Why a $250K Business Might Be More Profitable Than a $1M One
You can have a business making $250K that pays you more—and supports you better—than one making $1M.
You can build something that feels spacious, clear, and profitable—and still earn less revenue than someone whose million-dollar business is quietly bleeding out behind the scenes.
Because here’s what no one tells you:
Scale doesn’t guarantee sustainability.
And most businesses don’t break from lack of money.
They break from misalignment.
I was reminded of this on a call with a thoughtful, multi-talented business owner who’s been reimagining what sustainability could actually feel like.
She’d recently attended a group coaching session where everyone was asked to share their revenue goals for the coming year.
Nearly every person in the chat wrote:
$1,000,000.
She wrote: $265,000.
She didn’t say it with shame; she said it with clarity. It was the number that reflected her actual needs, desires, and plans. She’d already run the numbers. She knew what she wanted to pay herself. She knew what kind of business she wanted to run. And she wanted the majority of that $265K to be profit.
And what I said to her, nodding in deep agreement, was:
A million-dollar business isn’t always more profitable. In fact, it can be less.
Success isn’t about the number.
It’s about the structure that can hold what you’re building—whatever the shape, size, or scope of that vision may be.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Goal. It’s What We Stop Asking.
When a revenue milestone becomes the baseline of legitimacy—whether it’s $100K, $500K, $1M, $3M, or $10M—we flatten the conversation. We skip the more useful questions that actually matter. Questions like:
Q1. What kind of business are you building?
Are you building something lean and high-margin—designed around your energy, your values, and the life you actually want to live?
Are you recreating the same overextended, corporate machine you left behind… only now you’re the engine, the fuel, and the fire alarm?
Or are you building something expansive—something revolutionary, team-powered, and mission-led?
A business where profit isn’t the primary metric, but shared impact is.
Maybe your margins aren’t the highest—but you’re employing people at fair wages, serving a complex need at scale, or reimagining how power moves in your industry.
Maybe the structure is bigger, but so is the purpose it’s built to hold.
This kind of scale isn’t accidental—and it’s never cheap.
It demands intentional infrastructure, clear governance, and values held in action, not just in a mission statement.
And when it works—it works beautifully.
Not because it’s optimized for efficiency, but because it’s built to steward something larger than one person.
Not every founder wants a lean business.
Not every vision fits inside a solo model.
Some of us are building systems that are meant to outlast us—and those carry a different kind of weight.
The question isn’t “Should I scale?”
It’s “Does the structure match the scope of what I’m building?”
Q2. What does it take to run that business?
Every revenue tier has its own structural weight.
To build to $100K, you’re aligning your offers to your market.
To reach $250K, you’re making that revenue repeatable—and pricing it right for the scope and the people you want to serve.
To grow from $250K to $750K, you’re hiring ops and delivery support.
From $1M to $3M, you’re building internal systems, org charts, cross-functional rhythms.
At $10M, you’re managing layers of abstraction—and, if you’re not careful, the culture you didn’t intentionally design will run the business for you.
So the number isn’t the problem.
The problem is treating it like a goal—fixed, final, and self-justifying—instead of what it actually is:
A threshold that demands new structure, new capacity, and new clarity.
Rather than treating these milestones as endpoints, what if we chose to treat them as pressure points? Moments that reveal where your current system can’t quite hold.
Not failures and also not finish lines.
Just invitations to realign the structure—to practice a new way of holding the work.
You don’t just hit $1M or $3M or $10M+ and coast. You hold that level with structure. And without that structure? The founder—and the key team around them—often become the infrastructure.
Burnout stops being a risk. It becomes the default.
Q3. What are you actually keeping—and what’s it costing you?
At $1M in revenue, even a modest 20–30% margin erosion from silent loss can mean $200K–$300K vanishing into:
Rework and team turnover
Clients who churn because delivery slips
Systems that no one uses
You stuck in the weeds while everyone waits on you to decide
Meanwhile, a business at $300K—with clean systems and a founder who’s not over-functioning—can take home $150K+ in actual profit.
