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Join for freePosted: Wed 1st Jul 2026
Ever felt like your business is growing – but somehow you're working harder?
Like every decision still lands on your desk, no matter how many people you've hired or empowered?
In this Lunch and Learn, commercial consultant and author Eddie Stanton explains why most businesses that stall before they scale have a structure problem – and what they can do about it.
Drawing on experience across some of the UK's best-known businesses and the SME sector, Eddie sets out the practical steps to building a business that performs consistently without you, the founder, having to carry it.
Why processes and systems – not people or products – are the real ceiling on growth
How to tell whether your team is truly empowered or just waiting to be told what to do
How a simple weekly rhythm can remove you as the bottleneck without removing you from the business
Eddie has held senior commercial roles – CEO and MD at businesses including Glen Dimplex, Avonside and Baxi, and sales and marketing director at Stewart Milne.
That mix of scale and proximity is what led him to write The New Gold Rush and develop a practical methodology for helping owner-managed businesses build the structure they need to grow without the founder carrying all of it.
Eddie works with businesses on growth strategy, operational systems, fractional commercial leadership and mentoring.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Ryan: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Ryan, and I will 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 small businesses.
Today, I'm really pleased to introduce Eddie Stanton, who is the founder of Broadcom Consultants. In this session, Eddie explains why most businesses that stall before they scale have a structure problem, and what they can do about it.
As always, if you've got any questions throughout the session, post them in the chat and we'll do our best to answer them at the end.
The webinar is recorded, and the follow-up email will go out later today with the recording and further resources.
On that note, I will hand over to you, Eddie.
Eddie: Thanks, Ryan. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you so much for joining.
Today, we're going to look at some of the reasons businesses can get stuck when they are trying to grow. We'll think about what might be holding your business back and, hopefully, offer some solutions based on my experience to date.
First of all, I should introduce myself. My name is Eddie Stanton. I thought it might be helpful to give you a little background and, hopefully, that will show why I'm qualified to talk about the areas we're discussing today.
I've worked at businesses of all sizes, including some pretty large businesses. So I have scale experience, and that has involved decisions with consequences. Hopefully, that's relevant to what we're going to talk about today.
I've also had quite a lot of involvement in later years with SMEs in a variety of different sectors, and that's where the real friction lives that we're addressing today.
I'm going to try and help identify the gap between actual and potential outcomes.
In my experience, similar problems often occur at key stages in a business's growth pattern. I'd like to talk a little bit more about that as we go through the rest of the webinar.
This is what growth issues can look like.
When you have talented founders, which I'm sure you all are, it is seldom a capability issue. In my experience, it tends to be structural.
Some of the issues you'll see are that the speed of decisions and action can suffer. Decisions queue up, opportunities can pass, and the business can, if you're not careful, move at one person's pace and within one person's bandwidth. That person becomes the bottleneck, which is often you as the founder or manager.
Similarly, growth can hit a ceiling if the business can only scale as far as the leader's capability. That can have an impact on your people, either through a lack of motivation or, in some extreme cases, good people leaving.
That's not what anybody wants, given the investment and time it takes to recruit good people.
It's really important that your team feels empowered. The limit is never the marketplace. It's the capacity of the business to adapt and grow.
Even when the founder does delegate opportunity, it's not always obvious to the people within the business that it can be taken up. That's an area I'll come to as we go through today.
Do your employees know that they're trusted to make decisions?
It's about permission versus belief. I think most of us, when we've been in positions of authority, think we've made this clear. But in my experience, the majority of employees are not entirely sure.
What happens is they wait to see what happens when things go wrong. That's where you lead the culture, and the culture will be exactly what you do rather than what you say.
I think that's a really important point to bear in mind as we go through.
Culture underpins all the areas we're going to talk about today. It's not often talked about or even identified, but it really is a critical issue.
When businesses are growing, most tend to make a bet on what the solution will be. It might be the next hire, trying to get good people. It might be a bigger marketing budget. It might be a new product or marketplace.
But none of those things are sufficient if they are successful and the business cannot sustain the growth.
What sustains growth is robust processes, ideally in position early, and systems that give people clarity so they can act without having to come to management for every decision, even at lower levels.
That helps sustain further growth and allows businesses to be successful in those situations.
I'm going to come to a point now that I'm sure many of you will be familiar with, which is the owner-founder dilemma.
