Growth Follows Subtraction

Check what you removed before your last real growth spurt, because the pattern that got you here is more often subtraction than addition.

By James Schramko · Updated August 2026

When I look back at the biggest jumps in the business, several of them followed a removal. Rarely a launch, rarely a new channel. Something got cut first, and the growth showed up after, as if the business had been waiting for the room to work in.

I did not plan it that way in advance. I only saw the pattern once I lined the stretches up next to each other. By then it had already repeated enough times that it stopped looking like coincidence and started looking like the actual mechanism.

What Actually Happened Before Each Jump

Around 2015 I was running eighteen product lines. I cut that down to two, sold the SEO business and a separate website-development business, and kept mentoring and the royalty deals. Revenue went up after the cut, and I dropped to a three-day work week. The two businesses I sold did not stall under new owners either. Both went on to grow well past what I was running them at.

The website itself went through the same cut, years later. It carried over two thousand pages, most of them years old and doing nothing for anyone. I pruned it down to twenty-seven. Engagement and time on site went up by half, and I dropped a few hundred dollars a month in server costs I had stopped noticing I was paying.

Software went through the same process. Tools I had stopped actively deciding to keep got cancelled one at a time. None of them were expensive on their own. Carrying them was a decision I had made once years earlier and never revisited, which made the cut worth doing regardless of the dollar amount attached to any single tool.

The pattern runs personal as well as commercial. I once ran the same audit on the rest of my life at the same time as a client challenge: sold a surfboard I was never going to ride again, ended two rev-share deals that had been stalled for years and were never coming back to life, donated a wardrobe of old clothes, sold a domain I kept meaning to develop and never would. None of those five things were costing me much individually. Carrying all of them at once was costing me the clarity to see what actually mattered.

Membership went through it too, on a longer clock. I read early that the model was heading toward its end, moved the business away from a membership focus while it was still working, and let mentoring become the thing I actually built around. The subtraction happened before it was forced, which is the only version of subtraction that gets to be a choice instead of a casualty.

Why Addition Feels Safer

Adding something new feels like progress you can point to. A new product, a new channel, a new hire, all of it shows up as visible motion. Subtracting something feels like admitting a past decision was wrong, and it produces nothing to show anyone the day you do it.

That asymmetry is exactly backwards. Every one of the cuts above freed capacity, attention, or cash that the business had been quietly spending on something that was no longer earning its place. The growth did not come from the thing that got removed. It came from what the removal let the rest of the business do without that weight attached.

There is also a harder version of this asymmetry worth naming directly. When you have been running a product line, a piece of software, or a commitment for years, you have usually built identity around keeping it going. Cutting it does not just cost the sunk time already spent. It costs admitting, at least to yourself, that the thing was not what you kept telling people it was. That admission is the actual price of the cut, and it is a different currency to the dollars or hours involved.

The Question That Finds It

Before you plan the next addition, run this question first: what is currently getting your time, money, or attention purely because you decided to keep it once, and have not actually re-decided since.

Old software nobody uses fully. A product line that used to matter and now mostly just exists. A commitment made to an earlier version of the business that the current version has outgrown. None of these announce themselves. They sit quietly in the base cost of running things, and the only way to find them is to go looking on purpose.

How To Run Your Own Subtraction Pass

List everything currently running in the business: every tool, every product line, every recurring commitment, every piece of content still live.

For each one, ask a single question: if I were starting the business today, would I choose to add this? Not whether it once made sense. Whether it earns its place now.

Anything that gets a clear yes stays without further debate. Anything that gets a clear no goes on the cut list. Anything you hesitate on is worth looking at hardest, because hesitation is often sentiment protecting a decision you have not re-made in years.

Cut in order of confidence, not size. Start with the cuts you are already sure about, even if they are small. You do not need to solve the hardest one first, and a few completed small cuts build the will for the ones sitting underneath them.

Do this as a standing pass, not a one-time clean-out. The business that needed a website prune five years ago will accumulate a new version of the same problem, because every business adds faster by default than it subtracts.

Quick Reference

Look at your last real growth jump. Find what got removed just before it. The pattern is usually there once you go looking.
Addition looks like progress and produces nothing to defend. Subtraction looks like admitting a mistake and frees the capacity that growth actually runs on.
The find-it question: what gets your time or money purely because you decided to keep it once, without having re-decided since.
Cut in order of confidence, not size. Small certain cuts build the will for the larger ones.
Run the subtraction pass as a standing habit. The business restocks candidates for it faster than you expect.

Finding the things a founder is still funding out of habit rather than decision is one of the first passes I run with every founder who joins Mentor.