What got you here won’t get you there…
There’s a point in every scaling business where things that used to work — often brilliantly, often without much effort — just… stop working.
Not overnight, not dramatically. In fact at the beginning it’s more of a creeping awareness that turns into a broader sense of frustration and sometimes even confusion.
You might experience it as a slowing of momentum. You might notice that decisions take longer. Often things that felt easy suddenly feel clunky, and you start to notice little pockets of friction that weren’t there before.
And then someone asks the question – “Why don’t things feel like they used to?”
What they’re seeing is a ‘culture drop’.
Up until now, culture wasn’t really something you had to do. It just… was. But the culture drop is a very clear signal you’ve entered the messy middle – that weird state between start up and business as usual. The tricky teenage years of business.
The messy middle isn’t a failure, it’s a growing pain. And it’s a moment that gets misread all the time.
Leaders assume something has gone wrong and, as natural problem solvers, they immediately start looking for what’s broken. They question the people and they wonder if they’ve broken the magic spell.
A lot of the leaders we meet are quietly waiting for things to go back to normal.
But they won’t.
Because this isn’t a blip, it’s the point where the business has outgrown the way it used to work.
Culture doesn’t scale by accident
In the early days, you don’t build culture. You are the culture.
You’re hiring people you know, or people like you. You’re in the room together. You’re talking all the time. Things get picked up quickly. Standards are obvious because they’re lived, not written.
It’s fast because it’s instinctive, but as you grow, that stops being enough.
You’re no longer all in the same room. You’re hiring people who weren’t there at the start. Communication becomes less direct. Assumptions creep in. The gravitational pull of the core team starts not to be enough to hold everyone close any more.
And this is where culture starts to fragment, and tribes emerge. Different interpretations of “how we do things around here” turn into the old guard and the new guard.
At that point, you have a choice.
You can leave it, and let people create their own version of your culture. Or you can step in and start shaping it intentionally.
Most leaders resist that at first because it feels like you’re about to turn something organic into something corporate.
But you’re not breaking the magic, you’re trying to make sure it survives.
The thing everyone resists (and then needs)
At exactly the same time, something else shows up. A need for more process. I can almost hear you recoil! Process sounds boring and slow doesn’t it. It sounds heavy, bureaucratic, the beginning of the end.
Up to now, you have been the process.
You’ve made the decisions, you’ve joined the dots, you’ve spotted the problems and fixed them. You’ve carried the context in your head. When everything works through you, that works.
It completely breaks when it doesn’t. Why? Because now people are guessing, working things out late, finding out after the fact. Everyone starts solving the same problems twice.
Suddenly, the business feels noisy, slower, increasingly frustrating. Not because there’s too much process but because there isn’t enough of the right kind.
So what now?
If this feels familiar, you’re probably in the messy middle. You’d be forgiven for trying to solve it by stepping in and doing more.
But the business doesn’t need more from you, it needs you to take a different, more intentional approach.
You need to step out of the day to day and start to think more intentionally about what your business needs next.
Don’t wait for it to “settle”.
It won’t.
If you’re in the middle of a culture drop, drop us a line. Sometimes even small shifts make all the difference.
