The Importance of Defining Growth

March 2026

Here's a scenario you might recognise.

Hard-working leadership team. Headcount up. Revenue moving in the right direction.

And yet something is sluggish — decisions take too long, good people are pulling in different directions, and strategies that looked right on paper are stalling.

Quite often, the root cause is both simpler and more stubborn than people expect. The business hasn't clearly defined what growth means right now — and even where a definition exists, it hasn't been communicated in a way the organisation has actually internalised.

The definition tends to live in one person's head. Sometimes that's the founder. Sometimes it's a new CEO or MD who came in with a clear vision that never quite landed. Either way, the team can't be blamed for not following a map they were never shown.

Large businesses have this problem too — compounded by layers of management, competing divisional agendas, and the distance between strategy and execution.

But for founder-led and PE-backed businesses in growth phase, there's less margin for error. The team is smaller, the lines of communication are shorter, and the cost of misalignment lands faster.

I've seen it from both sides. Running a business for 22 years, and now as a chairman and advisor working with founders and investors. Growth gets used to mean market share, headcount, margin improvement, new products, and geographic expansion — sometimes by different people in the same room, in the same meeting, about the same quarter.

The cost shows up six months later. When the sales director and the CFO are surprised by each other's priorities. When a capable hire leaves because their role kept shifting. When a decent strategy fails not because it was wrong, but because nobody was rowing in the same direction.

This is where a good non-executive earns their place. Exec teams are, by definition, deep in it — close to the detail, under daily pressure, rarely with the space to step back. A non-exec's job is to see the wood for the trees.

To ask the question that's too obvious to get asked internally: what are we actually trying to achieve this year, and does everyone in this room mean the same thing when they say it?

That clarity doesn't emerge on its own. It needs someone to demand it. H/t Alex Wright for his piece in The Times on Monday — worth a read.