The $11,000 Email: Building the Capacity to Scale Your Business

I used to think that once I was more successful, I’d have fewer problems. Once I hit $100K months, things would be easy. If I could only make a million dollars a month, I’d finally have my stuff together, better systems, more support and fewer things going wrong.

I don’t think that anymore, and I actually believe the opposite is true.

More success means making more decisions. It means more money moving through you, more people relying on you, more visibility, more opportunities and more logistics, and it also means more things that can break and more moments where things don’t go according to plan. The successful people I know have developed a larger container for managing all of that stress.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about for the last week or so: capacity.

What I mean by capacity

I’m talking about how much can happen around you without it completely hijacking you. How much uncertainty can you hold inside your business? How many problems can come up before your entire day becomes about the fact that something negative happened?

And more importantly, how quickly can you experience something stressful, disappointing, frustrating, embarrassing or just unexpected, and then find your way back to neutral?

I think one of the biggest gaps between where we are now and the level we tell ourselves we want to reach is often a capacity issue. The business you say you want to run won’t get there until you become the version of yourself who can handle it, the version of you who doesn’t think everything is a big deal and comes back to neutral really efficiently.

My friend Stacy Tuchel runs a business that’s approaching $2 million a month. The last time I got to mastermind with her, she described it as whack-a-mole. Every time she turns around there’s another problem to solve or something surprising her, and she just has to handle it.

The $11,000 email

Recently I got an email out of the blue from my payroll and retirement benefits provider. It said they’d gone through their reports, realized a payment hadn’t processed correctly at some point in the past, and I owed them $11,000. They’d be debiting it from my account in the next couple of weeks.

It was so cryptic that I almost thought it was spam. The issue was supposedly from 2022 or 2023, about three years ago. I emailed them back, called customer support and got on their chat, trying to find anyone who had a clue what they were talking about. I spent about two hours that afternoon uploading every past payroll report and every dollar I’d put into my retirement account to Claude and asking it to reconcile everything. I had employees back then, so I wondered if someone’s retirement hadn’t been funded correctly. I couldn’t find it.

But at no point was I distraught. I wasn’t crabby, I wasn’t crying and I wasn’t calling my husband in a tizzy. I knew it was going to be okay whether I had to cough up $11K unexpectedly or not, because I believed in my ability to solve the problem without catastrophe.

That ability is something I learned over the last decade of entrepreneurship. I had to learn how to move from problem to problem without catastrophizing and without huge emotional swings in my highs and lows, staying close to that baseline.

Stop adding meaning to things that just are

Back in 2012, when I was a baby entrepreneur designing WordPress websites, I went to a networking event and a guy asked what I charged. I told him $1,200, and he laughed in my face and said he’d never pay that much for a website.

It crushed me for weeks. It was still replaying in my head months later. Was I charging too much? Did he not take me seriously? Was I not a real business owner? I would ruminate forever on comments like that.

Now when someone tells me I’m too expensive, I’m like, okay, cool, no worries, go find less. I have no emotional response whatsoever.

One of the things I worked on with a mindset coach back in the day was not adding meaning to things that don’t need meaning. His opinion was that he wouldn’t pay that much, and my price was $1,200. It just is. It didn’t mean he was cheap, it didn’t mean I was overpriced or a bad business owner, and it didn’t mean any of the other stories I was spinning up. The more you can detach from adding meaning to things, the easier your life gets.

What I learned watching a $25 million business owner

A few years ago I spent a weekend with my friend Bill Allen. I stayed in his guest room with his wife and three young kids, spoke at an event he was hosting and helped coach in one of his programs. We went to the gym together, I sat in his office while he hosted meetings, and I rode in his car while he took calls and did deals. I got to be a fly on the wall for someone whose business was doing around $25 million a year.

Over those three days I watched important meetings, deals falling through, family things, people who needed him, a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing and decision after decision. His nanny was late, his kids were right there, and he moved through all of it with so much ease.

I remember looking at his calendar and thinking I could never run a business like that. Things that were a simple conversation for him would have consumed my energy for hours. Part of me was even thinking, gosh, I’m glad my business is simpler.

