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Join for freePosted: Fri 26th Jun 2026
Businesses that stall at the growth stage almost never have a problem with their product.
The ceiling is almost always in one of three places – how clearly the business is directed, whether the team structure still fits, or whether the financial picture is clear enough to make confident decisions.
In this Lunch and Learn, Michael Wakeham shares a practical framework for founders and owner-managers who are ready for the next stage of growth.
Drawing on two decades of experience working inside SMEs and established business growth research, Michael explains the three areas that consistently shape whether a growing business scales or plateaus – strategy, people and finance.
How to tell the difference between having a strategy and having a list of goals, and why it changes everything about how you grow
What to look for in your people and team structure as the business moves to the next stage
How improving your financial visibility changes the quality of decisions you make without needing to change the underlying numbers
Michael has spent more than 20 years working inside owner-managed SMEs in recruitment, professional services, healthcare and franchising at the point where businesses have something that works and are figuring out how to build on it.
He sits on the advisory board at Arden University and mentors businesses through the Help to Grow: Management Course. He also works with founders and owner-managers through his practice Brynley Knight.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Michael Wakeham, who is a business growth adviser. In this session, Michael will share a practical framework for founders and owner-managers who are ready for the next stage of growth.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Michael.
Michael: Thanks, Caitriona. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining the session today.
This is aimed at businesses that are currently growing or ready to scale, and are looking for ideas and guidance around the key things to look out for and what to do.
To start with, a quick introduction to me. I've worked in business for about 20-plus years, which probably gives away my age a little bit.
I've worked in different industries and with different companies as a director, adviser and consultant. I've also run my own business on a few occasions.
I also look at business through a psychological lens. I did a master's a couple of years ago, focused on cyberpsychology, which is how humans interact with technology and how it affects us. With the AI boom at the moment, it's a very interesting topic.
In terms of Enterprise Nation, I've been an adviser for about six months and have worked with quite a few mentees across different industries and at different stages.
Today, we're looking at the key areas to focus on for a scaling business.
There are three core things that, in my experience from running my own businesses and working with other business owners, generally either hold people back, cause issues, or, if improved, can help accelerate growth and move the business to the next stage.
The first thing to highlight is that when you're scaling a business, you will get to a point where it might feel really tough. It might feel like it's not moving as quickly as you want it to.
That can actually be a real positive. What got you to where you are now as a business is not necessarily what will get you to the next stage.
It's the same in any walk of life, whether it's fitness, nutrition or anything else. Sometimes you get to a point, review things, hit a bit of a plateau, and then move again with a new strategy or plan.
Let's start with strategy. If anyone wants to look into this in more detail, one of the best books I've read on this topic is Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.
This is how he describes what a good strategy is, and we'll delve into the areas of that in a second. The key thing I talk to business owners about is that strategy is not a list of goals. It's not a list of ambitions or aspirations.
It's a clear thing that you need to achieve to take the business to the next stage.
That's difficult to do because, as a business owner, you are flooded with competing priorities. You'll have different things you need to do on certain days. You'll have people issues, finance issues, supplier issues and all sorts of other things.
But it's being able to focus and stick to that clear strategy, and almost deprioritise or push some of the other aspects away, so you can focus on it.
Whenever I start talking to business owners about strategy, one of the first things I start with is you as the individual.
What do you want to achieve? What do you want your business to achieve? And how do you want that to work in practice?
We all start businesses for different reasons, and sometimes we get to a point where those reasons change or adapt. Our circumstances might change. But fundamentally, what do you want to achieve?
I've met business owners who are at the scale-up stage and, in their heads, they want to grow to millions of pounds of turnover, a certain profit level or a certain market share. That's great, and we can work with that.
There are other business owners who want to create a lifestyle business. They want a business that gives them a good income, but means they can take their children to school, have the odd day off and not work too much at weekends.
The planning and strategy around that is very different to someone who wants to commit 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week.
So when you're looking at your business strategy, take one step back and think: as the business owner, what do I want personally, and what do I want my business to be?
Once you've got that clarity, the next stage is to diagnose where you're currently at.
If we go back to that quote, it's about a clear diagnosis of the challenge.
From an aspiration perspective, and this is something I've done in my own businesses, you might say: "I want to hit £1 million turnover", or, "I want to make 20% profit on my turnover."
But is that realistic?
