Why Hustle Isn't The Same as Scale
- Samantha Riel
- Aug 27
- 5 min read
Why are we still defending 'hustle' and 'grind' in 2025?
There’s a myth we’ve been sold for years in business: hustle equals success. If you’re not burning yourself out, if you’re not answering emails at midnight, if your team isn’t “all in” to the point of exhaustion, then you’re not serious about growth.
Common, now. It's time we let that go. Hustle doesn’t scale.
Systems, people, and clarity do. But hustle? That's just a recipe for burnout
That’s why I started Scale Without Chaos. After two decades in corporate leadership, I saw too many smart teams trapped in unnecessary firefighting. Missed handoffs, manual busywork, systems patched together, leaders setting strategies no one could execute. It wasn’t ambition that was broken, it was the way we worked.
The worst part? None of it was necessary.
Why We’re Still Defending Hustle in 2025
It amazes me that in 2025, with everything we know, we’re still glorifying burnout. We still treat time as disposable. We still confuse speed with progress.
Think about it. We live in a world where you can learn from thousands of companies that came before you, where you can buy templates for almost any process, where automation can take repetitive work off your plate in minutes. Yet somehow, “work harder” is still the default answer to growth.
Why?
Because hustle looks heroic. It feels like momentum. Leaders confuse long hours with results. Founders confuse constant stress with building something meaningful. And teams confuse survival mode with progress.
If you look closer, the reality is simple. Hustle is a tax you pay for not having the right people, processes, and systems in place.
A Story That Shouldn’t Be True in 2025
A few months ago, I started working with a global company. Not a scrappy startup. A large, established organization with household-name partners.
In my first week with them, I asked a basic question: how do leads flow from your website into your CRM?
The marketing leader looked me in the eye and said, “We manually input all our leads.”
Yes, in 2025. A company with multimillion-dollar revenue had an employee whose entire job was to take leads from the website, enter them into a form, and push them into the CRM. Lead assignment? Tracked in a spreadsheet. Every new inquiry required manual copy-and-paste work before it ever reached a salesperson.
The team knew it was crazy. They admitted it. But the company didn't fix it - instead, they threw more people at the problem. Why? Because their website system didn’t integrate easily with their CRM, and fixing it required a small budget approval.
One Zapier workflow could have solved the problem in less than a day.
This is what chaos looks like. Not because people don’t care. Not because leaders aren’t smart. But because somewhere along the line, someone decided it was easier to accept inefficiency than to fix it.
The Currency We Trade Without Thinking
Every time leaders choose hustle over structure, they are trading the most valuable currency they have: time.
Time for leaders to think strategically.Time for teams to work effectively.Time for customers to get value faster.
And when time is gone, you don’t just lose hours on a calendar. You lose focus, energy, and momentum. You create a culture where burnout is the expectation and inefficiency is the norm.
Scaling with chaos is not a badge of honor. It is a slow leak that drains every part of your business.
People, Processes, Systems: The Real Growth Formula
Every problem I’ve seen in scaling companies comes back to one of three things:
People: Do you have the right people in the right roles, empowered to make decisions and equipped to succeed?
Processes: Are your workflows defined, documented, and continuously improved, or are you relying on memory and workarounds?
Systems: Are your tools working together to support the process, or are they creating extra work and frustration?
When even one of these three is broken, you get bottlenecks. When all three align, you get scale.
The Simplicity Test
The best solutions are rarely complicated. More often, they’re the small, obvious fixes everyone overlooks because they’re busy hustling.
That’s why I often challenge leadership teams with a simple test:
Take one current frustration in your business.
Ask, is this a people problem, a process problem, or a systems problem?
Then ask, what is the simplest possible fix we’re ignoring?
You’d be amazed at how often the answer is clear.
A feedback loop that was never put in place or a manual task that could be automated in an afternoon or a process that was designed years ago and never updated.
When leaders slow down long enough to ask, they often discover they’ve been carrying unnecessary weight for years.
Why Founders Need to Care
If you’re a founder, you don’t have time to waste. Every inefficiency in your business costs you twice. First in the dollars you lose today, and again in the culture you create for tomorrow.
Chaos trickles down. If leaders tolerate it, teams accept it. And when teams accept it, customers feel it.
That’s why I believe founders should stay close to the customer experience. Talk to customers. Ask where they get stuck. Watch how they move through your process. The details you see will show you where your systems and processes are helping, or where they are silently hurting.
Scaling without chaos isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less, better.
Where This Leaves Us
Here’s what I want you to think about this week:
Where in your business are you still defending hustle?
What manual task are you tolerating because “that’s just the way it is”?
What fix could you make today that would free up time and energy for tomorrow?
I’ve seen too many examples to count. Leaders who were spending hours on reporting that could be automated, sales teams stuck in CRM busywork that never made it into a campaign or onboarding processes that created more frustration than value.
The fixes are rarely complicated, but they require a shift in mindset: stop throwing people at problems, and start solving them with structure.
You don’t need more hustle. You don’t even need more leads.
You need to keep the water in the bucket.
When your people, processes, and systems are aligned, you create space for real growth. Your team has the clarity to execute. Your customers get value faster. And your business can scale without burning itself out.
That’s not just a tagline. It is the difference between founders who survive and founders who thrive.
✅ Want help fixing the chaos in your business? At Balsam&Cedar, we work with founders and leadership teams to align people, processes, and systems so you can grow sustainably. Let’s talk.
