The Work Edit: How to scale a consulting business without growing the team

Hiring feels like the obvious next move when a business starts doing well. More people, more capacity, more revenue. The logic is so clean it barely needs questioning.

But the businesses with the smallest teams are sometimes the ones making the most money.

This episode is part of The Work Edit, a format where I sit down with someone facing a real professional challenge and we work through it together. My guest is Lisa, who has spent four years building The Culture Ministry, a diversity and inclusion consulting business. She came to me with a question I hear constantly: how do I scale?

What followed was a conversation about why growth doesn't have to mean hiring, what a proposal win rate above 60% is really telling you, and why a well-designed experiment beats any polished strategy framework.

If you run your own business, or you're thinking about going out on your own, this one will give you plenty of tips to apply.

Lisa and I discuss:

• Why hiring more people often grows revenue but not profit, and how Inventium is having its highest-profit year ever with a smaller team

• The single line in your profit and loss statement that signals when it's genuinely time to hire

• How AI has reshaped businesses, and the surprising place it creates new bottlenecks rather than removing them

• What a high proposal win rate is actually telling you about your pricing

• The Inventium ROI guarantee, and the slightly awkward question worth asking past clients about what you should have charged
• How to treat a market shift as an experiment to learn from, rather than a personal failure

Key quotes

"If you are getting the majority of your proposals accepted, I would say you're not charging enough."

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

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Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

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