But Bill was still present. He was generous, he was laughing with his team, he was connecting with his family and he was getting his workouts in. At one point we were driving between meetings, he took a stressful phone call, and afterward I noticed him taking deep breaths. I asked if he was doing breathwork, and he said yes, he was trying to get back to his stable zone.

He had little rituals that most people would never see. He wasn’t carrying the stressful thing from 9 a.m. into his 2 p.m. meeting, then carrying the 2 p.m. problem home to dinner and taking all of it to bed. He had built that capacity over time.

Watching him, I realized capacity is how effectively you can complete the stress cycle and come back to neutral.

Why this matters when you want to scale

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I set goals of $100K and $250K months again. I want to build an empire, and I’ve finally let myself believe that’s possible. I also have three kids in every activity known to man, and I’m the primary caregiver. I could tell myself I don’t have the bandwidth to grow a company and be the mom and partner I want to be, call it a season of life and shut it down.

Lately I’ve been called to expand my capacity instead. I can use AI to save a ton of time. I can hire great A-player team members, attract dreamy clients and have ads and launches that work, and I can believe I deserve to scale without losing myself or my family in the process.

If you’re an online entrepreneur saying you want more clients, a bigger audience, a team, stages, a book or events, you also have to accept the duality that comes with it. More clients means occasionally more unhappy clients. More money means money can temporarily go sideways. More visibility means more criticism. As your capacity expands, you have more room for the good too.

And if a bad thing takes you three days to recover from, eventually your nervous system starts protecting you from growth. That can look like procrastination, staying small, overplanning or waiting for the perfect time. You might hesitate to commit to anything because part of you doesn’t trust yourself to handle the emotional aftermath if it goes wrong.

So ask yourself how long you’re going to let something own you. Ten minutes? An hour? The rest of the afternoon? Three days?

Capacity means feeling it without becoming it

Building capacity still means caring. I can get detached really fast, especially with hiring and leadership, and building capacity has meant letting myself have my feelings.

One evening recently my husband and I were both crabby, and his energy was affecting mine while I folded laundry with my kids. The harder I tried not to be affected, the more frustrated I got. What helped was admitting it: okay, this is affecting me. I can feel it without getting lost inside it.

The next morning I journaled, went for a run, looked at my to-do list and handled it, and I was back to my baseline. Movement is a huge piece of my capacity. I can build an empire after I’ve gone for a run.

Find your reset and start tiny

Part of expanding your capacity is knowing what brings you back. For me it’s often a run. For you it might be breathwork, a walk outside, a silent walk with no music, driving without your phone, sitting quietly for 10 minutes, talking to someone you love, a shower, music, going to bed early, cleaning your kitchen, prayer, journaling, good food, closing your laptop or laughing with your kids.

Then build those resets into your life before you desperately need them. A coach once had me set breathing timers on my phone throughout the day. I’d close my eyes, do box breathing for a couple of minutes, imagine that favorite-sweater feeling and then go back to work. So many amazing things happened while I was doing that practice, probably because I believed I could regulate and come back to neutral.

You can practice on tiny things. When my kids were little and tantruming, I’d take a sip of coffee, look out the window at complete chaos and focus on how warm and good that coffee felt. For a minute I was back to myself and could handle whatever was happening. You don’t have to wait for a crisis, an annoying text, broken tech or a flopped launch to start.

And to close the loop on that $11,000 email: a week and a half later, they emailed to say it was an error on their end and to just ignore it. Good thing I didn’t freak out.

The goal is to know you’ll be shaken sometimes and to always know how to find your way back. There’s an incredible amount of freedom in that.

Listen to the full episode

Listen to the full episode above for the whole story, including more from that weekend with Bill and the frog-in-the-pot idea I can’t stop thinking about. If it resonates, send me a DM on Instagram and tell me what it meant to you. I love getting your messages.

And if you want to be around entrepreneurs having these conversations alongside the business strategy, come check out Tiny Offer® HQ at tinyoffer.com/hq.