Every business reaches a point where working harder stops working. It’s the epitome of “what got you here won’t get you there.”
Though counterintuitive, you eventually run smack dab into the reality that more work doesn’t necessarily equate to more results.
When this shows up—and it will—the question that begs to be answered is: Why?
You can sell more, hire more, spend more, add more, launch more, and demand more from yourself and your team. But like a jockey on a horse in the Kentucky Derby, no matter how hard you push for more, more, more, there’s a limit to what it’s capable of.
But have you considered that the horse isn’t the problem?
If you want to go faster, sometimes you need an entirely different vehicle—one designed for a level of speed that makes a horse look like it’s standing still.
This is when you recognize that growth starts exposing everything that wasn’t built to grow.
Communication breaks down. Decisions slow down. People become overwhelmed. Accountability blurs. Margins shrink. Culture begins to change. And somehow, despite having more people around you, more decisions still seem to find their way back to you.
I’ve experienced this firsthand.
When we started Chiro One, we didn’t have a sophisticated organizational design. We had a vision, enormous ambition, incredible partners, and a willingness to work.
And work we did.
Like a weed, we grew. Then we grew some more. But each new level exposed something the previous level had let us get away with.
Eventually, I learned something that fundamentally changed the way I think about building companies:
Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
Think about that for a moment.
Your current results aren’t happening independently of your organization. They’re being produced by it—your revenue, profitability, turnover, customer experience, execution, leadership, culture, and even the amount of time the company requires from you.
They’re all outputs of the organization you’ve built.
So when you don’t like the results, simply demanding better results isn’t enough.
You have to examine the design.
Growth Doesn’t Fix Problems…It Magnifies Them.
As entrepreneurs, we’re optimists by nature. We tend to believe the next level of growth will solve today’s problems. Up to a point, we’ve even proven it to be true.
Until it isn’t.
Growth has an interesting way of exposing weaknesses that were invisible when the company was smaller.
A communication problem with 10 people becomes a serious problem with 100. A weak hiring process becomes expensive when you’re hiring dozens of people. An unclear strategy becomes dangerous when dozens of decisions are being made without you.
A founder who approves everything becomes the greatest bottleneck in the organization. And a culture that exists primarily in the founder’s head begins disappearing when the founder can no longer personally influence everyone.
That’s why I’ve come to believe:
Growth breaks everything.
Not because growth is bad, but because it puts pressure on the design.
And eventually, every system reveals its ceiling.
You Can’t Buile a $100 Million Company With a $10 Million Organizational Design
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why so few companies reach $100 million.
Part of the answer can be found in something I learned as an elite athlete at UW–Madison in the mid-’80s.
As a full-scholarship wrestler for the Badgers, one of the most powerful lessons I learned was to understand the foundation of every possible move. Wrestling has seven basic skills. Once you understand them, you can break virtually any move down into its core components.
When something failed, the answer wasn’t necessarily to learn another move. It was to identify which basic skill hadn’t been applied correctly and fix it.
Mastery came from mastering the fundamentals.
Business is exactly the same.
Instead of seven basic skills, a scalable organization has nine fundamental elements:
- Vision
- Strategy
- Structure
- People
- Processes
- Systems
- Metrics
- Rewards
- Culture
Whether you’ve intentionally designed them or not, they’re already at work in your company.
The question isn’t whether you have them. It’s whether you’ve intentionally designed them to produce the future you’re trying to create.
Because they either reinforce one another—or fight one another.
You can have a $100 million vision and a $10 million leadership team.
You can have an incredible strategy and systems incapable of executing it.
You can hire talented people and put them inside broken processes.
You can say accountability matters while measuring the wrong things.
You can talk about teamwork while rewarding individual behavior.
You can put beautiful words describing your culture on a wall while tolerating behavior completely inconsistent with them.
And then wonder why the organization isn’t producing the results you want.
The problem may not be effort.
The problem may be the design.
Begin With the End in Mind
Imagine your company five years from now.
Not simply bigger.
Built...
What does it look like?
How much revenue does it generate? How profitable is it? Who leads it? What decisions happen without you? What systems run the organization? What does your culture demand?
And perhaps most importantly:
What would your company have to become for someone else to place extraordinary value on it?
Now work backward.
If that’s the company you’re trying to build, what must be true about your Vision, Strategy, Structure, People, Processes, Systems, Metrics, Rewards, and Culture?
Then ask the harder question:
How many of those things are true today?
That gap is your work.
The Founder Has to Change First
There’s one more uncomfortable truth.
You can’t redesign the organization without redesigning your role inside it.
The person who starts the company is rarely the same person required to lead it at $10 million. And the person capable of leading it at $10 million isn’t automatically prepared to lead it at $100 million.
Every new level requires a new you.
At first, your value comes from doing. Then managing. Then leading.
Eventually, your highest value may come from designing the organization itself—building leaders, allocating capital, creating clarity, protecting culture, and making a handful of decisions that affect thousands of others.
That’s a fundamentally different job.
And it requires a fundamentally different identity.
Which One Are You Building?
I’ve written before about the distinction between a business, an organization, and an institution.
A business makes money.
An organization runs without you.
An institution outlives you.
There’s nothing wrong with building any of the three, but you should know which one you’re building.
Because if your dream is extraordinary, the organization underneath it has to be extraordinary too.
So here’s the question I’d challenge you to consider this week:
If your company became 10X larger tomorrow, what would break first?
Your answer may tell you more about what’s preventing your next level of growth than another sales strategy ever will.
The question isn’t simply: How big do you want to become?
The better question is:
What are you building today that will be capable of carrying you there?
On October 29, I’ll be bringing 30 founders together in Chicago for the LARGER THAN LIFE Business Summit to work through questions exactly like these.
Not simply to build bigger businesses, but to build organizations capable of becoming something much bigger than the founder who started them.
Because your vision determines where you’re going.
Your organizational design determines whether you can get there.
Looking forward to serving you on Thursday, October 29, 2026.
Until then,
Be Larger Than…
