When a business starts to struggle in its growth phase, the first instinct is usually to look at the business itself.
Sales are sluggish, so we look at the sales process. The team isn’t delivering, so we look at hiring. There’s no clarity, so we look at strategy. There’s constant firefighting, so we look at systems.
These are all reasonable places to look. The problem is, they’re often not where the problem actually lives.
In the vast majority of cases I see, the business problem is a symptom. The root cause sits one level up: in leadership.
The business that looks like it’s growing, but feels like it’s breaking
There’s a particular phase that a lot of business owners find themselves in, usually somewhere between 15 and 50 people, where things start to feel unexpectedly hard.
Revenue is coming in. The team is growing. On paper, it’s working.
But the person at the top is exhausted. Every decision seems to land back with them. The team isn’t quite stepping up the way they’d hoped. There’s a low hum of anxiety that doesn’t go away, even on the good days.
This isn’t a sign the business is failing. It’s a sign the business has outgrown its current leadership model.
And the leadership model, more often than not, is still the one that made sense when there were five people and the owner was doing everything themselves.
What worked at the start is now the ceiling
Most people who build a business from the ground up are extraordinary at doing. They’re hands-on, resourceful, and good at a lot of things. That’s what got them here.
But as the business grows, the job fundamentally changes. The skills that built the business start to create bottlenecks. Being across everything stops being an asset and starts being a liability.
The team can’t grow properly because they’re waiting for sign-off. Decisions stall. Good people leave because they’re not getting the autonomy they need. The owner is working harder than ever but producing less leverage.
We know something needs to change. What we don’t always see clearly is that the thing that needs to change isn’t the org chart, the process, or the team. It’s how we’re leading.
Why leadership problems disguise themselves as business problems
Leadership issues are hard to spot because they don’t show up with a label on them.
They show up as a team that isn’t accountable. A manager who’s not performing. A culture that feels slightly off but is hard to articulate. Hiring decisions that keep going wrong. A business that’s growing in revenue but shrinking in energy.
Because these things look like business or people problems, we go looking for business or people solutions. We hire a new manager. We restructure. We bring in a consultant. We work on the strategy.
Sometimes that helps, in the short term. But if the underlying leadership patterns haven’t changed, the same problems tend to resurface. Just in a slightly different form.
I’ve seen this play out many times. A business owner who’s had three operations managers in three years and is convinced they can’t find the right person. A managing director whose senior team aren’t taking enough initiative, no matter how many times it’s been raised. A CEO who’s restructured twice and still feels like the business can’t run without them.
The common thread isn’t bad luck with people or structure. It’s a leadership dynamic that’s not being addressed directly.
What changes when the leadership changes
When someone in a leadership position genuinely works on how they lead, not just what they do, the impact tends to be significant and fairly rapid.
Teams start taking more ownership, because the conditions that were preventing it have changed. Decisions get made at the right level. The owner starts to get time and headspace back. Culture shifts because the person setting the tone is operating differently.
It’s not that the business problems disappear overnight. But the leader is now in a much better position to address them clearly, without being in the middle of everything, without every issue ending up on their desk.
The business starts to feel like something that can grow, rather than something that has to be held together.
This isn’t about fixing what’s broken
One thing I want to be clear about: most of the business owners and MDs I work with are not struggling because they’re doing something wrong. They’re struggling because they’re in a stage of growth that genuinely requires a different kind of leadership, and nobody explicitly told them that.
In corporate environments, leadership development is built into the structure. There are HR teams, mentors, coaches, and performance frameworks. People are supported through transitions.
Founders and business owners rarely get that. They build as they go, often without any dedicated space to think about their own development as a leader.
So when things get hard, it’s easy to assume the issue is the business, the team, the market, or the timing. It’s much rarer for someone to stop and ask: what role is my leadership playing in this?
That question, asked seriously and with good support, tends to unlock more than any operational fix.
Where to go from here
If you’re running a growing business and something feels persistently stuck, it’s worth considering whether you’re looking in the right place.
The business problem in front of you might be real. But the lever that actually moves it is often your leadership.
That’s the work I do with business owners and MDs at exactly this stage. Not consulting, not telling you what to do, but creating a dedicated space to think clearly about how you lead, where the real gaps are, and what needs to change for the business to scale without you carrying all of it.
If that sounds like where you are, I’d be glad to talk.
