Episode 6: The hidden cost of growth: why organisational change can’t wait

This episode explores why growing agencies can actually struggle, and what's really happening beneath the surface when a business starts to feel broken.

The lobster analogy

Gareth and Alfie have a vivid metaphor to cover why organisations experience issues as they scale: agencies outgrow their structures the way lobsters shed their shells. During that transition, the animal becomes vulnerable - exposed and fragile until the new shell hardens. The crucial difference, though, is that lobsters actively go through that process. Founders typically don't. Instead, they keep the same processes, the same people, and the same roles long after the business has grown beyond them, leaving the organisation stuck in a kind of permanent mid-moult.

Four things that break during growth

Processes are the first casualty, though there is an important distinction: processes aren't really breaking, they're being revealed as never having existed in the first place. Most agencies run on habit and institutional memory rather than documented workflows. The business operates on "how we've always done it," which works fine at small scale but quietly falls apart as the team grows.

People break in two distinct ways. The first is capability - individuals who were perfectly suited to the role at an earlier stage hit a ceiling as demands increase. The second is workload: even capable people buckle under the stress of growth when supporting structures aren't in place. Importantly, this isn't always terminal - some people can grow into new versions of their role with the right development.

Profit presents one of the more counterintuitive dynamics discussed: revenue goes up, but profitability goes down. Small, tight teams of five to ten people are often more profitable than larger teams of fifteen to thirty, because business complexity compounds faster than efficiency gains. Founders frequently find themselves earning less despite leading a bigger business.

Communication becomes exponentially harder as headcount grows. With two or three people, alignment is natural and almost effortless. With ten or twenty, the number of communication lines multiplies dramatically - and technology doesn't solve this. The real problem is human: people lose a shared sense of intention and priority.

How it all connects

These four areas don't fail in isolation. Communication breakdown leads directly to process failures. As the founder's span of control stretches, they lose direct connection with team members, different parts of the business develop independently, and people start making decisions without a shared compass. What started as a few growing pains quietly becomes a structural crisis.