Assess Growth Challenges for 2027 Success

Open YouTube or LinkedIn today and the same headlines are everywhere: "How I made my first RM1M in a year." "How to 10x your business in 3 years." "How to scale fast." I've been on that side of the story. Year 1, we did RM4M. Year 3, RM50M. 10x in three years. On paper, that's a success. Looking back, it also hid a lot of problems. We scaled revenue faster than we scaled the team, the supply chain, the systems, or the management muscle. Growing top line was quietly covering everything that wasn't ready. Growing fast for one or two years isn't the hardest thing in business. Right timing, right product, right market moment — and a lot of companies can pull it off. The harder game is what happens when: ➡️ The wave you rode has slowed ➡️ New competitors have arrived ➡️ Your ad costs keep climbing ➡️ Your best-selling SKU is no longer best-selling Plenty of companies sprint through years 2 and 3, then stall in years 5 and 6. Revenue is still there. Profit quietly isn't. That's when you realise: Growing fast and surviving long are two different capabilities. These days, I spend less time studying the rocket-ship stories. I've been studying the boring ones — companies that have been running for 20 or 30 years, still with steady customers, healthy margins, real cash flow, and an owner who isn't fighting fires every morning. Not exciting. Not viral. But they've earned through multiple market cycles, and they're still here. When someone asks me now, "How do I scale fast?" — my first question back is: "After you scale — will the company be more profitable, more stable, and easier to manage?" If scaling brings higher revenue but lower margin, a bigger team but a busier founder, more orders but tighter cash flow — that isn't scaling. That's just amplifying the problems you already had, faster. I'm not against growth. I'm against a kind of growth that only survives on a favourable trend, expensive ads, and a founder personally holding everything together. The best companies aren't always the fastest growing. They're the ones still making money after the market has changed three or four times. #Entrepreneurship #Strategy #Growth #Founders #LongTermThinking

I spoke to 173 founders in 9 weeks. As Erin Brockovich said "yes, I am very tired" None of them were pitches. Not theirs, not mine. For nine weeks I've been getting in front of founders everywhere I could: webinars, outreach, cold chats, anywhere i could get facetime without an agenda. On purpose. Not to sell anything. To test something. What I was testing was whether my story, told in a different order, gets a founder to the light bulb moment in seconds instead of hours. When you change the words from strategy, brand and positioning to value, growth and foundations, does the story engage better? Here's the part that actually surprised me. What I do hasn't changed. Same sixteen years, same thinking, same work. What's changed is the order I do it in, the story I wrap around it, and the value attached to that story. The story is this. Every business is leaking growth somewhere nobody's watching for, and most of what a founder needs to fix it, they already own. You've spent the money. The campaign, the rebrand, the hire, the raise. And it didn't land the way it was supposed to. From inside, it looks like execution. From outside, the pattern is usually obvious. Underperformance isn't always the work. It's the foundation underneath it. There's no margin for error at a critical inflection point. A raise, exit, six-figure campaign, expansion so I find the value you already own, and the growth gaps only an outside perspective can see. I've tested this for nine weeks with real founders, and the response has been beyond expectations. It's been a lot of work, but what it means going forward is that... I'M ALL IN.

TOP 3 REACTIONS BY OG FOUNDERS WHEN THEY LOSE MARKET SHARE Having met over 1000 founders, I have seen a trend that I think is worth sharing.   Imagine a founder who has built a business from scratch before any other player in the industry. One who pioneered a category and educated people on the need for that product or service. One who invested in the grassroot challenges like supply chain, product development and technology to scale slowly. One who put their own hard earned money into the business each year to grow it and believed in it when nobody else did. And then suddenly after 10years of establishing the category as the OG founder,  and creating acceptability in the market, a funded start up comes along and pumps in 50cr in brand building and performance marketing to take away 50% market share in 1 year.  In my experience, there are 3 ways in which the OG founders react in such a situation: 1. THE HIGH CHAIR CYNICISM These are OG founders who look at the new-kid-on-the-block as a rookie. They dismiss the competitor and tell themselves that "he/she is yet to see the real world". The high chair cynicism drives them to not act. They opt for the wait and watch strategy. They expect the new player to fail and disappear in no time. And assume it will be business as usual next year. They don't change their ways nor look inwards. Soon, they realize they were caught napping. 2. THE PANIC BUTTON  These OG founders get very insecure of the growing competition and their immediate reaction is to panic. They will start doing cost cutting, offering more and more discounts and some even go to the extent to reduce quality to protect margins. Their entire strategy is based on the assumption that consumers will buy more if it is cheaper. This reaction leads to a race to the bottom where the aim becomes to be tactically ahead not strategically. These founders cry foul and find this entire environment very unfair to them.  3. THE RESILIENT CONFIDENCE These OG founders acknowledge the competitors, and without wasting any time -make a plan how to back themselves. They believe in what they have built and get strategic at this time of crisis. They know they are not their competitors, and they trust why people buy their brand. So they take the market head-on and plan for growth and survival by putting money into brand building and storytelling. They gear up to spend on creating more brand awareness, brand recall and brand preference without compromising on quality, pricing or service. These are the OG founders that push on with resilient confidence. In a competitive landscape there are no free lunches. It is not about fairness. It is about guts. To stay resilient, you have to back yourself and also pre-empt the future. The end result is tough to predict, but how you react as a founder defines you and your business. As a consultant, I have seen this time and time again.  And it is still very fascinating to watch! #strategy #startups #resilience