If you diagnose where you're currently at, how many customers you have, what that customer base brings in from a turnover perspective and how hard it is to grow more customers, you can start to test that ambition.
If you're at £500,000 turnover and you want to get to £1 million, is it realistic that you're going to do that? Do you need to increase the time frame? Do you need to do different things?
The diagnosis of where your business is currently and what you need to achieve is really important.
Once you know where you want to get to, what you want for yourself and the business, and where you currently are, that should flag the one thing you need to do to get to the next stage.
There will be other things. There may be five or six things you need to do. It might be that you need new suppliers. It might be that you need a new system. It might be that you need new people.
But generally, there is one key thing that, if achieved, means everything else follows on.
It could be that customer acquisition is your number one priority because you need more revenue, which will then allow you to invest in a new system or hire.
So your one key thing at that point is customer acquisition. You know that in terms of priorities on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, customer acquisition is number one and everything else sits behind that.
That gives you a very clear plan. If you get to 100 customers, you'll get this amount of revenue, which will allow you to make this hire or invest in this system.
The final thing on what makes a good strategy is having the dedication to achieve that one thing. Everything else will then fall into place behind it.
On the flip side, looking at this from a psychological perspective, as a business owner, you are bombarded with things that drain your attention.
I refer to it as cognitive load. You might have a customer calling you, emails to respond to, people who need training or support, supplier issues, finance issues, and even things like social media draining your cognitive load.
So when you look at your strategy, if you've got lots of goals, tasks and things you need to accomplish, it drains your ability to perform.
If you look at your current strategy, ask yourself: is it a list of goals, tasks and ambitions, or is it a very clear purpose that allows you to focus on what you need to do?
Another thing that sometimes affects a good strategy is that there isn't an appreciation of what you're trying to achieve.
As I said at the beginning, if your goal is to get to £1 million but getting there doesn't fit with your lifestyle or how much time you can commit to the business, the aspiration has no appreciation of where you are currently. It's important that whatever you set has that in mind.
On the flip side, if the ambition is within what you're able to dedicate and give to, that's great. But sometimes I speak to business owners and they have very aspirational goals around turnover, profit or market share, but no appreciation for the foundations or systems needed to achieve them.
One of the best quotes, which I'm trying to remember now, is by James Clear in Atomic Habits. It was something along the lines of: you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
That all builds into the strategy piece. Once you know what you want and what you need your business to achieve, you need to set up the structure and systems to achieve it. If you're doing that consistently and with focus, then you should scale and move to the next stage.
To finish on strategy, here are a few questions to ask yourself after this Lunch and Learn, or when you're planning for next week. They might give you some clarity and food for thought.
If it's just you, if you're a solopreneur, can you describe your target or your one key thing for the next 90 days?
If you've got a team, are you all on the same page? Are you all working towards the same goal?
In the last three months, have you said no to anything because it didn't fit that plan? Or are you saying yes to everything and taking on more work that doesn't necessarily follow your strategy?
And finally, if you sat down and listed everything competing for your time and cognitive load, how many things would be on that list?
That will help when we come on to people in a second. Are there too many things on that list? Are there things you might be able to offload to a team, external support or even AI?
That's the strategy side.
The next stage is people, and this is probably one of the most difficult areas because we're dealing with people.
You might be working with people who joined you at the very start, stayed with you and gone through the tough times. There may be a lot of loyalty and a lot of time spent together building the business.
But one of the key things I've found in numerous businesses I've worked with is that sometimes the team or people who help you build the business are not necessarily the people who will scale the business.
That's not a failure on anyone's part. It's not a failure on you as the business owner or on them as individuals.
But sometimes the skill set and skill base you need at the start-up stage, where it's fast-paced, a bit of a hustle and a bit seat-of-your-pants, might not be the same as what you need later, where structure, systems, processes and SOPs become more important.
People planning and people strategies are huge topics, covering everything from recruitment to development and retention. But when we look at scaling a business, there are a few things that are important to think about.
The first is whether the people you've currently got, or the people you're looking to hire, complement you and the business.
I'm working with someone at the moment from a mentoring perspective. They're the business owner, they're looking to scale and they're looking to bring someone in to work alongside them.
Their focus, and what they want to do day to day, is the front-of-house activity. They're a hospitality business, so they want to do the entertainment, events, customer meetings and front-facing activity, and less of the back-office work.
