The balance of bringing on new clients, hiring more staff to cope with the work and then going through periods of client churn

Whenever you scale you'll have moments of stagnation and a "flatline" as you need to invest (team, assets). And you invest not only $ but also time, and that means a lost potential profit.

So making sure the foundations are there - LTV, long-term contracts, profit margin per client, time spent per client, cash cushion in the bank, operational efficiency are all CRUCIAL as this is what makes your business lean and agile and ensures you're not carrying any extra, unnecessary weight.

Remember, there will always be friction whenever there is a gap between capacity and demand. And that gap can be on both sides of the spectrum. (1) When you have too much capacity and not enough work - in this scenario your fixed costs (salaries) are dragging you down and you're not leveraging the assets you have (team members). You're losing money. (2) When there is too much demand and not enough work - in this scenario you cannot service clients, your quality goes down, you're losing potential revenue. Both scenarios will create friction. So you need to make sure the gap is as small as possible.

Now, this was a bit of a generic/philosophical...So to answer your question "how do you deal with the constant balance of bringing on new clients, hiring more staff to cope with the work and then going through periods of client churn? ":