The Argument That Wouldn’t Resolve
I was working with two business partners recently - I’ll call them Alex and Seb - who had been having the same argument for months. Nothing dramatic. No shouting or ultimatums. Just a slow, intelligent stalemate that resurfaced every time the conversation turned to growth.
Alex wanted to keep the business tight - protect margin, stay lean, grow by becoming sharper. Seb wanted to push - hire ahead of revenue, invest profit into capability, stop artificially limiting what they could become.
If you spoke to either of them on their own, you’d probably agree with them. That was the exhausting part. Neither of them was being reckless or timid. They were both trying to protect the business - just from different dangers.
What they didn’t yet have was a shared name for what phase the business had actually moved into.
A Very Predictable Phase
There’s a stretch in the life of most growing companies where the old rules stop working cleanly but the new rules aren’t fully visible yet.
Daniel Priestley describes it well in 24 Assets: the point where a business is too big to behave like a scrappy boutique but too small to operate like a properly scaled organisation. Overheads creep. Cash flow tightens. Culture pulls in two directions. The behaviours that created early success - speed, improvisation, founder heroics - start colliding with what the next phase demands.
An older book from the late 80s by Ichak Adizes makes a similar observation: organisations don’t struggle because they have problems; they struggle because they start spending huge amounts of energy internally trying to resolve tensions that come from moving between stages.
That was exactly the feeling here. Nothing was obviously broken. Clients were still being served. Revenue was still coming in. But the business was burning effort in place.
How It Shows Up in Real Life
In practical terms, the pattern showed up in very ordinary moments. Pay reviews became tense. Bonus conversations dragged on for weeks. Every hiring discussion felt like a referendum on the future of the company.
If someone hinted they might leave, one of them would quietly feel relieved about the cost saving while the other worried about losing capability. Cheap digs started creeping in - jokes about being “risk-averse” or “reckless” that weren’t entirely jokes.
The same spreadsheet got reopened every quarter. The same uneasy compromise got reached, then quietly unravelled. Nothing was collapsing. But everything required more effort than it should.
Both of them had started wondering - privately - whether the partnership itself might be the issue. It’s exhausting arguing with another person. It’s even more exhausting arguing with a phase of growth you haven’t named yet.
Naming the Phase
Once we could see the structure clearly, the work became much simpler and much less personal. We acknowledged where the business actually was.
Not a lean boutique anymore. Not yet a properly scalable organisation. Sitting in that messy middle that punishes hesitation and punishes overreach - just in different ways.
From there we made grounded moves: stronger governance around pricing and individual recovery rates, a clearer pyramid structure so expensive hires created leverage instead of just cost, more explicit agreements about when to protect margin and when to invest for growth.
None of it was glamorous. But it matched reality. And when reality is named properly, intelligent people can usually work from it.
The Real Shift
Nothing about the tension was personal in the end. It was structural. The business had moved. Their language hadn’t caught up yet. And when language lags behind reality, intelligent people start fighting ghosts.
There’s a line from Marshall Goldsmith that founders quote to each other for a reason:
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
The real work is recognising when there has quietly become here.