In our second article in our Friction Files series we are exploring why successful businesses can become less efficient as they grow and crucially how to solve it as a problem.
If you can relate to “we’ve grown, but everything feels harder than it should” then read on! It’s a strange thing to admit when the results say otherwise – turnover’s up, the team’s bigger, the order book’s healthier than it’s ever been. Yet the day-to-day experience of running the business gets heavier, not lighter. That gap between the headline numbers and the lived experience is one of the clearest signs that growth has outpaced the structure supporting it.
It isn’t a sign that people are working less well than they used to. It’s usually a sign of what’s quietly accumulated around them as the business has grown.
When growth happens what builds up in a business?
Very few businesses set out to design an operating model for the size they’ll eventually become. They design one for the size they are at the time – and then keep growing inside it.
This isn’t just about how a business feels to operate. ONS research has found a statistically significant relationship between stronger management practices and higher productivity – reinforcing the commercial importance of continually improving how work is organised as a business grows.
A few years on, several things have typically piled up at once:
- Processes inherited from a smaller business. The way approvals, onboarding or reporting worked at £5m turnover often hasn’t been redesigned – just stretched to cope with three times the volume, by three times as many people, none of whom were around when it was first set up. The way forward is to redesign the highest-volume processes around how the business operates today, rather than continuing to stretch the old versions.
- Additional management layers. As the team’s grown, new layers of management have usually been added to keep oversight in place – often without a matching rethink of who actually needs to decide what. More layers frequently means more handoffs, not more clarity. Start by clarifying who should make which decisions, then shape the layers around that, so oversight is built on clear decision rights rather than added on top of their absence.
- Workarounds. Somewhere along the way, a process stopped fitting reality and instead of being redesigned, people quietly built a workaround. Multiply that by every team, over several years and the “official” way of doing things and the way things actually get done start to diverge significantly. The first step is to surface them by mapping what people really do, then building the workarounds that work into a properly designed process and retiring those that don’t.
- Systems bolted together. New software gets added to solve today’s problem, without much thought for how it talks to what’s already there. The result is often several systems doing adjacent jobs, held together by manual reconciliation and a handful of people who know which system to trust. Mapping how systems and data currently connect makes it much clearer what to integrate, consolidate or retire, so technology supports the process rather than being patched around it.
- More meetings. As decision rights blur and information gets harder to find, meetings often become the default way of getting everyone aligned. It works, but it’s an expensive way to make up for gaps that clearer structure would close for free. Once decision rights are clear and key information is easy to find, many alignment meetings can be shortened, reduced or dropped altogether.
- Unclear responsibilities. Roles that were once obvious in a 15-person business – because everyone could see what everyone else was doing – become genuinely ambiguous at 100 people, especially where the business has grown through hiring rather than through a deliberate redesign of who owns what. Defining a clear owner for each key process and decision, and making that visible across the business, replaces assumption with accountability.
- Fragmented information. Data and context end up scattered across systems, spreadsheets and individual inboxes, rather than living somewhere the right people can reliably find it. Decisions slow down not because anyone’s indecisive but because nobody quite has the full picture in one place. Agreeing a single, trusted source for the information that matters most, and making it easy for the right people to access, speeds up decisions without adding effort.
The ONS identifies continuous process improvement as an important element of stronger management practice, with better management associated with both higher productivity and greater business resilience.
None of these appear overnight and none of them are anyone’s fault in isolation. Each one is usually a reasonable response to a problem at the time. It’s the accumulation – several of these building up together, unaddressed, over several years of growth – that turns a business that once ran smoothly into one that feels, from the inside, considerably harder to operate.
Recognising the pattern within the business
The businesses we see this in aren’t failing. Most of them are, by every external measure, succeeding – which is exactly why the erosion is so easy to miss. It shows up as a slow accumulation of friction rather than a single visible problem: things simply take longer, involve more people and require more effort than they should for a business of this size and maturity.
How Alcea helps helps solve the friction that growth can cause a business
This is exactly the kind of operational friction Alcea’s business transformation work is designed to uncover. We look beyond the individual symptoms to understand how the business is actually working as a whole – where processes have become unnecessarily complicated, responsibilities are unclear, information is difficult to access, systems aren’t supporting the way people really work or growth has created dependencies and workarounds that didn’t exist before.
We gather evidence from across the business to identify what’s creating the greatest friction and where change will make the biggest difference. From there, we work alongside leadership teams and their people to redesign processes, clarify ownership, improve ways of working, strengthen capability and introduce the right technology where it genuinely helps. The aim isn’t change for the sake of it. It’s to make the business simpler and more efficient to operate today, while creating stronger foundations for whatever comes next.
If growth has made your business harder rather than easier to run, the problem may be structural rather than individual. Alcea helps growing businesses identify and address the accumulated friction that’s built up around their people and processes. Get in touch to talk it through.