When progress hits a wall

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Scaling start-ups with AI: The ultimate assistant and the power of mentorship (AI Business)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• The best books for founders looking for personal development (TechRound)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• How to write the perfect AI prompt (Inc)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Battle-tested tools that transform startups into industry titans  (Forbes)

💡 Hiring Insights

• 9 recruitment trends shaping 2025 (Recruiter Flow)

👀 ICYMI

• Using storytelling as your secret weapon (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🧠 A new way to think about growth plateaus

Ever go white water rafting? Building a company can feel like you’re on the rapids - all you have is your oar and a small team to navigate water that essentially carries you wherever it wants. And all everyone is just trying to do is make it to the calm sections without tipping over.

In the early days, when everything is working, things move fast.  New hires bring fresh energy, revenue, climbs, and the momentum feels effortless.  And then out of nowhere progress slows.

The strategies that got you there slowly lose their edge.  Your early stage playbook stops working, and what’s worse, the next playbook isn’t exactly obvious.

It’s this moment in your company’s lifecycle where the company is still very much alive, but it’s not moving the way you’re traditionally used to.  For founders who recognize this is happening, they know they’ve hit a plateau.

And as soon as you realize you’ve hit a plateau, you need to take action.

Breaking Operational Plateaus

When the growth slows down, it’s often because you’re still operating with outdated processes and structures. Growth at one stage of a business may not necessarily look the same at the next.

You’ll notice it in your teams because they’ll continue to work within the same systems but start to get frustrated over the work, the lack of progress, and the feeling that their job  just isn’t having much of an impact.

If you feel like your team is spinning its wheels, it might be time to rethink how you work.

Switch up how teams make decisions

One source of the plateau could be from decision-making bottlenecks.

You could...

Implement the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) framework to clarify who owns decisions

Adopt Amazon’s “two pizza” rule: if a meeting requires more than two pizzas to feed everyone, it’s too large to be efficient

Create decision-making autonomy at different levels.  e.g. Creating clip levels for approvals so that employees know where their own decision-making power starts and where they need approval.

Restructure for scale

Very often the reason why growth has slowed down is because of how teams are organized.

Naturally your company starts out as a centralized model given the small number of people.  As it scales, moving to a decentralized model where teams begin to have their own individual accountability and metrics creates a new level of responsibility across teams and employees that lead parts of your company.

While shifting to a decentralized model, it’s crucial to hire middle management to alleviate senior leadership and create a new layer of responsibility, one that can be the connection between the action on the ground and the senior leadership team running your company.

Axe whatever isn’t working

It can be tough to let go of processes and functions that got you to where you are today, but unfortunately these could be the very things that are holding you back from your next stage of growth.

It’s not a bad idea to do an audit with your teams to see what can be cut. , whereby tThe teams can still operate just as efficiently, if not more.

It’s also not a bad idea to do an audit on your products and/or services so see what is working well and what isn’t - the items that aren’t working well most likely can be cut without much impact to your company.

🏃 Overcoming personal stagnation

It’s only natural that when your company plateaus, you also feel a sense of stagnation.  When you started the company, it needed a certain version of yourself to get it to the point of growth.  However, eventually your company’s plateau will catch up with you if you haven’t managed to evolve yourself.

Reclaim your time

With a lot of people looking to you for guidance and decision-making, it’s very easy for you to become the bottleneck.  And it’s not like you mean to do this but sometimes you just don’t have the time to make the decision.

You can change this.

Audit your calendar and divide your tasks as follows:

• $10 tasks (low value, operational)

• $1000 tasks (high value, strategic)

• $10,000 tasks (company defining growth work)

Start by eliminating any tasks you feel are worth less than $1000 and then refine from there until you’ve been able to claim time back to do the work that doesn’t slow the company down.

When not to be the single point of failure

A time comes where you don’t need to be the sales, marketing, legal, and financial departments all at once.  The most scalable founders know when to gradually replace themselves in key functions.

List out the areas in the company where if you don’t do it, it won’t get done.  And then appoint leaders who can take over these items so you can focus on strategic elements that will move the company forward.

Stress-test the vision

Is your original vision still the right vision?  There’s nothing wrong with having to make tweaks.  In fact refusing to make tweaks to the vision can oftentimes be the reason why you face growth plateaus in the first place.

Run through scenarios where if you had to start all over again, what would you do differently.  Even better, go through all the tactics that would put you out of business if you were your competitor.

Stuart Butterfield, founder of Slack, realized his vision of being a video game company wasn’t scalable, while also realizing the internal messaging platform they had built to use for game development had more merit than they originally realized.

Not all plateaus are bad. Sometimes, they signal that a business or founder needs to stabilize before the next leap forward. The best founders use these moments to refine what’s working, eliminate inefficiencies, and double down on their best bets.

Instead of viewing a plateau as stagnation, consider it a pressure test.

• Is your team structured for scale?

• Are you still the right person to make every decision?

• What would break if demand doubled overnight?

The answers to these questions determine whether you’re truly ready for the next stage.

The goal isn’t just to break through a plateau. It’s to make sure you’re building something strong enough to sustain the next wave of growth.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Try the two pizza rule with your meetings

• Scale Yourself → Audit your calendar to divide your time into low, medium, and company defining value

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