84: Before You Scale: Why I Chose Alignment Over Expansion

What if the version of success you’ve been chasing… isn’t actually yours?
 In this episode, John McClain gets personal about what happened when his business grew beyond what his soul was ready for — and why he made the decision to choose alignment over expansion.

From running two design offices across the country to finding peace and purpose in a smaller, more intentional business, John shares the real lessons behind sustainable success.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to “go big” before you were ready, this episode will remind you that the most successful business is the one that feels like home.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
💡 The hidden pressure behind the “grow or die” mindset in business
💡 How John built two thriving offices — and why he chose to scale back
💡 The moment he realized busy doesn’t mean fulfilled
💡 How to know when your business growth is no longer aligned
💡 Practical steps to stay grounded and profitable without losing your peace

Episode Quote to Share:

“Growth without alignment is just chaos with better branding.” — John McClain

Resources & Mentions:
✨ Explore Design Success Academy inside The McClain Method — your roadmap to building a beautiful, profitable, and soul-aligned business.
👉 Visit mcclainmethod.com
for programs, tools, and free resources.

Follow John on Instagram → @themcclainmethod

Watch this episode on YouTube → John McClain YouTube Channel

Fast Action Step:
Take five minutes today to ask yourself:
👉 Is my business structure supporting the life I want — or stealing the joy from it?
If the answer feels even slightly off, it might be time to realign before you expand.

Transcript

Before You Scale: Why I Chose Alignment Over Expansion – Ep 84 – McClain Method Podcast

[00:00:00]
 And I had a heart-to-heart with myself — a come-to-Jesus moment — where I realized that I wasn't chasing growth for what I thought it was going to be. I was actually chasing a form of validation from my peers, my community, and from the outside world. Let that sink in.

Welcome to The McClain Method, the podcast for interior designers who are ready to stop hiding and start shining. I'm your host, John McClain — designer, business mentor, author, and your branding bestie. This is not about paint colors or pendant lighting. It's about building a business that's both visible and profitable, inside and out.

From marketing and messaging to mindset, systems, and visibility, we cover the front stage and the backstage of your design business — because your brilliance deserves the spotlight, and your business deserves to run like a dream behind the scenes. So if you're ready to be [00:01:00] seen, get recognized, and get booked, it's time to let it shine.

Welcome to The McClain Method.

Hey everybody. Welcome back. It's John McClain here, and I want to welcome you officially to The McClain Method. Whether you're listening to me on the podcast or watching on YouTube — or maybe you're doing both, I don't know — I love it.

But today we're gonna get real about something that doesn't get talked about enough, in my opinion, because I want to tell you today that big growth isn't always good.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, right? Because everybody wants to go bigger and everybody out there is shouting at you: “Scale your business, hire more people, build your team, get a new location,” whatever. And I know that looks really exciting from the outside, but I learned firsthand that growth, if it is not aligned with what you want to do, can actually take you away from what you loved about your business.

So if you've ever scrolled through Instagram and thought, “Wow, that person has 10 employees and a bunch of offices and they must be [00:02:00] killing it,” stick around — because this conversation might just save you from some serious burnout.

Okay, let's rewind for a second. I grew my business from literally me — one person in a spare bedroom with a laptop — and I grew that to two offices, eight employees, and clients on both coasts. I had one in Orlando, Florida, and the other in Los Angeles.

Now, on paper that sounds glamorous: two time zones, two client lists, two busy, thriving locations. And really, for a minute, it was super, super exciting — until it wasn’t.

Because when your business expands faster than your capacity to actually lead it, things start slipping, even if it looks perfect from the outside.

Now, don't get me wrong — there were lots of things that I did right and things that I was really proud of from both offices. I, for instance, never changed my design aesthetic. So once we moved and opened up the new office in L.A., I still had my Florida office. I did not change design aesthetics from either location. The design aesthetic for my firm
 was what you got — that is [00:03:00] exactly what we followed. I knew it, my team knew it, and our clients knew it, which made it very effective.

I also didn't change my pricing. Someone might think, “Oh, you can't charge as much in a smaller market as you can in a larger market.” And you absolutely can. And I did.

I found all of the ways that truly set us apart. Those were our processes. Those were our attention to detail with all of our clients. Those were things like really honing in on not only the client experience, as I said, but also the design aesthetic. We really made sure that every single T was crossed and every single I was dotted when it came to design. And our clients felt that.

