Reaching £5m in revenue feels like success. Hitting £10m feels like momentum. But for many businesses, somewhere between £5m and £20m is where things quietly start to fracture.
Growth doesn’t stall because demand disappears.
It stalls because the operating model that got you here cannot take you further.
This is the most dangerous phase of scale.
At this stage, most founders are still running the business as if it’s a scrappy scale-up - but the organisation has already outgrown that reality.
Here’s what typically snaps first.
Founders and senior leaders become the bottleneck.
You don’t feel “busy”.
You feel constantly interrupted.
Growth slows not because people aren’t working hard, but because the organisation can’t move without you.
At early scale, heroics work.
At mid-scale, they destroy consistency.
Nothing is truly broken - but nothing is predictable either.
This makes forecasting unreliable and confidence fragile.
Most £5-£20m businesses are running:
If you can’t trust your data, you can’t scale with confidence.
Early culture is implicit.
At scale, culture must be designed.
Without clarity:
Performance becomes uneven - and resentment quietly grows.
This stage exposes a truth most founders aren’t prepared for:
The problem is no longer growth.
The problem is coordination.
You’re not building a faster engine.
You’re building a system that allows many engines to run in sync.
That requires a different mindset.
Companies that move cleanly through £20m don’t “work harder”.
They redesign how the business operates.
This removes the founder bottleneck without losing control.
Instead of chasing growth everywhere, they lock down:
Revenue becomes repeatable, not heroic.
High-growth businesses align systems so that:
This is where confidence returns.
The biggest shift at this stage isn’t tech - it’s management.
This is what allows scale without burnout.
To break through this ceiling, founders must accept one uncomfortable truth:
You cannot scale intuition.
You must scale intent.
That means:
The businesses that win don’t grow faster.
They operate better.
If your business feels:
You’re not failing.
You’re standing at the point where scale requires redesign.
Handled well, this stage becomes the foundation for £50m+.
Handled poorly, it’s where growth quietly dies.
Ready to scale?
At the £5-£20m stage, growth needs redesign.
>>Book a Scale Readiness Audit - to understand where pressure is building inside your operating model - and what to fix now to unlock the next phase of sustainable growth.