You can't out-sell broken delivery

You can do everything right on sales and still get caught out.

When you’re growing fast, the first thing that breaks is delivery. It goes out of sight, and by the time it shows up in the numbers it’s been broken a while. The attention’s on sales, the next round, the push into a new market, and delivery gets whatever’s left.

Here’s the bit most people miss when they’re growing: the team and the processes that got you to £1m aren’t automatically the ones that get you to £2m, or £5m. It’s less about the individuals than you’d think. It’s about how your process and your culture evolve as you grow, or more honestly, how they don’t. Nobody sits down and redesigns delivery. It just tweaks and stretches and gets handed over, one busy week at a time, until it doesn’t hold.

Let me give you a real example. I’ve kept it anonymous, but the numbers are real, because the numbers are the point.

Brought in to oversee, ended up hand-delivering

I came into a scale-up as a contractor to help with one big slice of their delivery through a busy peak. I thought I’d be overseeing a team. What actually happened is I ended up single-handedly delivering a load of the work myself, at a very practical, hands-on level, because there was no process and no handover, and the promises made to clients meant getting the work out the door was almost impossible. The team who were meant to be doing it had basically evaporated, taken off to work on other parts of the business.

This was a business that had taken multiple rounds of investment and was pushing hard into a new market. Headcount was high. From where I was sitting, looking only at delivery, nobody was watching the spend. The risk of under-delivering was so high that whichever contractor came in just spent whatever it took to tick the boxes. No time to shop around on price or quality. Just get it done.

The analogy I’d use: a bucket with a load of holes in it, and them just pouring more and more water in.

The number

When they finally looked properly, they were making an eight-figure annual loss. Investor money. I don’t know whether that was the loss they’d planned for. But the fact that they immediately made a round of redundancies and shrank the team tells me it probably wasn’t.

The part that actually costs you

Here’s what gets lost when you only look at the money.

The core problem was simple: no one was owning delivery. The people who were supposed to kept getting pulled onto sales and growth, which makes complete sense if the revenue line is all you’re watching. It makes a lot less sense once you realise you’re burning bridges with customers you worked really hard to win, and their long-term value with you drops every time.

There’s a human cost too, and that’s the one that gets ignored completely.

They had a team of relatively junior people who were doing a fantastic job, but weren’t really given any leadership. Give that a couple of years and they’d burn out, and start to feel like they weren’t doing a great job. Which isn’t the case. They were absolutely smashing it.

That’s the bit nobody puts in the plan. When delivery has no owner, and the culture that grows up around it is “just spend, don’t think about it too hard”, you get one of three outcomes. None of them are good.

Good people get disheartened, and they leave. That’s a shame, and replacing them is expensive.

Or they stay, and it turns a bit toxic, because what they’ve learned is that the way things work here is you throw money at the problem and don’t think about it.

Or, worst of all, the people who genuinely care about their work end up feeling like they’re doing a bad job. Not because they are, but because nobody gave them what they needed to do a good one.

Zoom right out, and here’s what you’ve actually got. A business that, on the surface, looks like it’s doing plenty. Dig in, and it’s losing money, burning through good people, and wasting everyone’s time.

This is fixable, and it doesn’t mean slamming on the brakes

It doesn’t mean stop spending, and it doesn’t mean killing the growth plan. It means patching a few of the holes in the bucket first, maybe by bringing in a senior person to do that tactically, and then starting to steer the ship in the right direction. Give the team a bit more visibility of what’s coming so they can plan for it. Throwing more people at the work gets it out the door, but it doesn’t touch the thing that’s actually wrong.

The mental model I keep coming back to is crossing the chasm. Most fast-growing businesses treat the gap between where they are and where they want to be as something to leap, and they drop an alarming amount down the gap while they’re mid-jump. You don’t have to. You can start building a bridge. I’m not saying nothing falls down the chasm on the way. I’m saying plan for the bridge instead of pretending the gap isn’t there.

Build a bridge to cross the chasm. Don’t just take a run-up and hope.

You can’t grow purely on revenue and sales. It’s obviously a massive part of it. But you’ve got to be able to follow through and deliver what you said you would. And getting everyone aligned, even when they don’t all agree, is key.

If any of this feels close to home, Map Your Delivery is the method I use with clients, packaged so you can run it yourself in an afternoon and find where your own bucket is leaking.