Category: Coaching

Growing fast is not the same as growing well

I speak to a lot of founders who are, by any obvious measure, doing well. Revenue is up. The team is growing. They’re winning new clients. And yet something feels off.

They’re working harder than ever but feel further from in control. Decisions that used to be straightforward now feel complicated. The business they built around their own judgment has grown to a point where that judgment alone isn’t enough.

What I often find, when we start to dig in, is that the growth has outpaced the foundations.

The foundations most growing businesses are missing

I’ve built and scaled businesses myself. One of them, a specialist travel business, I eventually grew and sold. And across those experiences, and the coaching work I’ve done since, I keep seeing the same gaps come up. Not in every business, but in enough of them that I’d call them patterns.

Vision and clarity

Not a mission statement on a wall. I mean real clarity: about where the business is going, what it’s optimising for, and what success actually looks like in three years. Without that, every decision becomes harder than it needs to be. Your team can’t prioritise effectively because they don’t know what matters most. And as the founder, you end up as the bottleneck for things that shouldn’t need you at all.

Understanding the numbers

Most founders I work with understand their revenue. Fewer have a clear grip on margins, cash flow timing, or the unit economics of what they sell. That’s not a criticism: it’s often just not where their energy has gone. But it matters enormously as you scale, because the decisions that look obvious on the surface often look quite different when you understand the numbers behind them.

Systems and processes

At five people, you can run on tribal knowledge and a founder who holds everything in their head. At fifteen or twenty, that breaks down. The businesses that scale well are the ones that have started to build repeatable, documented ways of doing things. Not bureaucracy: just clarity about how the work gets done, so that the business doesn’t depend entirely on specific individuals.

Leadership

As a founder, you were probably very good at doing the thing your business does. That’s how you got here. But leading a growing team is a different skill set, and most founders have had to learn it on the job, with real consequences for getting it wrong. Knowing how to set expectations, have difficult conversations, delegate effectively and build a culture that retains good people: these matter more and more as headcount grows.

Why coaching can help earlier than you think

Most founders come to me at a point of strain. The business is growing but something isn’t working, and they can feel it even if they can’t name it yet.

That’s a perfectly good time to start. But the founders who get the most from coaching are often the ones who start a little earlier, when things are going well but the complexity is beginning to build. At that point, you have the space and the runway to put things in place proactively, rather than reactively.

Coaching isn’t about being told what to do. It’s about having a thinking partner who has been through it themselves, who will ask the questions you haven’t thought to ask yourself, and who can help you see your business more clearly than you can when you’re inside it every day.

A question worth sitting with

If someone asked you right now to describe your business’s vision for the next three years, could you do it clearly and confidently? Could your team?

If the honest answer is no, or not really, that’s not a failure. It’s just information. And it’s a good place to start.

Talk to us about coaching and mentoring  → either use the contact form below, or call us on 0330 223 7580 

What our clients say

“Sarah asked me some tough questions and introduced me to lots of ideas, theories and tools as well as some business basics. I was muddling through before Sarah’s help but now have clear structure and processes I can follow.”

Vicky, Little City

“Sarah helped me to develop structure and systems and has given me a much better understanding about my business. I now feel more empowered and in control and have seen a direct increase in productivity.”

Amanda, Colchester Children’s Counselling

About the author

Regional Director for Essex and Suffolk, Sarah helps ambitious business owners get the right support without the cost of full-time staff. A serial entrepreneur herself, she brings real-world experience, Virtual Expert connections, and leadership coaching to every client relationship.

Why most training doesn’t stick – and what to do instead

I’ve had a version of the same conversation dozens of times.

A founder or MD gets in touch. Their business has grown, usually faster than they expected. The team has doubled. New managers are in post. There’s a culture they want to protect, and a performance bar they need to lift. They know training is part of the answer. So they find a provider, book a programme, and send the team along.

Six weeks later, I’ll often hear the same thing: ‘It was a good day, but I’m not sure how much has changed.’

Sound familiar?

The problem isn’t training. It’s the wrong kind of training.

Most training programmes are designed for large organisations: companies with dedicated L&D functions, multi-year development cycles and the luxury of time. They’re then sold, with a few tweaks, to businesses a tenth of the size.

The result is training that’s well-structured, professionally delivered and largely disconnected from the reality of running a 20, 30 or 50-person business.

In a scaling business, your managers are often leading people for the first time, without a blueprint. Your HR function (if you have one) is probably one person building the plane as it flies. Your culture is a genuine competitive advantage, but it’s under pressure as headcount grows. These are specific, urgent challenges. Generic solutions don’t serve them well.

What actually works

In my experience, training sticks when three things are true.

1. It starts with your context, not a catalogue

The most effective development conversations I have with clients begin not with ‘what do you want to learn?’ but ‘what’s actually getting in the way?’ Sometimes the answer is a skills gap. Sometimes it’s a process problem. Sometimes it’s a confidence issue, a team dynamic, or a structural change that hasn’t landed yet.

Good training is diagnosis first, delivery second.

2. It’s delivered by people who understand the world of growing businesses

There’s a meaningful difference between a trainer who has read about managing difficult conversations and one who has sat in those conversations themselves, with real stakes, real people and no HR safety net.

At Get Ahead, our trainers work inside scaling businesses every week. That’s not a marketing line. It means that when a manager asks ‘but what do I actually say?’, we have a real answer.

3. There’s support beyond the session

A workshop can shift thinking. What embeds it is what happens afterwards: the follow-up conversation, the coaching check-in, the manager who applies it and gets reinforced rather than left to drift.

One of the things I’m proudest of in how Get Ahead approaches training is that we can stay involved. Because we often support our clients operationally too, we can help embed the learning in a way that a training-only provider simply can’t.

The moment to act is usually earlier than you think

Most businesses come to us about training at a point of pain: a leadership crisis, a performance issue, a team that’s lost cohesion. We’re glad to help at those moments. But the businesses that see the most sustained improvement are the ones who invest in development before things go wrong.

If your business is growing and you’re starting to feel the strain, if your managers are stretched, your culture is harder to maintain, or your people’s capabilities aren’t quite keeping pace, that’s the signal. Not a crisis, but an opportunity.

A conversation is the best starting point

We don’t believe in off-the-shelf answers, which is why we always start with a conversation. If you’re wondering whether structured training or development support could help your business, I’d love to talk it through. Give us a call on 0330 223 7580.

No obligation. No jargon. Just an honest conversation about what might make the greatest difference for your team.

Read more about our bespoke leadership development here.

About Hazel

Hazel is the Get Ahead Regional Director for Kent and East Sussex, bringing over two decades of senior-level experience that spans Russian linguistics, marketing, and a long career in Human Resources across the IT, engineering and charity sectors. For many years, Hazel was part of the Senior Leadership Team at a global engineering company, navigating a venture capital-backed Management Buyout, leading significant organisational change, and representing the business across the Far East, North America and South America. In 2018, she accepted the Queen’s Award for Enterprise at Buckingham Palace on behalf of her organisation. Hazel leads Get Ahead’s nationwide HR Essentials service, helping SMEs build compliant, practical people foundations that support sustainable growth. Her areas of expertise include HR and people management, strategic business development, training and development, and coaching.

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