Outgrowing Your Business (It's Scary AF)
Ep 2: On Outgrowing What Once Fit
It’s scary AF when you realize you’ve outgrown your business, your audience, or the message that once felt like home.
It’s even scarier when you admit it out loud and start acting on it.
In this episode of The Midnight Edit, I pull back the curtain on what it actually looks like to outgrow a business without betraying your past work, burning everything down, or forcing clarity before it’s ready.
This episode explores:
Why this kind of evolution is inevitable for creative, soul-driven entrepreneurs
The real cost of ignoring the quiet whisper that says this isn’t it anymore
How to honor everything you’ve built while making space for what’s next
Why expansion doesn’t require destruction
If you’ve been feeling the pull toward something bigger, deeper, and more aligned and it also feels terrifying, this conversation is for you.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to episode two of The Midnight Edit.
It’s 1:22 AM — so let’s do this thing.
It is scary as fuck when you realize that you’ve outgrown your business.
You’ve outgrown your audience.
You’ve outgrown your message.
It can be downright terrifying to realize that it’s time to shut down an offer that’s thriving — honestly, for everyone but you.
It’s no small feat to even let yourself acknowledge that teeny, tiny little voice that’s whispering:
This just isn’t it anymore.
And it’s even more fricking terrifying to think about acting on that voice.
First of all — I want to normalize the heck out of this feeling.
Because you are a brilliant, artistic, creative, deep-feeling, soulful, magical human.
No one with that level of artistry and magic is meant to stay static their whole professional life.
This type of evolution is only natural. It’s honestly inevitable.
But the reality is, especially as business owners, we can get really, really attached to the vehicle that brought us this far.
It’s kind of like the first car that you get.
Maybe you get it when you first get your license, and that car brings you through the end of high school and gets you through college.
And then all of a sudden, you have this awesome grown-up job and your first amazing real paycheck.
You’re like:
Hmm… maybe I don’t need to drive this car where one window doesn’t go up all the way and the seats are kind of soggy all the time.
But there’s the nostalgia.
There’s the connection to it.
The same thing happens for us in our businesses.
The offers we first launched, the courses we first designed, the clients we first worked with — they worked beautifully for the version of us that started the business.
The version of us that had the courage to take those first steps.
To do something that, honestly, not a lot of people do.
To take the riskier path.
Of course we’re going to feel attached to everything that got us this far.
And yet… it’s time to make space for the new.
Because we can feel when our offers, our message, our branding — every outward expression of our business — starts to feel claustrophobic.
We can feel when we’ve outgrown it.
And often… we just let that feeling slide.
For a while.
I know I sure did.
I’m going to share more about my own personal experience of this in the next episode.
But for this one, I really want to talk about what happens when you fight it.
When you’re getting those little whispers and you’re like:
This is terrifying. I’m just going to pretend this isn’t happening.
I haven’t evolved. I’m not changing. Everything’s fine.
On some level, not only will you know it — your people will know it.
And most importantly, your soul will feel it.
Because instead of sparkling excitement at new enrollments, there’s dread, resentment, or just fatigue.
Trying to write content has some part of your brain screaming:
This is boring.
You might even start fantasizing about burning it all down, shutting it all down, running away to a village in Provence.
(Okay, maybe that was just my daydream.)
But here’s the thing — you don’t have to burn it all down to let it evolve.
It is a natural part of the process to make space for the new.
It is a natural part of the process to release what has been, to make space for the expansion and evolution that is happening.
Because I know you are not the same person you were when you started your business.
And honestly, for a lot of us, we’re not even the same person we were a year ago.
I often say that business is a fast track to self-development and personal development — to going deep and really getting to know yourself on a level that some people go through their whole lives never actually figuring out.
And so — you don’t have to dance on the bones of everything you’ve built to give yourself the freedom to expand.
Part of the attachment to not wanting to release what has been is that letting it go can feel like disrespecting it, or like we weren’t valuing it.
It’s the:
I put so much time into creating that course.
I put so much time into designing that sales page.
I love my people. I don’t want to leave them behind.
What we can do instead is recognize that we’re honoring everything we’ve created.
We’re not pretending it was bad.
We’re not shaming it.
We’re not saying that because you’re not doing it anymore, it doesn’t have value.
But we can also recognize that there is an incongruence between who you are now and those offers.
And what you owe to yourself — and to your people — is to show up as your full self.
To design a body of work that can hold your full self and your fullest expression.
Ultimately, that’s the way you make the deep, powerful impact I know you want to make.
And I know your number one priority is serving your people and making sure they have a powerful experience.
That starts with you showing up as your fullest self — and making sure every element of your body of work not only reflects that, but supports that.
Because the best leader, the best facilitator, the best educator is one who is lit up by what they’re doing.
Not one who feels like their brain is melting out of their ears because they have to answer the same question again and again and again — a question they outgrew a year and a half ago.
So again — I want to normalize: it’s scary as fuck.
It can be so terrifying to realize that it’s time to evolve.
It’s time to grow.
And it can feel really daunting.
But I’m here to tell you: I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all.
On a practical level — whether you are evolving offers, retiring offers, launching new offers, shifting your brand, shifting your body of work, stepping into something bigger, deeper, lighter, more expansive —
One: I have literally just moved through that.
Two: I’ve guided my clients through it.
And on a practical level, there are strategies, frameworks, and things you can do to make these shifts a reality in a way that’s titrated for your nervous system, but also a smooth transition for your audience.
Because often, what we see is this pattern:
We have the realization…
And then we think we need to whip out all these changes in 24 hours — rebrand everything, shut everything down, launch everything new.
That’s not how this has to go.
We can do it in a simple, easy, titrated way so that — yes, it will still feel scary — but you don’t have to go through it alone.
And it is so possible.
Because your work is way too powerful to stay stuck and squished in outdated offers.
You are here to have a beautiful, expansive, deeply transformational body of work.
And that starts by listening to those sneaky little whispers that say:
Yeah… it’s time to evolve.
✨ Let’s keep the conversation going
I’d love to hear what stood out for you in this episode - feel free to send me a DM on Instagram @emily.mwalker (it's my fav place to hang out!)
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