Maybe you’re thinking, “$150K is not enough.”
And I get it. I’m here for all of us making more money—for all the right reasons.
But when we treat “$1M” like the holy grail, we flatten the conversation.
Because sustainability and profit aren’t just about top-line income; they’re about structure, systems, and stewardship.
And when you don’t build a business that can hold the money… the money doesn’t stay.
And to be clear—there are businesses that scale with integrity.
I’ve seen founders build high-revenue, high-impact companies that run with care, clarity, and coherence. But they’re never built on guesswork or grit.
They’re architected with intention. Resourced at every layer. And led by people who chose to stay in right relationship with their team, their vision, and themselves—even as the org chart expanded.
Scale isn’t the problem. Misalignment is.
This Isn’t Hypothetical.
I’ve seen how easy it is to normalize extractive growth—especially when ambition and alignment get tangled. I’ve had to untangle them myself, again and again. And I’ve sat with founders in the thick of that same question: what am I really building toward? And at what cost?
That’s what came up for me in a completely different client conversation—this time with a founder and their partner who were hiring a new team member. It was a good, right-fit hire.
They were sourcing a MacBook that could handle video rendering, and they were floored by the cost.
“Wait—why is this so expensive?”
It’s something many of us aren’t taught—especially when we’re scaling fast:
“This is what it costs to do business well.”
And it wasn’t just about the laptop. That moment reminded me how many of us—myself included—have to learn the language of operational stewardship over time. We think we’re just solving for the next hire, but what we’re really learning is how to build a business that’s resourced to hold itself.
They knew how to set revenue goals, but they didn’t know what it takes to resource those goals.
They knew what they wanted to build. What hadn’t yet clicked was how much structure it would take to hold it.
Once you understand that growth without structure is just a prettier form of collapse—you start seeing everything differently.
These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re slow leaks that compound over time.
We celebrate revenue as proof—but rarely ask what it’s built on.
Many founders are burning through multiple six figures a year in silent loss—then blaming themselves, or their teams, for not feeling successful.
We call it “silent loss.”
It doesn’t always show up on your P&L.
But your body knows.
Your team knows.
Your nervous system definitely knows.
We’ve internalized a view of business that’s rooted in extractive logic.
The goal through this lens isn’t sustainability; it’s output, exploitation, and ownership.
We’re told to “build a business, not a job”—but scalable success often means recreating corporate systems and absentee ownership: complex orgs, underpaid teams, extractive expectations.
We stop working in a job and start building one on the backs of others.
We’ve inherited a blueprint that rewards control over care. That measures success by how little you have to be involved—how far you can remove yourself from the labor and still extract the value.
It teaches us that freedom means stepping back, scaling up, and letting others hold the weight—without ever asking what that weight actually costs.
I’ve had to unlearn that logic myself. And I’ve walked with founders who are quietly reckoning with the same thing:
That what we were told would give us freedom… doesn’t always feel free.
No wonder so many of us build “successful” businesses that still feel off.
What if it’s not that you’re undercharging or not thinking big enough?
What if the structure itself was never meant to support your full humanity—and you’re feeling the friction of that misfit?
What if we stopped glorifying a revenue number—and started designing around what we actually want?
More ownership of our time
Work that doesn’t overdraw our capacity
Models that reflect our values
Growth that doesn’t rely on grit or guilt
Time to make art, raise kids, write poems, rest deeply, or build something weird and meaningful.
If a $265K business gets you that—why chase $1M just because someone else said you should?
If you’ve been measuring your success by the top line—and wondering why it still feels heavy—there’s another way.
We can build businesses that support us.
We can create regenerative microeconomies.
We can run numbers that match reality.
We can restructure for alignment before something breaks.
Sovereignty isn’t always a function of scale.
Sometimes, it’s about remembering you get to choose—
And refusing to build your business from someone else’s map.
xo,
Brittany