What they need is someone who is happy to sit on a laptop and do the back-office work. Not someone who can do it but also wants to be involved in the customer interaction side.
It's important to ask: do they complement you, and do they complement your business?
Do you have lots of introverts? Lots of extroverts? People from the same background? It's important to step back and look at that from a people perspective.
Then ask whether they fit the strategy. If your strategy is to grow sales, are you looking to hire people who complement that? Will they be salespeople, telesales people or marketing people? Will they drive that strategy?
It's important to look at that as well.
When you're looking at your business, you may also have to make difficult decisions about the team you've currently got.
It could be that someone joined you five years ago and has grown with the business. You've brought other people on, and they're now sitting in a management role, but they haven't developed their skill set.
The business has grown to this point, but are they now the right person to take it to the next stage?
Do you need someone else to come in above them? Do you need to reorganise things from a structural perspective?
On a few occasions, I've found that you might have the right people, but when you sit back and look at things, they're not in the right seats to drive the business forward.
Sometimes, because people have been with you for a while, you forget their actual skills and attributes.
A few years ago, I worked with a company in a similar situation. A woman had joined them at the start. I think she was their second employee. She had grown with the business and, after about 10 or 15 years, was operations manager.
But she was struggling, and the business was struggling because of that choke point. Her real skill set was in systems and IT. It just needed a reshuffle to bring someone in who was better equipped to run the operational side. That worked really well.
The final thing I added, because I think it's important with the advent of AI, is that when you're looking at a people strategy, there are two sides to it.
One is whether you're bringing in people who are AI literate, who understand what AI is and how to work with it. Can they use their own judgement and skill set alongside it, so AI becomes an added benefit?
Also, if you are introducing AI to the business, what effect is that having on your people?
I recently ran a session about the effects of AI on well-being. If you're introducing AI, it's important to look at your people and how it's affecting them as well. That's a key thing.
To finish on the people side, here are some key questions.
I think one of the biggest and best questions is the first one: if you are looking to scale, what that means is that you can't be in the business all the time. You can't be doing the thing that your business does all the time.
You need the space and time to step outside and look at the business top-down, to work on strategy and other things that are really important.
So one of the key questions is: if you took yourself out of the business for two weeks, what would actually happen?
Even if you took yourself out for a day or a week, would the business still run? If the answer is no, that may be one of the key things holding your business back from scaling. You need to put the right structure and foundations around people in place to allow you to do that.
A couple of other questions to prompt your thinking: if you have a leadership team or a team of people at the moment, has that team been designed for what you were two or three years ago, or is it ready for where you are now as a business?
In the next year or two, as you scale, will they grow with the business? If you feel they won't, what can you do? Do they need training, development or restructuring? What is the next stage?
In the last month, if you sit back and think about what has come to you, are you the bottleneck as the business owner? That's a very common occurrence.
Have things come to you where you thought: "I don't think I needed to answer that", but it came to you anyway because people know you give a quick answer? If so, it might be that some structure and development are needed to take you out of the firing line.
The final thing I've found to be one of the most important when scaling is the financial side.
I'm sure everyone has heard some version of this statement: turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality.
I've managed finance functions. I'm not an accountant myself, but as a business owner and director in a few businesses, I've looked after the financial function.
One of the biggest challenges in a scaling business is getting clarity and visibility on the key numbers within your business.
Sometimes, if your turnover is good and where you need it to be, you can feel fairly happy. But your profit may not be as good as it should be. Then it's about understanding why, looking at cost of sale, administration costs and whether there are efficiencies you can drive.
If your turnover is good and your profit is good, what's your cash flow like? Are you struggling to make key payments, such as tax or payroll? Is there a problem there?
It could be that you need to look at credit control. Can you automate it? Can you create a process to get cash into the business? Or is it a case of managing suppliers and outgoings better?
I've had businesses that pay their suppliers on time all the time, but don't get money in from their customers in the same rigorous way. That creates an imbalance. Although turnover and profit look great, there is always a cash flow problem.
When I'm talking about understanding the figures, I mean the mechanics under the hood. You need to be able to take the key figures and understand what's driving those underneath.
I worked with a company last year as a consultant. The turnover was great, profit was pretty good and cash flow was OK as well.
The business owner worked more on feel. It was a services business, so if they did a certain number of reports in a month, she knew roughly how much turnover they would get. Because their costs were fairly minimal, she knew roughly what profit they would get.
