Find Yourself Building the Plane While You're Flying It?

By Frank Gramlich, CPA | Xavier Financial Services

Remember those old cartoons where the clumsy character is flying a plane while pieces of it are falling off in every direction, and he is somehow scrambling mid-air to catch and reassemble the parts before the whole thing goes down? That is a pretty accurate metaphor for XFS this summer. I say that with a smile, because we're still airborne! It captures the reality of running a growing professional services firm. The work of operating and the work of improving happen simultaneously, and neither one waits for the other to finish.

This is genuinely exciting. But it carries specific risks that every business owner in a growth phase should understand, because the same momentum that makes the season feel energizing is exactly what makes those risks harder to catch in real time.

What Building While Flying Actually Means

Every growing service business lives in this tension. You are delivering work to clients today while simultaneously trying to improve the firm that delivers it. New clients create new demands, new demands test the systems you built for a smaller operation, and that testing happens while the operation is running. There is not necessarily going to be a quiet stretch where you have room for decision making at a comfortable pace.

For me, a structured day helps hold it together: protected fulfillment time, dedicated marketing blocks, consistent networking and prospect meetings. The discipline in honoring my schedule keeps the plane in the air. Still, solid structures get tested when volume grows faster than the infrastructure supporting it.

The Risks Worth Knowing

Process failure under load is the most immediate. A scheduling workflow that held up well at 15 active client relationships may start developing gaps at 25. It does not announce itself as broken; it just stops working as cleanly as it did, and the cost shows up in lost time, missed details, and occasional mistakes that would not have happened six months earlier.

The marketing trap catches a lot of growing businesses off guard. When fulfillment demand spikes, marketing time may get compressed. Four to six weeks later, the pipeline has quietly dried up while you were busy. Protecting marketing time with the same discipline you apply to client work is one of the harder habits to maintain during a busy stretch, and one of the most important.

Decision fatigue is quieter but equally real. Building and operating simultaneously means two categories of decisions compete for the same attention at the same time: the decisions required to serve current clients well, and the decisions required to improve the firm. When those stack up without enough separation, the quality of both tends to suffer.

The overpromise is a risk specific to growing service businesses. Ahhhh, the dreaded overpromise! When things are going well, it is easy to take on more than current capacity can absorb, assuming the infrastructure will catch up. Sometimes it does. When it does not, the client experience deteriorates before you realize it happened.

The repair cost may be the most overlooked. Fixing a broken process while you are actively running it is expensive in time, focus, and occasionally in client relationships. Building a better process during a slower period costs a fraction of what it costs to repair a failing one mid-season.

When It Happened at XFS

Tax season this year was the first time I had to be genuinely mindful of biting off more than I could handle. I caught it, slowed intake, re-spaced appointments, reorganized the calendar, and got back to the level of delivery my clients expect. That correction cost real time, and in a solo practice, time is the resource you can least afford to spend on fixing what should already be working.

It was also a useful signal. Needing to pump the brakes mid-season is a clear indication that the original framework is being tested. The right response is to take it seriously and act on it before the pressure returns.

For XFS, it confirmed something I had been thinking about for a while: getting ready to hire is closer on the timeline than I expected when January started.

The Question Worth Asking Now

The work we did in 2024 and 2025 built the foundation XFS is running from today. The question this summer is whether that foundation can support what is being built on top of it. If it cannot, there is no time to let things stagnate while I find this out the hard way. The adjustment has to happen in real time, even when real time feels like the worst possible moment for it.

That is what building while flying actually means: you do not get to land first.

Philadelphia's 'USA 250' celebration continues this week with MLB All Star Game at Citizens Bank Park. High hopes for a Schwarbomb and a memorable Mid-summer Classic!

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Xavier Financial Services, LLC | Boynton Beach, FL | xavierfinancialservices.com