Every client that we worked with in either location really did feel like they were the only client that we had — even though some years we had like 15 to 20 different projects going on at a time.

So I want to remind you of that: you can grow and you can expand and you can enter other markets, and even just other cities, and I don't want [00:04:00] you to change who you are fundamentally. I don't want you to change who you are as a person, as a businessperson. I definitely don't want you to change your aesthetics.

Because here’s what happened: the people in Orlando, Florida kept reacting to us and saying, “There's something about your design style that looks really different than other designers that we see.” And I said, “Yes, we are our own style. We have a style we call Comfortable Chic,” and we explain that to clients. We tell them what that is, they love it.

But I saw very quickly that the thing that set us apart was actually not only the way we took care of our customers and our tradespeople and our vendors, but also the way that we took care of clients and the way that they really felt that no one else on their block, or even in the city, was going to have a design like them.

So if you're trying to go cookie-cutter and just copy someone else and go down that road of sameness, I really want you to know that by standing out with the way you run your business and the way that you design your projects — whatever that looks like for you — is going to make you the unicorn in the room, in the city, and [00:05:00] sometimes even in the entire country that you're in.

So stay true to who you are, no matter how big or how small you stay. And by small or big, you're gonna find out that I'm using those terms pretty relatively.

The other thing too: before I left Florida, I made sure that my team could run things without me, seamlessly. I spent over a year writing my detailed Standard Operating Procedures — my SOPs — for everything from client onboarding to install day, and all those things in between. And those same systems that I sat down and wrote for myself are actually now part of what I teach inside of my programs — my Design Success Academy and The McClain Method —
 which I created because other people wanted to run their businesses the same way that I was. So I wanted to share all the hard work that I put in, and I love that.

But anyway, back then, even with all those systems that I had in place, something still wasn't right. So I had to learn a harsh lesson.

First of all, my brain was everywhere. Even though I wasn't physically in two offices, mentally, y'all, I was in both places. I [00:06:00] really was. I had Slack messages, time zone differences, questions. The Florida team would be really deep into their day working on things, and then in L.A. we’re just kind of getting started in some ways.

Maybe I'm just waking up in Los Angeles and my team in Florida has already done, you know, four client visits or whatever. So that did make a difference for me.

Now, I did start to put rules in place for that — and you can definitely put rules in place for that. I started to elevate roles in my Florida office so that people there could take on more responsibilities and manage more people and manage more tasks. I really did hone in on autonomy and I trained my team to run
 kind of the business on their own. I wanted them to know that this was their business as much as it was mine, even though their name was not on the door.

And so that made a big difference for me to just sort of take away some of that work that I was doing and alleviate the headache of that. My team started coming to me with solutions to problems,
 not just the problem itself. And when I did that as well, I could instantly feel that I, of course, had less stress [00:07:00] on me. But for my team, they had a sense of pride. They felt really proud — as if they had achieved something — when they solved the problem without me having to step in. And that really is the truth.

They did achieve a lot, and I was so proud of them.

But here's something that most entrepreneurs overlook: no matter how strong your marketing is — and I had strong marketing in both places. I had ads going. We were in lots of magazines. There were features, some television as well where I would do interviews, podcasts, and radio, and all these things —
 nothing replaces the owner or the leader of a company being physically present in an area. It just does not. Nothing replaces you.

The energy that you have, the pride that you bring, the specific details that you bring about how you began your business, and the little things that come into your mind as an entrepreneur and as the leader of your business — no matter how much you train someone, nothing ever replaces that part. That is a true superpower and something that you can only own as the owner of your business.

Now again, you can [00:08:00] train people, of course, to mimic that and to use the tools and the information that you have to also lead in their own way. But they're never going to be you. So just know that part.

And really, for me, as you know, I couldn't physically be in both Los Angeles and Orlando. The Florida events were strong. I was there before I started my L.A. office. So my Florida events were… I was actually a little more ingrained in the community in Florida at the time, because those were my people. Those were places that I went to every week. I would see them at grocery stores.

And I did start to develop that in L.A. But I just couldn't physically be at L.A. design events and then events in Orlando as well.