It's a pattern that shows up in businesses of all sizes, and it's certainly something that needs to be recognised and addressed.
Business founders are often brilliant at building their businesses, but there does come a point where they can, in some cases, become the constraint.
Operational problems are visible to employees well before you will be aware of them in many cases. But do they reach you at the appropriate time?
There's also the situation that I think we all believe nobody can do the various jobs that need to be done as well as we can. That might be the case. But they can do them well enough, which is a compromise that every leader needs to accept at some point in his or her journey.
Employees do spot those problems, but they can also feel when system failure is apparent.
That often happens when the right culture isn't reinforcing things, or when growth wasn't anticipated and the systems and strategies are not in place.
That led me to write a book, which I'll talk about very briefly in a few moments' time. It also led to the development of an operating system called ClearPath, which I'll touch on shortly.
The book is called The New Gold Rush: How Humans Create Advantage in an Age of Unlimited Capability.
This isn't really a plug for the book. It is available on Amazon, but I wanted to talk about how it led to the journey I've been through in the last 12 months, recognising some of the issues and opportunities that AI is going to bring.
Everybody is talking about AI at the moment. A lot of people, particularly those who are busy day to day, don't take the time to fully understand how it works and what it can do for you.
Essentially, it is another tool. It's a supercharged tool, but that's the way to view it, in my opinion.
AI can accelerate what's happening, both the good and the bad. So if there are structural weaknesses, it will accelerate how they come to the surface.
It also favours businesses that are structurally ready, because it allows them to capitalise on growth, as we spoke about earlier.
One of the things AI does is give greater capability. I'm sure many of you have already identified where it helps in your businesses.
Previously, you may have needed more people, or more people in your supply chain. Some of those areas can now be handled very quickly by one person because of the support AI can give.
What it also does is highlight where gaps can appear.
You may also see companies you're dealing with that are not keeping up with the pace as well as others. Businesses can now grow quickly or fall behind quickly in this new environment.
AI gives greater capability. One of the things the book addresses is the rise of trust networks, of which Enterprise Nation is a great example.
They will become increasingly prominent in terms of how markets develop, probably at the expense of larger corporations. Larger corporations certainly won't disappear, but they won't be as pre-eminent as they have been in the past.
Frameworks are critical. Those are some of the key themes I articulate in the book.
Enough about that. Moving on to where that took me in terms of operating structures.
There are some key characteristics that I've seen in my working career for successful management.
I touched on culture and trust. Systems will only work if people believe it's safe for them to be open and talk about what's happening in the business, rather than what they think the founder or manager wants to hear.
If that's the case, you'll get compliance, but you won't get intelligence applied to move the business forward.
Administration is certainly the bane of most of our lives. For any management process to embed itself into a business, it needs to recognise the need to be light on administration and remove another burden from managers and employees.
If management systems take more than a few minutes to update, they may happen initially, as you have a big push on a new system, but they will usually fade away after a matter of months.
All that effort, resource and often money that's been pointed towards new systems can be wasted, and the thing disintegrates.
The final thing on this slide that I'm particularly keen on is the weekly cadence.
Lots of you, I'm sure, operate on monthly, quarterly or sometimes even half-yearly programmes.
For me, the weekly cadence is a game changer. It's something I've employed in a number of businesses over the last couple of years.
It allows for consistency. It also allows for better marginal improvements, which is important, particularly as things speed up in the AI era.
It moves away from sporadic insights and lurches. It allows people to build steadily, and I think it's a real platform for any management operating system to be built on.
It was taking some of these characteristics that helped me develop the ClearPath app that I spoke about earlier. I'd like to talk about how that works in practice.
ClearPath operates very simply, with five inputs required of every person within the business on a weekly basis.
Two of those cover more strategic elements: personal development progress and strategic business aims. Then, every week, there are three critical business tasks that need to be done by the individual.
Those are the five inputs required on a weekly basis.
The AI element of the application comes in by taking those inputs. It starts to recognise patterns, learns about the individuals and gives guidance.
Once the updates are put in weekly, ClearPath produces an action plan for the following week. It gives advisory notes to people, so they have a structure for how to carry out certain tasks, particularly if it can identify tasks that keep recurring and that people are not able to close out.
It will also flag to management an overall picture of the people reporting in. Again, it will identify patterns. It could identify areas of conflict.
More often, it allows managers to see where people are trying to improve, where that's being successful so it can be recognised, and where perhaps it is less successful so it can stimulate a coaching conversation.
