It may be stating the obvious to say that you don’t know what you don’t know, but it’s a concept worth paying attention to when it comes to stepping into entrepreneurship. Here are four reasons why starting small will help you learn and grow your business at a sustainable pace, which many find to be the best way to ensure long-term success.

1. Starting Small Creates Momentum

When you start small, each little accomplishment creates momentum that pushes you forward. Instead of biting off more than you can chew and potentially crashing and burning way too soon in the process, taking on smaller goals and achieving them creates a forward motion for your endeavor.

People like Akki Patel stepped into their entrepreneurial journeys one business at a time. In Patel’s case, he’s been able to turn the momentum he created from owning a single restaurant into a company that at one time owned and operated over 300 dining establishments. Starting small makes it easier to achieve the success that propels growth.

2. Starting Small Prevents Inertia

Beyond boosting momentum, starting small can prevent getting stuck, which is something that can easily happen if you are overwhelmed by taking on too much, too fast. If you’re attempting to accomplish more than you can handle or working with overly tight deadlines, you’re in danger of simply freezing where you stand, unable to act or react because you’ve stalled out. Tackling your goals in smaller steps makes it easier to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

3. Starting Small Is More Efficient

From exercising to cooking to painting your home, it’s hard to think of any task which isn’t best handled by working smarter, not harder. It’s the same for launching a business; if you can expend less energy and time accomplishing your goals, you’ll establish a pace at which you can reasonably grow. Working too hard is often worse than not working hard enough, because the work you do when you go all-out is often about doing more rather than doing things right.

4. Starting Small Makes You More Flexible

Although you may have done thorough research and planning, you really never know how a business is going to go until you launch. By starting small, you’ll be able to test the waters without diving in too deeply, so you can easily gauge what’s working and what isn’t. A modest beginning will offer you more space in which to pivot and make any necessary changes more easily. If you’ve committed a lot of resources to doing things a certain way, you’ll find that it can be much harder to have the flexibility required to recalibrate.

From building momentum so you don’t freeze in your tracks to improving efficiency and flexibility, there are a lot of smart reasons to start small when launching a business. Many top entrepreneurs have achieved what they have by embracing the opportunity to learn and adapt as they go, rather than starting too big and blowing their chance at success.