Success Can Hide Costs You Never Agreed to Pay. Here's the Audit.

Thomas Midgley Jr. solved two of the hardest engineering problems of the 1920s, and decades later both solutions proved catastrophic. The General Motors engineer added lead to gasoline to stop engine knocking, then helped develop Freon to replace toxic, flammable refrigerants. Leaded petrol spread toxic lead through exhaust for generations, and chlorofluorocarbons were later found to damage the Earth's ozone layer.

Midgley died in 1944, before scientists discovered the ozone damage. The American Chemical Society had awarded him its highest honor, the Priestley Medal. Entire industries grew on his work. By the usual measures, the author of a recent Entrepreneur commentary argues, Midgley had an extraordinary career — until the full costs surfaced.

What does the Midgley story teach founders?

The shared lesson is about the limits of the original measure of success. "A product can work as intended while creating consequences its original purpose never required anyone to consider," the author writes. Warning signs around leaded petrol appeared during its early production, but the cost was ignored and the fuel stayed in widespread use for decades. Freon seemed safe at first glance; CFCs were everywhere before science caught up.

Business owners run the same pattern. Something works, so you do more of it. Answering calls at all hours wins customers, so you keep answering. Making every important decision keeps the business fast, so you stay involved as the team expands. Each decision solved a problem. The costs emerge later, as the business grows.

When do growth habits become expensive?

Early in a company's life, personal involvement is exactly what it needs. Availability signals trustworthiness. Decisions routed through you move quickly. Extra responsibility helps the business survive.

The trouble starts when those habits outlive the circumstances that made them useful. The founder who once needed to approve every decision may now be bottlenecking the team. The availability that won clients leaves no room to switch off. The author is blunt: "The behavior that helped build the business can become expensive as the business grows."

More customers bring more revenue and more complexity. A new market demands more travel. Profit rises while the owner's time, energy and family life get harder to protect.

Why don't owners catch it sooner?

In coaching conversations with entrepreneurs, the author says they keep returning to the gap between what a business produces and what it demands from the person running it. Revenue, profit and growth are easy to track. The cost to a founder's health, relationships, judgment or freedom is harder to quantify, so it can go unexamined for years.

"A business can be winning by its own measures while the person who built it pays a price they never intended to pay," the author writes. None of this is the owner's fault. A crisis forces a review, but, as the author puts it: "Who stops to question continued success? Nobody."

How do you measure what success costs?

The author's exercise: pick one part of the business that's performing well — a fastest-growing service, a major client relationship, a process that depends on your constant availability. Write down three things:

• What it produces — the results it delivers today.
• What it demands — your time, energy, team capacity.
• What it displaces — opportunities, family time, future thinking.

Then ask whether the arrangement stays sustainable as the business grows. Time spent managing one opportunity is unavailable for another. Energy spent on routine decisions can't also be spent on the future. An arrangement that works financially may impose family costs nobody intended when it began.

One more question: what has changed since you first made that decision? The business may have grown, responsibilities shifted, regulations moved, or a once-acceptable risk may deserve another look. Would you make the same decision today?

If yes, carry on with a clearer understanding of the exchange. If something has changed, you can delegate a decision, renegotiate a client relationship, or stop doing something that no longer justifies its demands. The point, the author stresses, is to make that choice while you still have options — rather than waiting for circumstances to make it for you.