The Pursuit of Growth

Feb 11, 2025

Capitalism is framed as a relentless force of innovation—or, depending on your ideology, the root of all evil. But for a select few, it’s much simpler

Words by Alex Livermore

It’s the price of doing business—you must make money.

And to make money, you need to take risks. Expose yourself. Push forward. To quote the greatest Nutri-Grain campaign of the early 2000s: "You only get out what you put in." Sweat, capital, investment—it all fuels the machine.

If i was in a pitch i'd say market positioning is the wind that carries ideas to the right audience. Without it, you’re a whisper in a hurricane.

But beneath this momentum lies a paradox:

It can never stop — and maybe it should.

Starting a business taught me one thing fast: making $10,000 is easy. Scaling to $1,000,000? That’s another story.

I knew my whole life that I wanted to run a business. My father was a banker who became a mortgage broker and started Provincial Home Loans. As the sole owner of a company that employed a 30+ brokers, I saw firsthand the tangible benefits of confidence, sales acumen, market timing, and a business model built on recurring revenue.

When I launched propGen, landing a $5,000-a-month contract to build a website and run Facebook ads for a property development in Geelong felt like striking gold. I thought I’d cracked the code.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Real estate developers? A few are straight-up scumbags. They don’t just pay late. Some don’t pay at all—and a few actually enjoy making the little guys sweat. It was a brutal but valuable side gig. I learned some great lessons, but one stands out above the rest:

Scaling to consistent, sustainable growth is a completely different challenge.

Fast forward five years: propGen became Forge Studio. Today, I’d call it a successful small business—it supports an incredible team. In so many ways, it feels like we’ve made it. In others, we’re just getting started.

Some businesses succeed. Most don’t. In Australia, 20% crash in year one. By year three, 60% are gone.

And those who remain? Growth or an endless cycle of demand, delivery, and mediocrity? Well, in 2025, many business owners are struggling—but that comes with the territory: high risk, high reward.

So why not be courageous?

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

Business ownership is survival—balancing vision and passion against the pressures of profit.

And if we choose to keep growing, to what end?

What must I become?

The relentless dreamer, obsessed with the next opportunity, always searching, never satisfied? The one who sees beyond the horizon, chases ideas before the market catches up, convinces others to believe before the proof exists?

Or the ruthless executioner—a leader who trades idealism for efficiency, makes the hard calls, cuts the losses, and optimises everything, even at the cost of others?

At what point does ambition turn into sacrifice? When does the fire that fuelled the dream start burning everything else down?

Maybe this is the paradox of success: the bigger the vision, the less of yourself you get to keep—should we stop or keep going?

Does growth demand more, or does it slowly erase us? If I don’t grow, do I stagnate? Fade into irrelevance? Does survival itself become the only ambition?

I’ll keep going. Not because I have the answer. But because I don’t.

Payroll’s due in two weeks—I’ll worry about it later.

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