stunandawe

Imagine you built a factory.

The factory has 60 employees, modern equipment, a strong order book.
But every machine requires your personal PIN code to start.

Every quality check requires you in the room.

Every shipping decision gets routed to your desk before the truck leaves.

You'd call that factory insane.

You'd say whoever designed that system clearly didn't think it through.

And yet.

That's exactly the operating model most founders are running at 50, 80, 100 people. Strategy in their head. Decision rights implicit. The team trained, slowly and without anyone noticing, to wait for the PIN code.

MIT Sloan found only 28% of managers responsible for executing strategy can name the top three priorities they're supposed to be executing. These are not junior employees. These are the people whose job title literally includes the word "ex*****on."

They're guessing.

Not because they're bad at their jobs. Because the factory was designed around one person and nobody updated the blueprints when the factory got bigger.

HBR put the outcome bluntly: 67% of well-formulated strategies fail not because the strategy was wrong, but because ex*****on was poor.

Good factory. Bad wiring.

So what are you waiting for to fix the wiring.

👇 How to do it: link in comments.

When every B2B company is running the same growth strategy, running that same strategy becomes the worst possible move.

The returns on obvious tactics don't disappear overnight. They erode slowly, until one day you're spending more to get less, and everyone around you is suggesting you spend even more.

The 27 tactics in this playbook share one thing in common: your competitors probably aren't doing them yet. Not because they're secret, but because they look indirect, or they're hard to justify in a quarterly review, or they don't produce a graph that goes up the week you start them.

Dark social sharing. Zero-volume keywords. Employee advocacy. Barnacle SEO. These aren't flashy. They're also not crowded.

I put them together in a free guide because the most useful growth moves in B2B right now are the ones that feel counterintuitive right up until they work.

Free download, link in the comments.

Every founder I talk to about bringing in outside help has the same five objections. In order:

→ "The last consultant left me with a slide deck and nothing changed."
→ "I don't have the bandwidth to manage an outside engagement right now."
→ "You won't understand my business fast enough to be useful."
→ "It will take months before there's any real impact."
→ "The numbers don't support this right now."

Each one is completely reasonable. Each one is also asking the same question in a different costume: is this actually going to be worth it?

The bandwidth objection is worth pausing on, because it almost always misidentifies the source of the problem. If you're reviewing pricing exceptions because no one else has clear authority to approve them, bandwidth is not the issue. Your accountability structure happens to eat your calendar. An outside engagement doesn't pile on. Fixing the structure frees the calendar.

The last objection deserves a direct answer rather than the usual pivot to case studies. I wrote the direct version in this article.

Many companies have designed themselves into a corner.

Not by accident, exactly. Every company is already designed, most just weren't designed on purpose. I've worked inside multinationals where the politics, or the policies, had quietly become the point.

They set like concrete, one convenient decision at a time, until the org chart is running the company and the humans are just keeping it fed.

Bureaucracies are pretty good at that too.

As Rory Sutherland put it in a talk: "Creative people always have to present their ideas to rational people for approval. That never happens the other way around. The rational people have the power of veto and the creative people only have the power of suggestion."

That asymmetry is how the concrete sets. The safe, sensible, defensible option wins every small decision, and defensible compounds into a company optimized for approval instead of outcomes.

Designing on purpose means asking the questions the veto never makes you ask:
→ What game are we actually playing?
→ Are the right people in the right seats?
→ Does the work ship without heroics?
→ Who are we when nobody's checking?

Answer them on purpose, or the defaults answer for you. And they already are.

That's what I call company design. It doesn't have to be sophisticated. It just has to start.

We help teams put these in place in a few weeks. Reach out if your company's design needs a make over.

Want Faster Ex*****on? Start by Doing Less

People ask me how to speed up ex*****on, and my answer disappoints them, because it starts with doing less.

It disappoints them for a reason. "Do less" doesn't feel like leadership. Adding a sprint, a stretch goal, a push, that feels like leadership, even when it's the thing making everyone slower.

We're wired to treat visible effort as progress, so the quiet move of taking things off the table feels like doing nothing. It's often the highest-leverage thing on the list.

While you may think your team is slow, they're more likely overwhelmed. Pushing harder buys you a short boost you can't sustain. Speed comes from clearing the path.

Here are three moves you can use (and the order matters).

1️⃣ Cut the priority list to two or three things, and here's the part everyone skips: nothing new starts until something on the list is done. Work-in-progress limits aren't just for dev teams. They work beautifully for entire companies.

2️⃣ Remove friction. Every handoff, every approval, every "let's quickly sync" sitting between starting and shipping is a tax. Ask your team which ones are the worst, then go kill them.

