6 things I learned in my first 90 days running a growth lab
Lessons from the part of entrepreneurship no one glamorizes
When I launched Authority Juice, I thought the hard part would be getting clients. Yes and no.
We did get clients. Fairly fast.
However, the most challenging aspect was everything else that came with running a service business.
Building systems, writing processes, managing delivery, selling the work, and hiring people before I felt ready.
In the first three months, I learned more about my limits than I did in years of working in-house.
I learnt how to run a business without letting the work consume me.
These are six lessons that reshaped how I think about growth, operations, and staying sane while scaling.
1. Hire to protect your focus
Most founders wait too long to hire.
They tell themselves they’ll figure it out once things settle. But things never settle.
I did the same thing. I waited until my calendar was packed and my brain was fried.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t short on hours. I was short on clarity.
Good hires give you back focus, not just time. You don’t need a full-time team from day one.
But you do need people who can take ownership, not just tick off tasks. That shift changed everything for me.
When I gave up control of delivery and SEO ops, I finally had the headspace to think, plan, and sell.
But here’s what no one likes to talk about.
Sometimes you also need to fire fast.
I learned that the hard way. One wrong hire can slow down the entire engine.
You spend more time correcting things than doing the work. Letting someone go feels heavy, especially early on.
But it’s part of protecting the team, the client experience, and your own momentum.
Also check out: How to explain marketing to your CFO & CEO (without getting your budget cut)
2. The work doesn’t sell itself. You still have to
I used to think good work would be enough to close deals. That clients would read the case studies, connect the dots, and say yes.
But most people don’t have the time or headspace to decode your value on their own.
They want YOU to explain it clearly.
You need to help someone see their own problem more clearly.
The more I simplified my sales calls, the better they worked.
I stopped walking people through long proposals. I started breaking down what I was seeing in their current setup and what I’d fix if I were on their team.
This shift made a huge difference.
People do not buy strategy decks. They buy clarity.
Once they understand how you think, they stop comparing you to every other agency in their inbox.
3. Your calendar is your biggest risk
I used to worry about positioning. I kept thinking about how other agencies were pitching the same services.
What I should have paid attention to was my own calendar.
That was the real threat.
Most of my early stress didn’t come from client demands. It came from trying to do five different types of work in a single day.
One hour I was on a sales call. The next I was building a strategy doc. After that came hiring, delivery, reporting, and internal reviews.
No single task was hard. But switching between all of them wrecked my focus.
Once I blocked time by function, everything changed.
Mornings became deep work time. Afternoons were for calls. Fridays were for internal ops and cleanup.
It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me room to think clearly and execute better.
Also check out: A day in the life of a marketer-turned-founder
4. Pipeline isn’t the problem. Predictability is
In the first month, we signed solid clients. In the second, we hit capacity. In the third, I realized we had no system to replace revenue once those projects wrapped.
Founders think they need more leads.
What they actually need is a more predictable way to generate them.
That means having a marketing motion that runs in the background while you work.
Right now, we’re focused on building a system that works even when I’m not selling.
It’s slow, but deliberate.
I did not want to wait for referrals to land. The goal is to create steady movement so the pipeline doesn’t dry up every time I go heads down.
5. Your reputation grows faster than your brand. Protect it
Most of our early leads came through word of mouth.
People had seen the work or heard about it from someone they trusted. It wasn’t because of branding. And definitely not because of a fancy website. We started on Substack.
The work spoke for itself, but so did the experience of working with us.
Clients trusted us to get the job done without chasing updates.
They knew we’d step in, fix what was broken, and make their team look good in the process.
Reputation builds with every small moment, such as Slack messages, check-ins, clear timelines, and clean docs. That’s what people remember. The way the process felt.
You just need to deliver, follow through, and be someone people want to work with again.
6. No one cares how sexy your Notion setup is
In month one, I built dashboards.
In month two, I built more dashboards to track the first dashboards. I had views for views. Tags for tags. Custom emojis for every workflow.
It felt like I was building a product. I was not.
No one used any of it.
Clients didn’t care. My team pretended to care. I spent more time organizing work than doing it.
Now we run on one board, and one update a week.
The goal is to ship. And keep shipping.
The first 90 days didn’t come with a playbook.
I had to figure it out in real-time while selling, delivering, hiring, and trying not to lose sight of why I started in the first place.
What worked wasn’t one big shift.
It was a series of small, uncomfortable adjustments.
Delegating before I felt ready
Fixing my calendar so I could focus
Treating my pipeline like a system, not a scramble
Stripping down the noise instead of stacking on more.
Authority Juice is still a work in progress. But now it feels like a company, not a glorified solo project.
The kind of business that can grow without burning out the person running it.
If you’re building something similar, don’t chase perfect ops or flashy positioning. Just keep moving, keep simplifying, and protect your energy like it’s your job.