Because it's on a weekly basis, it promotes that weekly gain. Lots and lots of gains from people throughout the business, together with personal development gains, keep people engaged and tend to keep good people in businesses.
It doesn't require any other systems to work with, and there is no ongoing consultancy to maintain it.
The business becomes self-diagnosing as the system learns more and more. It has a 52-week memory, so it can run through a full year or financial year, whichever model your business runs on.
It can also either replace or support quarterly review periods, because all the data is saved on the system and is available for further reference.
In summary, it operates up to four management levels. It summarises team issues to management and highlights issues for note and action.
One of its key strengths is highlighting patterns by department and function. That ensures the management team can make sure people aren't pulling in different directions.
That's not usually intentional, but sometimes it happens when areas get fixated on a particular destination of travel. Sometimes it just needs a nudge to move that back in, so it's aligned with the rest of the business.
One of the key things is that it promotes a more coached approach rather than the command and control approach we can often fall into because of time pressures.
It also encourages people to take ownership, which is absolutely what we all want to do as leaders of teams. We want to make sure our people are fully engaged, developing and adding value to the business, rather than everything going into one bottleneck point, which can often happen.
I've spoken about culture a couple of times already today. For ClearPath, or any other management system, to operate, it requires the right culture, in my opinion.
Leaders need to walk the walk. They need to demonstrate that they are committed to operating in the way they say.
That really manifests itself when the first problems occur. How you, as leaders and teams, respond to that will create the culture that gives people confidence to make some mistakes and learn from them.
Otherwise, people will just do the bare minimum, and problems won't come to the surface until they become major problems.
If you're in a business that has a number of management tiers, it also means that middle managers must not protect patches. They need to be open.
Again, that will only happen if the culture is correct and people feel comfortable and empowered to do so in that environment.
If you don't have that, they become blockers to individual development and business improvement. I've seen that on so many occasions in different businesses, of different sizes and in different sectors.
Just a final point about implementation. It's a commercial operating system, not a technical one. Although it uses AI to support it, and uses it in very clever ways, its intention is to move the business forward commercially.
It isn't about the technology. It's about what the technology delivers.
There are areas where it can support a business, irrespective of size, but usually when you're getting to post-£2 million turnover.
When you grow fast and don't have a system like this, cracks can start to appear. Problems can happen. Standards can drop. Customer service levels can drop.
This gives you the opportunity to see those problems manifesting themselves early, which allows the business to change accordingly.
It does highlight underperforming functions, but not in an accusatory way. It brings things to the surface very quickly, as we mentioned, weekly.
Whether that's sales or operations, it doesn't really matter. It identifies the structure and clarity of the problem, but doesn't personalise it to individuals. I think that is really important in terms of culture.
In terms of structural transitions, it can support whether there's an ownership change, a leadership shift or an operational reset.
If commercial experience is needed, it can highlight that without the permanent hire risk.
There are lots of things it can expose and highlight within the business, all of which enlighten management and employees, and reinforce that ongoing marginal improvement culture.
Here are the areas where I can work in and help. I don't need to read them out. You can read through them.
The way I operate is to meet and talk with people, find out a little bit about the business first, and then jointly determine what the way forward might be.
By no means does it always involve ClearPath, but I wanted to talk about ClearPath because it gave me the opportunity to talk about some of the key blockers to growing businesses, particularly SMEs.
I'm sure it's something that resonates with all of you watching today. You will recognise some of the areas I've highlighted at various points in the growth of your business.
I'm a little bit earlier than anticipated, but not too far off. I'm ready to take any questions.
Ryan, if you could help with that and highlight anything that's been asked, I'll be happy to help.
Ryan: Fantastic. Thanks, Eddie. Really good presentation and really interesting. Thank you for that.
A couple of questions. How would you know whether your business has outgrown its current operating model? Would there be any signs?
Eddie: I think it depends what KPIs you have in the business at the moment.
It may be that you see sales starting to tail off where you've experienced a period of strong growth. All of a sudden, you might see that starting to level out.
Or it may be that, if you're supplying products rather than services, your stocks don't meet requirements.
It could also be greater stress levels within the workforce, or maybe even people deciding to move on unexpectedly.
There are a number of different areas you can look into to give indications. Depending on how frequently profit and loss is produced, you can look at that. Your bank balance is always a good indicator.