3️⃣ Point AI at the friction, not the work. Let the machines carry the meeting notes, the status updates, the handoff docs, so the humans keep the judgment and the creativity.

The sequence is critical: focus, then remove friction, then add AI.

Do it backwards and you'll just automate the chaos.

A founder told me last month his growth had flattened and he was three weeks from hiring a second VP of Sales.

I asked him what the slowdown actually looked like. Not the numbers, the day-to-day. He described it perfectly without realising it: work still got done, just slower. Decisions he used to make in the hallway now needed four people in a room, and the room's main output was scheduling the next room.

That's not a sales problem. His product was fine, churn was low, the market still wanted what he sold. He was debugging the one part of the system that mostly worked.

The real issue was that nobody could make a call without him in the middle of it. He'd scaled the headcount, the office, and the AWS bill, and skipped the one thing that mattered: the ability to decide without him in the room. The VP he was about to hire would have landed in that same system and been quietly rejected within six months.

He paused the hire. We spent a day on the foundation instead. Decision speed shifted in weeks.

I wrote up the full pattern, because he is not the only one living it. Link in the comments.

My favourite corporate euphemism is "wasn't the right fit."

You know the sequence. Growth stalls. You hire an expensive VP to fix it. Six months later they're gone and everyone nods along that they "wasn't the right fit." What actually happened is you dropped a strong person into a system with no shared context, no clear priorities, and no real authority, and the system did what it was built to do. It rejected them like a transplant it wasn't prepared for.

The VP was fine. The system ate them.

While we're being honest about the language: we call two days in a hotel agreeing on priorities we won't act on a "strategic offsite." We call adding thirty people and somehow shipping slower "investing in the team." And we call the founder approving every decision a "hands-on culture."

You added thirty people and shipped slower. That math feels illegal. It's just coordination tax, wearing a nicer word.

I wrote the un-euphemised version of why B2B growth actually stalls. Link in the comments, for those of us who can handle the plain version.

Here is the difference between growth and scaling, because most founders use the words interchangeably and it costs them a quarter.

Growth adds resources and output rises roughly in step. More reps, more revenue. More spend, more pipeline. The ratio stays flat, and that's fine until it isn't.

Scaling is different. Output keeps climbing while the resources you add per unit of output go down. You get more out of each euro, each hire, each hour of leadership attention. That's the whole game.

And here's the part that trips people up: scaling only happens when the company can carry more weight without routing everything through the founder. If every meaningful decision still flows through one person, adding resources just adds load. You grow heavier, not more capable.

So when growth flattens, the useful question isn't "how do we push harder on acquisition." It's "can this company make good decisions without me in the room." Until the answer is yes, you're growing. You're not scaling.

I unpacked the full mechanism, including the four things that make scaling possible, in the blog. Link below.

Why does hiring more people slow ex*****on down?

It's one of the most counterintuitive things I see in scaling B2B companies, so let me answer it plainly.

Capacity was never the bottleneck. When growth stalls between roughly 30 and 80 people, the real constraint is usually that the company still runs on the founder's context. Early on, a handful of people carry the whole business in their heads. They know why the priorities are the priorities and who to ask. That engine is astonishingly effective at twelve people. At sixty it quietly becomes the bottleneck.

Drop a strong hire into that system, one with no shared context, unclear priorities, and no real authority, and they don't become extra output. They become another node to coordinate. You can add headcount and slow down at the same time.

The fix is order of operations. Build the system (clear strategy, accountability that lives outside your memory, an ex*****on rhythm, operationalised AI), then add people. In that order, new hires actually contribute.

I answered this and a few related questions (product vs. org problem, growth vs. scaling, whether AI helps) in the full post. Link in the comments.

Most growth advice is aimed at the wrong layer, and I think that's why so little of it works.

The whole industry points founders at the product, the pricing, the funnel, the GTM motion. Meanwhile the investors running autopsies on their own failed portfolio companies pin roughly two-thirds of the deaths on people and organisation, not the product and not the market. McKinsey puts it at around 78% of companies that find product-market fit still failing to scale from it.

So we've built an entire advisory economy that optimises the part of the system that mostly works and ignores the part that's actually breaking.

My view: a growth stall is almost never a product problem. It's a founder-led-everything problem hitting its ceiling. The GTM, the team, the culture, the decisions, all flowing through one person who built the business on their own brilliance and is now wondering why scaling it is so hard. That's not a flaw in the founder. It's just an operating system nobody rebuilt for people who don't have the founder's context.

The companies that win aren't the ones with the best tools or the most aggressive GTM. They're the ones who built the foundation before scaling on top of it.

Full argument in the comments. Tell me where I'm wrong.