The First Signs: When Growth Starts Creating More Friction Than Progress
Some of the decisions limiting a business were made when the business looked very different.
Growth is supposed to be the reward.
When demand starts to build, it feels like proof that what you built works. What gets mentioned less is how often that same success can make the business’s old assumptions harder to see.
What Happens When Growth Outpaces You?
One owner built his business from the ground up, producing replacement lenses for name-brand sunglasses. In the early days, he cut lenses himself in a garage, often working past four in the morning around a day job. Years later, the business had steady demand and a growing team behind it, but revenue had flattened.
On one of his first calls with Mikke, the question was simple: what do you do for shipping?
Free, and nationwide. Always had been. It was part of the brand.
Mikke asked what would happen if they charged $1.99 instead.
The silence on the call said enough. Nobody would notice, the owner finally said. They made the change the following week, adding more than $200,000 to the bottom line that year.
The business was still successful, but some of its earliest assumptions had stopped being questioned. The owner was close enough to build the business, but too close to see which decisions were now limiting it.
On the Sigmoid Curve, this is the shift from growth toward plateau. The opportunity had not disappeared. The issue was that the business had outgrown the way it was being led.
Slow Down to Speed Up
The instinct in a moment like that is to keep pressing on the business in the same way that created the growth. It feels responsible. It is also how a business misses the points on the curve that matter most. You cannot tell whether you are still climbing or already being held back by decisions the business has outgrown if you are moving too fast to question them.
Slowing down is what makes growth legible enough to steer. For this business, it took one pointed question from Mikke: why is shipping still free? That pause exposed a decision that had become part of the business without being tested against the business it had become.
Every phase of the Sigmoid Curve eventually asks the same thing of you, and it is rarely more speed. See where you stand clearly enough, and you get to decide what happens next. Keep moving at the business’s pace instead of your own, and eventually the business decides that for you.
by
The Point Success Guide
in
Strategy Posted on
14/07/2026 15:08
