Dan Wright - Founder & Director, Thryve
This week I delivered a knowledge workshop for Queensland Leaders Gold Coast on strategy execution. Partway through, I asked the room a straightforward question: what is the real barrier to your next stage of growth?
The answers came quickly: market conditions, access to capital, competitors with deeper pockets.
Every one of those is real. And every one of them sits outside your control.
There's a fourth answer, and it's the one the business owners in the room recognised the most: the owner is still the bottleneck.
That one sits inside your control. It decides whether the other three matter at all. A business that can't run without its owner can't respond to a shifting market, can't absorb capital well, and can't outmanoeuvre a better-funded rival.
In the stages work I use with business owners this is called the second brick wall. Different thinking is required than that which established and grew the business.
The Shift Isn't About Your Diary
The usual advice here is to protect your strategic time. I've given that advice myself. When your aspiration is to scale, this is a tactic not a strategy.
Time isn't the binding constraint. You are.
In my business coaching work with owners at this stage, we focus on three changes.
Systems Alone Won't Do It
Better systems are often crucial. However alone they aren't sufficient. Leadership has to grow with the business in two ways:
The challenge simply put is: “Scaling without leadership stalls. Leadership without scaling burns out.”
Reach out if you’d like to go deeper into what successful scaling takes and pitfalls to avoid.
Dan Wright | Founder, Thryve Connection | Business Coaching & Leadership Development Specialists | thryve.net.au