For the first time in Superbloom history, we aren't taking on new clients in Q4.  Part of me wants to throw up and part of me wants to cheer. Because never, in any of my forecasts or wildest dreams, did I think we’d be fortunate enough to be in this place.  Let me caveat: no new retainer clients. If you’ve got a phenomenal short-term project, we’ll consider it. We’ll still take new business calls. We’ll still tell you how to successfully navigate the next few months. But we’ll also tell you that January is the soonest we can realistically have new campaigns live. Our team is the best it's ever been, and our clients are nothing short of fantastic. When I take a second to slow down and look at what we’ve built, I almost can’t wrap my head around it.  What do you mean we’ll still hit our stretch revenue goal for the year if we change absolutely nothing? What do you mean the team is performing skillfully, joyfully, and consistently? What do you mean our clients are growing smarter, scaling purposefully, and joining our calls smiling? For so long, growth has meant figuring out how to say yes to more. Right now, I think growth means knowing when not to. So for the rest of the year, we’re going to focus on doing exceptional work for the clients already trusting us, protecting the team that got us here, and making sure we enter 2027 ready for whatever comes next. And maybe it’s finally time to launch an idea I’ve had for years: pro bono work. I’ll have to consult my COO on that one 😆

Have you applied for any awards this year? Yeah — for your business, or for you as a founder. Do you even know what's out there for your industry? Most founders don't, because they've never looked. Go look it up right now. Write down the deadlines. Get an application in. And when you get that award, shout it on the rooftops! Awards aren't vanity. They're third-party proof you didn't have to build yourself — and they carry weight with investors, customers, and talent alike. You'll thank yourself later. #StartupMarketing #FounderLed #B2BMarketing #IndustryAwards

I'm getting increasingly pissed off about this. Founders who've spent 20, 25, 30 years building really good businesses are getting tired, but not tired of the business. They're tired of the business needing them. Every big decision comes back to them. They own the customer and supplier relationships. New business comes largely from reputation and referrals. The brand hasn't been looked at properly for five years. There's no real commercial engine and eventually they think...I can't keep doing this. I need to sell. Then along comes a buyer (and some of them, frankly, are bottom feeders) and they spot the unrecognised value immediately. Costs they can take out. A brilliant reputation that's never really been marketed. A tired brand and muddled message. No consistent way of generating new opportunities. They buy it. Sort those things out. Reduce the dependency on the founder. Get the business growing. A few years later, it's worth considerably more. And everyone celebrates what a brilliant deal they've done. It pisses me off because I think: That upside belonged to the founder. They just didn't know what they could do BEFORE selling. I've started calling it "exit ready, ready." Create a strategy for growth. Build a succession plan and start transferring the knowledge and relationships that currently live with you. Build a proper commercial engine. Sort the brand, message and marketing. And find your people early - strategy, finance, legal, marketing, wealth management. People you trust, who understand you and your business. Do that properly and you can reach the point where the business runs and grows without you. You almost feel retired before you've retired. THEN decide. Sell it. Keep it. Pass it on. Let the management team buy it. Sit somewhere sunny and take the dividends. I don't particularly care. I want the founder who spent decades creating the value to have the choice. We've now got two founders who were actively talking to buyers who've pulled out of those conversations after we've helped them understand their options, start planning and connected them with people across the SUMMIT ecosystem who can help. They may still sell. But if they do, I want them selling a business that's genuinely ready for it. Not handing years of unrealised upside to somebody else because they're knackered. Get exit ready, ready. Then decide.

