The Danger of Comfortable Growth: Why Scale-Ups Need Endless Curiosity
Executive Summary: The 1-Minute Read
The Risk of Comfort: Success can make scale-ups complacent, which is dangerous because growth can mask underlying problems.
The Core Issue: Many businesses do not fully understand why they are succeeding, so if growth slows they may not know what has actually changed.
The Leadership Habit: The best founders and CEOs stay curious about the drivers of performance, rather than assuming that past success will keep repeating itself.
The Operational Lesson: Healthy-looking results can hide unsustainable processes, so scale-up leaders need to look beyond the headline numbers.
The Takeaway: Success is not just hitting milestones; it is understanding how you got there well enough to sustain it.
Endless curiosity is one of the most important habits a scale-up can develop, because companies can easily become complacent when they are successful. You have grown from 1, to 10, to 50, to 100+ staff – clearly what you are doing is working, and you are successful. You must clearly know what to do.
Well, the answer to that is yes and no. Many companies I have worked with had the kernel of success ingrained within them, and it was going well. However, perhaps surprisingly, not many of those companies had a true understanding of the why.
Invariably, this lack of understanding comes down to a combination of factors, including:
- Lack of time or resources.
- Lack of experience to know exactly what you need to understand.
- An overconfidence that the knowledge which got you to where you are will continue to help you grow.
- Pushing the boundaries of new markets, meaning there is no one else to learn from.
The problem with proceeding on a scale-up path without true knowledge of what is driving your growth is that if it stalls or slows, you do not actually have a grasp on why. It could be that your great proposition has a fatal flaw in some regard, creating an underlying problem that you cannot see until it is too late.
The Myriad Reasons for Unexamined Success
Businesses are successful for a myriad of reasons:
- Perhaps they have a killer product or proposition that works at pretty much any price point.
- Perhaps the business has wittingly or unwittingly captured a moment in time in the market and cuts through the noise.
- Perhaps the product is positioned in a way that perfectly captures an emotional or need state of the consumer.
- Perhaps the product is just “okay,” but is priced so well that consumers simply lap it up.
- Perhaps the product has no competitors, so yours is therefore the best around by default.
- Perhaps the product is the same as others, but competitors are hampered by operational issues and your business just executes really well.
The list goes on. The point is that a successful business can sometimes be successful for reasons that the founders do not fully understand. That is fine if you just keep growing, but what if you do not? What if the business growth begins to slow? Quite simply, if you do not have a grasp on what works well and why, you can stumble inadvertently into a crisis.
The Threat of Comfortable Growth
The most dangerous phase for any business isn’t failure – it is comfortable growth. When you stop asking questions because the top-line revenue looks healthy, you invite complacency. True business maturity means remaining aggressively curious about your own data, even when everything seems to be going perfectly right.
This is the point where Donald Sull’s idea of Active Inertia becomes relevant: successful companies often keep doing more of what worked before, even when the environment has changed.
The most successful people I have seen over the years are the ones who practise endless curiosity. They do not just pat themselves on the back for achieving good growth and hitting their targets; they ask themselves why they hit them and what they can do better.
Sleepwalking Into an Operational Crisis
I was once brought into a business as the CFO, but because I had a broader skillset, I was also asked to take responsibility for the sales team and one other department. At the time, I was told I did not really need to worry too much about sales, as the team always hit their numbers.
I accepted that at face value at first. But as I got to grips with the team and started understanding how the numbers were actually being delivered, I realised there was a problem beneath the surface. The sales team was hitting target, but the way they were doing it was not sustainable.
Because the top-line numbers looked good, senior management and the private equity investors never really asked questions. The assumption was simple: if the team was delivering, there was no need to change anything. So when the growth plan came to rapidly scale the business, the thinking was equally simple – double the sales team and keep doing more of the same.
The flaw in that plan was that the team had been hitting its numbers by cold calling the entire customer pool every three months. That was not sustainable, and potential customers were becoming increasingly frustrated with the approach. On top of that, the sales collateral being sent out was years out of date, grammatically incorrect, and unclear. It was remarkable the business was making progress at all, although that was largely down to the strength of the product rather than the quality of the sales process.
Once we understood what was really happening, the fix became obvious. We put clearer rules in place to give prospects space, and the marketing team was tasked with rewriting all of the sales collateral. That allowed us to build a more sustainable sales approach and support the growth plan properly.
Systematise Your Curiosity
This is just one example of how you can sleepwalk into a major operational problem through a lack of understanding of your own business. The key is to systematically question yourself about every element of your operations:
- How did we achieve this milestone?
- What did not go to plan and why?
- What could we do better next time?
Too often, businesses do not unpick the true drivers of their performance. Ultimately, success isn’t defined by hitting a growth milestone; it’s defined by understanding exactly how you got there. Just remember: complacency kills momentum, but relentless curiosity secures your future.