And I will tell you — that mattered. It really did. No matter how much my team went out and were present at these events and how much I encouraged them to strike up conversations with people, it just wasn't me. And sometimes the owner of a company only wants to talk to the owner of a company.

And that was something that I found out as I moved and grew my offices from one to two.

And here it is — what I learned from all of that: [00:09:00]

Busy does not always mean profitable.
 And profitable doesn't always mean peaceful.

I was chasing a version of success that I had created and that I had seen online — not my own. It was other designers with big teams and fancy offices and glossy magazine spreads, and I thought, “Oh my God, John, that's what success looks like.”

But when I actually talked to those people, they admitted to me how much they were drowning. I knew. I could tell when I spoke to them — they had this trepidation in their voice, and they were like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re 20 people now, but oh my gosh, the amount of work and management that I have to do is so much more than I anticipated.”

“Yeah, we have, you know, 30 projects going on and we have millions and millions of dollars in revenue coming in,” but they really couldn't pinpoint how much it had changed their pride in their company. It just sounded like more of an overload of work than it did a positive outcome from what they were expecting.

So for me, [00:10:00] I also realized that I wasn't chasing growth — I was chasing validation. Okay?

And I had a heart-to-heart with myself, a come-to-Jesus moment, where I realized that I wasn't chasing growth for what I thought it was going to be. I was actually chasing a form of validation from my peers, my community, and from the outside world. Let that sink in.

Right? That's a hard lesson that I had to learn — that I wasn't looking for the growth that I wanted. I was looking for validation from the people who were going to tell me how much they were proud of me and what a fabulous company I've built because of what they were seeing.

And yeah, we were successful and I was enjoying it, but not because I enjoyed it for myself. I was enjoying it and creating it for other people. And that's when I made a decision that really changed everything.

I closed my Florida office. Sure did. It was very hard. Very, very hard decision to do that. I had an amazing team there. We had definitely scaled back down to [00:11:00] only three employees at that point, which was perfect, and they were wonderful employees and are wonderful people.

So that decision I grappled with for about six months or so, because I knew that it needed to happen and I knew that it was up to me to make that decision. But it was a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of pros and cons lists, and a lot of just really thinking about why I had two offices — and what I was looking for, for my own definition of success.

So I gave my team plenty of time to find new positions, and they all did. We let our clients know, and we scaled back there and we closed that office.

And I owned the office as well. And we renovated this office too, y'all. It was beautiful. I was so proud of this office. My team helped design it, and everything inside of that office was reminiscent of our design style, but also very functional. I was very proud of that office.

And in L.A. I did not have that office. So the Florida office was sort of like my signature office, because it was the first and the bigger one — and the best one, too.

But it was, again, a hard [00:12:00] decision to make to do that. And I say that because you might be facing a hard decision right now too. And if you want to just stop and ask yourself: did you make that choice based on other people? Or did you make that choice based on what you really wanted as a person and as a business owner?

So when I scaled back, it was very hard — as you can hear in my voice. But it was also the first time in years that I felt clear. I felt happy. I felt peaceful. I knew it was the right decision. I knew that even though it was so, so, so difficult to do that, the minute that we moved everything out of that office and it was empty and we put the office on the market to sell, I knew that it was the right choice. And my team did too, and we all just were on the same page with that.

So the validation that I was looking for from other people actually started to show itself in different forms to me — through things that I was doing that were actually following my heart and were following the pivot that I knew I needed to make in my company.

When I did that, it changed other things as well within myself. So this closing of the [00:13:00] office and focusing only on one location allowed me to have a freer mind and to really see things in a different way.

Now I only take on projects that truly align with me. I do not have a massive team. I have people that help me, but it is not as massive as it was before. I have remote experts who come in when they need to, and that's it. And guess what? My profits are higher, my schedule is calmer, and my creativity is back in full force.

I can focus on things differently. My focus today is on my firm here in L.A., which again is very small, it's very selective, and it is filled with passion. And my real passion, after all of that, I found, was actually helping other designers and creative business owners build their own businesses and build their own level of success within their company — and create businesses that were built with purpose.

And that is how and why I created The McClain Method and my Design Success Academy. They're all a result of that.

Because here is what [00:14:00] I've learned from all of that: growth without the alignment inside is just a lot of chaos with a bit of better branding, okay?