But one of the things we looked at was that although the headline figures were fine, we needed to delve into them in more detail.
What we found was that although everything was working fine, they were taking a lot more time on the reports than they were able to bill. I think it took them about 27 hours to do a report, but they were only billing for about 15 hours.
They were leaving a lot of revenue on the table. It just needed a few reports and some analysis to get under the skin of that and make the required changes. That then drove revenue without doing any more work, which is a great way to drive growth.
To finish on finance, here are some key questions.
Do you know your cash position in eight weeks? Can you predict it? Are you forecasting with cash flow forecasts and similar tools, so you can make the right decisions at the right time?
That helps you make changes or do certain tasks if there is an upcoming payment.
Another question is: has winning a new client created anxiety or excitement?
If it's excitement, then great. If it's anxiety because the cost of a new client will put you under more strain, either from a resource perspective or operationally, then that might be something to look at.
The final thing is: do you know your numbers, or do you feel them, like the example I gave?
When you come through the early start-up phases, you can get a feel for things and an intuitive sense of your business, which is great. But as you start to scale, you need that little bit of extra visibility on what's actually happening in the business.
I've put a picture of Everest here, hopefully as a stock image.
To summarise, when it comes to scaling a business, everybody is on their own journey. Every business is slightly different, and it takes different things at different stages to progress.
I used Everest as an example because some businesses might be on the plane to Nepal. Some might be at base camp. Some might be at the final scale. Each part will require a different approach.
As I said, in my experience, the three key things are strategy, people and finances.
Hopefully that's been useful and has given you some ideas. I'll hand back to Caitriona because I think we've got a few minutes left to see if we can squeeze in any questions.
Caitriona: Thanks, Michael. We had a question from Simon.
Simon is asking: "Is it important to relook at your business plan and see if monthly or quarterly targets are achieved? And if not, rewrite the business plan to implement more achievable quarterly goals to help the business grow?"
Michael: That's a really good question. It's something a lot of businesses think about because they might set a quarterly target, such as a revenue or profit target.
If they don't hit that after month one, and they're miles behind, there is a tendency to ask whether they need to rewrite it and start again.
It is right to look at it. In my experience, you might need to make some changes. But if your strategy is right, I wouldn't throw it out completely.
Say your target for the year is to hit £1 million, just for ease of maths. If that's split into quarterly targets, and you haven't hit it after month one or two, is there anything you can do for the rest of the year to catch that up?
If you're diagnosing your business and where you're starting from, was that the right target in the first place?
I wouldn't throw it out completely or start again, because you made that plan for a reason. But it's always important to relook at things. If you need to make tweaks or changes, that's important.
Caitriona: Thank you. We've got a question from Leo. Leo is asking: "How do you evaluate the single thing that really matters at the moment?"
Michael: I think what you're asking is how you break through all the noise and pick the one thing that will make a difference.
When you're looking at your business in terms of where you're at and where you want to get to, you'll probably create a list of different things that are important.
But generally, what I've found is that you'll find the one thing that, if you don't achieve it, will stop everything else. But if you do achieve it, it will allow everything else to come through.
For example, if you've got a solid business with good turnover and good profit, but you're not getting past a certain point or scaling, and you find out that you as the business owner are the bottleneck, then it might not be more customers, better systems or operations that you need. It might be a person.
If you get that person in, it relieves you as the bottleneck, and you can focus on other things. That's the one thing.
So although you may look at the business and think you've got a few different things to tackle, that one thing will alleviate the problem.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're just coming to the end of the session now, but we have time for one final question.
If a business owner only has time to improve one thing over the next three months, what would you recommend they focus on first?
Michael: Again, another really good question.
It depends where you're at as a business. But I think the most important thing for any business is to be clear on what it wants to achieve.
Going back to the previous question, if you don't understand that, it's very difficult to decide what you want to do in other areas.
There are lots of analogies around this. If you don't know where you're going, you don't know what steps to take to get there.
If you get clarity on what you want personally and what you want for your business, everything else will fall into place.
As I said, if it's a lifestyle business, it's a very different plan from a business you want to grow and sell in five years.
If I were in your position, I would focus on what you actually want to get out of the business.
Caitriona: That's a great place to leave it, and great advice.
Thank you so much, Michael, for your presentation. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We'll share the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Michael: Thanks very much.
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