Insights
Insights for Growing Businesses
We publish thinking on the operational challenges that growing businesses face.
Topics include cash flow discipline, control and performance visibility, workflow design, systems integration, and how to build operational structure without corporate complexity.
Founders can't step back. The reason isn't delegation.
More than half of UK SMEs would stop trading within a year if they lost a key person. Founder dependency is one of the most common patterns in growing businesses, and one of the most underdiagnosed. The advice to delegate fails because it misreads the constraint. The fix is structural, and it has two layers.
Why cash flow problems are usually workflow problems, not finance problems
More than 8 in 10 UK SMEs hit a cash flow problem every year, and most founders look to the finance function for the answer. It is rarely where the fix sits. For growing businesses, cash flow problems are usually downstream symptoms of a workflow that has broken between the first lead and cash landing.
How to work out which part of your business to fix first
Most founders spot an operational symptom and act on it before working out the cause. The new tool, the new hire, the new dashboard. Six months later the problem is still there and the money is spent. This article walks through the simple diagnostic method that prevents spending the next operational pound on the wrong fix.
Why Every Growing Business Needs an Operating System
Most growing businesses have good people and strong revenue. What they lack is a single place where everything is organised, visible, and owned. A business operating system gives you that, whether you have 10 people or 60. Here is what it looks like and why it changes everything.
Deloitte surveyed 3,200 leaders about AI. Here's what it means if you run a £5m business.
Deloitte surveyed 3,235 leaders about AI adoption. Three findings stand out, and all three point to the same root cause: you cannot embed AI into operations you have not structured yet. If your workflows are undocumented and your data lives in three different places, where does the AI tool even point? The operations come first.