Five questions to ask yourself if you’re struggling to scale your company

Being an entrepreneur today means dealing with a business landscape that is highly unpredictable-– tariffs, geopolitical turmoil, AI uncertainty, rising costs – all these uncontrollable factors make it harder than ever to successfully launch, grow and scale your business. However, as my old boss at Cisco, John Chambers, used to say “Concentrate on what you can control, not on what you can’t”. I have spent the last fifteen years working with over a hundred VC or Private Equity backed startups through scaleups, and based on this experience there are five questions the senior leadership team must answer, no matter your industry or business model, in order to grow successfully:

1 Are you clear about your focus or are people confused?
As an organisation grows and scales, the board, leaders and teams often lose sight of their core objectives. Many leaders fall into the trap of chasing too many opportunities or reacting to the latest market noise. Without radical focus, energy and resources are watered down, leading to confusion, misalignment, and diluted motivation. When leaders or employees are unclear why they are doing what they’re doing, their engagement and performance drop. Scaling requires discipline – knowing exactly what you want, why it matters, and how you’ll get there, and then saying “no” to distractions. Regularly and ruthlessly prioritise. Be explicit about what you want.

2 Are you measuring what matters?
Don’t mistake activity for progress and progression. In many scaling organisations, it’s common for teams to operate without clear, shared metrics for success. Ask yourself, are you tracking the few right metrics, measuring outcomes, and iterating based on what you learn as a team? If you’re not measuring execution at a granular level, you risk burning out while making little real progress. Do you have predictive rather than rear view mirror analytics? Without visible progress markers and regular check-ins, accountability wanes. This makes it easy for priorities to drift and for mediocrity to creep in. Celebrate small wins to fuel momentum.

3 Have you got the right team in place?
Scaling an organisation always exposes weaknesses in leadership, skills and team coordination: employees who worked when your organisation was smaller often don’t when you try to scale. It might seem harsh, but no amount of ambition or friendship can compensate for the wrong team members with incorrect skills or a lack of alignment. Ask yourself: do you have the right people in the right seats for this stage of growth? Invest in hiring and developing talent density in your teams. Ensure people’s incentives (care why) and goals are in sync with the business’s direction (know why). 

4 Do you have clarity about roles and structures? 
New people, changing structures and evolving roles are all byproducts of scaling. However, without clear definition and explicit communication about who is responsible for what, teams become inefficient, drop balls and experience internal friction. Lack of clarity and explicit communication often undermine team and individual performance. In fact, a study by Columbia Business School found that when you change more than 20% of a team’s members, clarity about priorities and values get diluted, and team cohesion and psychological safety can break down. And when people don’t feel safe to speak up, take risks, or admit mistakes, trust erodes and collaboration suffers. This leads to siloed behavior, bad decision making and poor learning. Make sure you are clear, focused and explicit about what you want people to be doing to ensure your employees are contributing to growth, not stifling it.

5 Will what got you here, get you there?
What worked when your company was smaller, flexible and emergent, often breaks when you try to scale. As complexity increases, teams often lack robust ways of processing information, making decisions, and solving problems. If these old, informal methods persist, teams get bogged down in confusion, judgment, and finger-pointing rather than curiosity and shared learning. Focus on a few core processes and systems that underpin growth to support the next stage of scale. 

Getting the plan: Execution ratio right 
Successful scaling is all about focus, decision making and clear explicit communication in these five areas that make growth sustainable. Take time to step back and diagnose. Often, the real obstacle is not just one thing, but a combination that needs action. As I’ve seen time and again, a brilliant plan or product can’t scale successfully unless these five things are all aligned. The plan is 10%; the execution is 90%.