to find incubators attached to academic institutions or government agencies. However, they can be privately run as well.

If you’ve been trying to work out of a small or inadequate space, you may be able to find office areas in an incubator setting. Also, if you’re not able to purchase equipment to take your startup to the next level, you could potentially gain access to specific kinds of machinery available at an incubator. This gives you the chance to go farther without spending down your capital.

For instance, Lab Central provides several incubator locations that allow biotech startups to share laboratory equipment and tools. This prevents founders from carrying the entire financial load of acquiring biotech equipment. 

Digital-first communities

In the digital era, founders may want to take their community-building into cyberspace. Specifically, becoming visible on social media channels — including LinkedIn — can give them and their businesses a spotlight. They can also start to build relationships with influencers who may become valuable marketing partners later.

It’s worth noting that you shouldn’t shy away from the idea of building a community around one of your passions. Maybe you’re an entrepreneur who overcame a learning disorder, and you want to raise awareness. In that case, you might want to launch a podcast or start publishing articles online to start conversations with other founders like yourself.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, used this technique to boost his exposure. His podcast, Masters of Scale, sets him up to talk with entrepreneurs across almost all fields. He built a dedicated community around a podcast. You might not have his visibility, but that doesn’t mean you can’t follow his lead.

You don’t have to feel like you’re all alone as a founder. Involving yourself in communities ensures you’re surrounded by people who can serve as coaches and sounding boards. With them on your side, you’ll be better positioned to navigate your business in a positive direction.

Founders face countless challenges. But one recent survey published by Wilbur Labs showed that loneliness may top them all — at least in terms of its near-universal presence among leaders.

The survey polled entrepreneurs about the realities they faced as they grew their companies. A full 87% of respondents admitted that being the head of a company involved more isolation than they expected. Furthermore, 90% said that the stress they experienced made them consider abandoning startup life.

These aren’t startling revelations. If you’re an entrepreneur, you know how often you can feel like you have no one who understands you.

All business owners want to hear that their business is growing, but fewer are ready for what growth actually feels like on the inside. Chiefly, growth is the gap between how a company runs at 10 people and how it needs to run at 50.

I’ve spent years helping companies handle the moment when calls and inquiries start outpacing the team’s ability to answer them, and the pattern is always the same: Growth exposes weaknesses that weren’t evident when things were smaller.

None of this means growth should be deliberately avoided or slowed down. Instead, it means the businesses that handle the middle stretch well are the ones that plan for the hurdles before they hit, not after. Here are five of the most common challenges and what to do about each of them.

1. Hiring can’t keep pace with demand

A recent Small Business Credit Survey carried out by the Federal Reserve shows that once businesses have acquired customers and increased their sales, the most frequently cited operational difficulty among firms is hiring or keeping qualified staff. That tracks with what I see constantly: A business lands a wave of new customers, then spends months trying to hire enough people to properly serve them.

Part of the problem is that you can’t always hire as quickly as your business grows. A Robert Half survey found 76% of small business leaders feel confident about hiring this year, 47% say finding skilled workers has gotten harder, and 56% report real skills gaps on their teams.

Growth doesn’t have to wait until those positions have been filled. Before deciding to make a full set of new permanent hires, identify which functions can be handled by contract, part-time or outsourced assistance. This way, you gain the necessary capacity while recruiting, without compromising your operational excellence in the process.

2. Customer response times start to slip

The front line is the first to feel the effects. Calls ring longer, emails sit unanswered for days, and the small touches that used to make clients feel seen and cared for begin to disappear. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Index showed that the number of talent-attraction problems reported by small businesses had more than doubled year-over-year, rising from 6% to 14%. As teams face greater pressure to find the people they need, it becomes harder to maintain the same level of responsiveness as demand grows. This is exactly the kind of staffing lag that shows up first in response times.

A full-time employee isn’t the solution in every case. Instead, you can arrange coverage that adjusts to demand so a busy week doesn’t result in slower responses. This might involve cross-training your existing staff, adding part-time shifts during busy periods or using an answering service like AnswerConnect to provide additional call coverage when your team can’t answer. The aim is straightforward: As your business gets busier, your customers should not notice.

3. Cash gets tied up before growth pays off

Growth costs money before it makes money, and that timing gap is where businesses can get squeezed. According to the same Federal Reserve survey, 77% of companies said that the costs of goods, services or wages had increased, and of those firms that applied for financing in order to finance an expansion, only 42% obtained the full amount they had asked for.

That makes a good case for entering into commitments later rather than locking them in at an early stage. During the growth phase, until the new business starts generating revenue, it is better to prefer flexible costs over fixed ones. For example, taking on leased equipment rather than buying it, choosing contract support instead of having a permanent workforce and going with month-to-month agreements with vendors rather than signing multiyear contracts.

4. Systems that once worked start to break

​​The spreadsheet used to monitor five clients stops working properly at 50. The group chat, responsible for scheduling three employees, becomes chaotic by 30. Most leaders don’t notice these systems are broken until something slips through the cracks: a missed callback, a duplicate order or a customer who has to repeat their problem to three different people.

Each time there is a significant increase in headcount or customer volume, build a habit of asking which tools and processes were designed for a smaller version of the company, and make the necessary corrections before they lead to a customer-facing failure.

5. Culture stretches thinner with every new hire

The final growing pain is usually the most subtle. Culture that felt automatic when everyone sat in the same room has to be spelled out once a team spreads across shifts, locations or time zones. New hires need to hear, explicitly, how the company cares for customers and each other, because they can’t absorb it by osmosis the way early employees did.

Put those standards in writing instead of leaving new hires to guess at them, and revisit the list by checking to ensure each touchpoint reflects the intended culture every time you carry out a hiring round. Otherwise, the version of the company that your employees and customers loved in the early days will gradually vanish somewhere around employee number 40.

Scale without losing what made you successful

Success creates its own set of challenges. More customers, more demand and more growth can put pressure on every part of a business. The pressure doesn’t mean that something is wrong; often, it shows that the business is functioning properly. The challenge is making sure your customers and employees don’t have to face the pressure that comes with that success.

The leaders who end up in a good position are those who deliberately adjust their staffing, their cash flow and their systems before they reach a breaking point — rather than merely responding to problems after customers have already noticed them.

Growth will always create pressure. The goal is to build a business that can handle more without becoming less of what made it great in the first place.

All business owners want to hear that their business is growing, but fewer are ready for what growth actually feels like on the inside. Chiefly, growth is the gap between how a company runs at 10 people and how it needs to run at 50.

I’ve spent years helping companies handle the moment when calls and inquiries start outpacing the team’s ability to answer them, and the pattern is always the same: Growth exposes weaknesses that weren’t evident when things were smaller.

None of this means growth should be deliberately avoided or slowed down. Instead, it means the businesses that handle the middle stretch well are the ones that plan for the hurdles before they hit, not after. Here are five of the most common challenges and what to do about each of them.