If you read nothing else from this rant, hear me when I say: Stop sleeping on small businesses. There is a particular kind of success we celebrate in the marketing and agency world that has become more and more tiresome, especially when most of us are running small businesses ourselves. I'm going to call it brand chasing. And while landing major brands is absolutely a form of success, it's not the only way to win in today's economy. Major brands are super dope. No argument there. And in working with them, there are typically more resources. Working with major brands also sends the not-so-quiet message that, “I can definitely trust you, if this company trusted you.” But somewhere along the way, I think our industry started confusing the notoriety of the client with the the significance of the work. Small businesses represent 99.9% of U.S. businesses, employ nearly 46% of private-sector workers, and generate roughly 43.5% of U.S. GDP. While agencies are still focused on moving “upmarket,” pursuing bigger organizations and more recognizable logos as evidence that they've made it. Meanwhile, other industries have figured out the opportunity. Gusto serves more than 400,000 small businesses and recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue. They didn't have to abandon small businesses to build a billion-dollar company. They built one by figuring out how to serve them well and I think there's a HUGE lesson in that. There is a market between the entrepreneur looking for a $300 logo and the Fortune 500 company with a multimillion-dollar marketing budget. Established small businesses have employees, customers, revenue, marketing budgets, and ambitions for growth. And when they grow, they hire more people, purchase more services, invest in their communities, and create more economic activity. They also give agencies an incredible opportunity to demonstrate something more meaningful than proximity to a famous logo: Make an Impact. In the future, I'd love for humble bragging rights to sound more like: ✅ Look how we helped this business grow. ✅ Look how much clearer their brand became. ✅ Look at the customers, revenue, enrollment, donations, or opportunities our work helped generate. ✅ Look what happened because we were here. Success can be more than finding “bigger” companies to do more of what they already do. It can mean actually helping the companies become better because the best services were no longer out of reach.

YOU RAISED THE ROUND ON A STORY. WHO'S STILL TELLING IT? Not how loud your launch was, but whether anyone can repeat, unprompted, what you actually do. There is a moment in every company's life when the noise thins out. The press cycle ends. The hiring sprint slows. The Slack channel that once buzzed with the pitch deck's talking points goes quiet enough that you notice nobody's using them anymore. Not your team. Not your customers. Not even you, in the last three calls. That's when a founder should ask the uncomfortable question: whatever happened to the story we raised on? You spent months building a narrative sharp enough to close a round. Positioning statement, one-liner, the deck slide that made the investor lean forward. It worked. Brilliantly. The money came in. Then six months later you ask, "why doesn't the market talk about us the way we talk about us?" You optimized the story for a room of investors. Don't be surprised it never left the room. Sometimes founders engineer this gap without meaning to. Every messaging decision gets made under deadline, for the next pitch, the next round, the next press hit. Nobody owns the story once the money lands, because the story was never treated as an asset. It was treated as a means to an event. "We have strong brand awareness." Translation: people have heard of us. Nobody could explain us to a colleague without checking the website first. That's the gap. Awareness is not comprehension. A logo everyone recognizes is not a position anyone can repeat. You can trend for a week and still be, to the customer who was supposed to become a believer, a company they've heard of and can't describe. This shows up hardest at the exact moment it matters most: the next raise, the next hire, the next customer who has to justify the purchase to someone above them. If the story only exists in your head and your deck, it dies the second you're not in the room to tell it. If it exists in the market, in the language your customers use unprompted, in what a departing employee says about you at a dinner party, it survives without you. That's the actual inflection point. Not the round. Not the valuation. The moment you find out whether the story you built was something you performed, or something the market now owns and repeats without needing you there to prompt it. Because the question that determines what a company's narrative is actually worth, long after the press release is forgotten, isn't "who heard the pitch." It's "who can still tell the story when you're not the one telling it." That's a narrative worth building on purpose, not just raising on.

We grew 300% two years running. Those were the years I made my most expensive mistakes. I just didn't know it at the time. From the outside we were flying. Team of 14 at the time, signing clients effortlessly, every number pointing the right way. Secretly, I was just guessing. I'd never run a team that size before. I didn't know what “good” looked like at that stage, so I made decisions that felt sensible but weren't. We over-hired, built a management layer sized for a company 3x as big, and carried needless costs for years. It all came crashing down a year later. You see, growth is a terrible feedback loop. When revenue is climbing, every decision looks like it worked, including the ones that are going to cost you. You don't find out you were wrong when you're wrong. You find out two years after (when it's expensive to undo). Alex Arnot has a line on his profile that describes 2022 me better than I could. “Your company looks fine on the surface. Underneath, you're second-guessing decisions, you don't know what great looks like at this stage, and mistakes now get expensive later.” He's sold three of his own companies, advised over 200 founders and worked on around 50 exits, which means he's seen this before. He knows on day one what the rest of us work out on day 700. We're running a live session together on Friday at 12.30 pm UK. I'll speak about how to build the right positioning as a founder and how authority actually turns into revenue. Alex will unpack how to scale your business faster and build something worth considerably more at the end of it. The session is free to attend: https://lnkd.in/eAsbvtfz