And what that means is you can polish up everything as much as you want to, and it's like that duck metaphor that we hear, right? The duck is beautiful on the surface, smiling and going calmly across the water — but underneath, they are paddling those little legs as fast as they can.

Does that feel like you? Do you feel like you have this persona of a gorgeous exterior, but underneath the water you're just running as fast as you can to try to keep up with everyone else?

Now, that is not saying that you should not work hard in your business. My God, yes — I worked hard and still work hard, very, very hard, in my business. But I also want you to ask: what are you working towards, and who are you doing that for?

If it's for yourself and it's for the growth, and you truly feel aligned with it and you truly feel like this is what you need to do to take your life and your business one step further — continue on. This is not me being a Debbie Downer to you. This is me sharing my [00:15:00] experience of how I saw that I was following other people's examples of success versus my own.

But whatever that means to you is what you need to ask yourself. And I'm gonna give you some tips at the end of this to filter through, to find out what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you can continue to move forward for yourself.

No matter where you are in your business journey, I want you to listen to me very closely. There are three stages of growth, and each one needs something very different from you.

Number one: if you're not ready to grow yet, listen up.

Don't rush. Get your systems very tight before you get your calendar full of projects. Document what you do. Document your emails, document your proposals, your workflows — because if you can't handle five clients smoothly, doubling that will not make your life any easier.

Number two: if you are ready to grow, listen up.

Start slow and do things in a mindful way. Delegate those tasks that do not require your one-on-one special level of genius. But [00:16:00] keep your brand voice and your company voice and your client experience very, very sacred.

Hire people for their skill set — absolutely, they should know what to do — but also make sure that they are aligned with you and your vision for your company. And if you don't know what that vision is, you need to know that before you start bringing other people in.

And do not, do not, do not compromise your prices or your values to match whatever market you're growing into. If you want to play in the luxury space, my friend, act like it from day one — and never ever waver from that.

Number three: if you're already growing, this is for you.

Keep one eye on your profits and one eye on your peace level, because if you're constantly putting out fires, it might be time to pause and rebuild your structure. Because remember this: scaling does not mean just adding more. Sometimes it means tightening up what you already have.

For me, real growth isn't about more offices or more team members or more clients. It is about more alignment with what's inside of me. More freedom, [00:17:00] more joy. More space to actually love what you do again. And that's what I want for you — not that version of success that looks great on Instagram or on TV or in a magazine, but the one that feels good in your soul.

That is what you need to be chasing.

If something doesn't feel good inside of you, you know it immediately. And if you are the person who continues to push through that and ignore that little feeling in your stomach or that little inkling in your brain that tells you, “Hmm, this isn't quite right, even though everyone else is doing it,” that is your sign to follow your gut and to follow your instincts.

Our entrepreneurial instinct is not something to be taken lightly. If you started a business and you're running that business, you're a smart cookie. And I want you to remember that you have an intuition — you just need to listen to it more.

So here's my permission to you: give yourself full permission to listen to your own intuition. A full permission slip to consider that intuition, that gut feeling that you have, as your business [00:18:00] partner. That feeling that you have in the pit of your stomach, or that little piece in the back of your brain — that is your business partner. And that business partner is thinking about you and your business just as much as you are.

And I want you to give that feeling a level of credit and to really listen to that when there is potential growth, or when maybe you want to scale back from that like I did.

So if this episode hit home with you, I'd love for you to check out my Design Success Academy, which is inside The McClain Method. It is where I teach the exact systems and the mindset shifts and all the things that we discussed today that helped me rebuild my business in a way that is profitable, calm, and like — crazy, crazy fulfilling.

You can find all the details at McClainMethod.com, and I, of course, will link it in the show notes. And if you love this conversation, please share it with someone who's also maybe feeling that presence and that pressure to go big — because maybe what they really need is permission to also grow aligned. And now you have a little bit of information to share with them.

Thank you so much for listening, my friend, and I'll see you [00:19:00] next time on The McClain Method.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The McClain Method Podcast. I'm so grateful you made it all the way to the end, because that tells me that you're ready to do the work that truly transforms your brand, your business, and your life.

If you want more tools, trainings, and behind-the-scenes looks at what I'm building next, head over to McClainMethod.com. And don't forget to follow along on Instagram at @themcclainmethod for even more drops of brilliance.