There are lots of different areas, and the top line is not always the obvious one.
Ryan: Interesting. So there are a couple of different things that can give it away and that you need to look out for.
Eddie: They can occur in any area of the business. Depending on the function, it just becomes a little bit stretched or stops working as it was.
It might be, as I said during the presentation, that decisions aren't being made quickly enough.
That could be for a variety of reasons, but it could be because there are bottlenecks.
It might not necessarily be the founder. It could be somebody in the business who is overwhelmed and therefore can't get to the critical decisions that need to be made. They're too busy doing the operational stuff.
Ryan: Brilliant. Thanks, Eddie. That ties in a bit with this next question, around decisions not being made quickly enough.
What would you say are some of the other biggest structural mistakes you see founders make when they're trying to scale?
Eddie: I think what happens is everybody is incredibly busy. Therefore, the pressure becomes overwhelming to do something quickly and urgently.
While that is a pressure, it can often lead to the wrong decisions. It can lead to overinvestment in systems that aren't appropriate or may not be required.
With any system, whether it's ClearPath, a CRM system, stock management or whatever it is, it's really important that the business has clarity about why it is making that change and why it is making that investment.
If you don't have that clarity, there's a tendency to rush into things. We all know that when we're implementing systems, they can take a lot of management time.
So at a stage in the business's development where it is already experiencing stresses because of growth, you then add another layer of complexity. That takes people's focus off the key things that are keeping the business successful.
That's why I highlighted in the presentation that people should think about the structure that underpins growth, so that as growth takes place, you have most of the necessary elements already there.
They have the capacity to take more, but giving thought to that before you think you will actually require it is a wise undertaking if people can get that foresight.
That's about having an overarching strategy for the business rather than just the operational day to day.
Obviously, there is a place for day-to-day improvisation, but a clear plan with clear milestones for when they are to be implemented would go a long way towards addressing the issues.
Ryan: Brilliant. Thank you, Eddie. Really helpful.
Another question. How would you say a founder can reduce their involvement without losing visibility over the business?
Eddie: Putting systems to one side, good practice is effective delegation. It sounds easy, but to do it properly takes time.
When delegating a task to one of the team, it's very important to give that person boundaries and parameters. What do you expect within a particular time frame, and what authority are you going to give that person to complete that task?
You may not give them any more authority, but if that's the case, they need to know that.
If you don't give people parameters, they will keep coming back to you to ask questions and ask you to make the decisions.
The other thing I would add around delegation is that you have to be prepared to allow people to fail. We don't want them to fail, but if people make mistakes, they will learn from those mistakes, provided they are handled properly.
If the minute somebody doesn't do something right they get called out, they will shrink. They won't step up going forward because that's the signal they're getting: if you put your head above the parapet and it goes wrong, something bad will happen.
So I think there needs to be a very clear structure for delegation, backed up by empowering and supporting people.
The paradox is that when you first start to do it, it takes up more of your time, so you can be even busier. But over time, it will release you from every day-to-day decision that needs to be made and give you the thinking time you need to address the strategic issues your business requires.
Ryan: It's like short-term pain for long-term gain.
Eddie: 100%, Ryan. It is, 100%.
Ryan: I guess it's like when you get someone new in the team. You spend a lot of time training them, but the end goal is that, hopefully, you're going to be able to pass on some of those tasks and delegate.
Eddie: That's a great example. We've all been there. You have to juggle some plates.
In my experience, there is never a completely calm time, but it's about getting the balance right in terms of what your role is as leader or founder, and what the role of the various people within your business is.
Those roles need to be clearly understood by everybody, and then people need to be allowed to crack on and do those things.
Then it's about monitoring and reporting, and what your key performance indicators are, so you can see the outputs coming from the various areas you've delegated.
Ryan: Absolutely. I think that's really helpful, Eddie. This has been a really great session, and we're just about bang on time.
I was just going to pop your book in the chat for anybody who's interested. I've got the Amazon link there. I know you referenced it earlier, but I thought anyone who's interested could check out the book.
Eddie: Thanks, Ryan. Please do, and I'd be glad of any comments back about anything I've spoken about today.
I will send out details of my website, so you can contact me directly if you wish to, or through Enterprise Nation.
I'd be really appreciative if anybody feels this has been helpful or would like a little further information or a discussion.
Ryan: Amazing. That's brilliant, Eddie.
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