Why £10m-£30m businesses hit an identity crisis.

(And why your growth might be holding you back)

There’s a strange moment that happens in businesses around the £10m–£30m turnover mark.  They’re successful by every external measure - solid revenue, a loyal team, a reputation that’s been earned the hard way.

And yet, inside the organisation, something starts to fray.  Quietly. Slowly. Almost imperceptibly.  It’s not operations, not culture, not product.

It’s the story. The story that got them here no longer fits who they’ve become.

Having worked in, for, and with businesses of this size for most of my career, I’ve seen the same challenges crop up again and again. I call it a narrative identity crisis.  These are the symptoms I see most often:

You ask five people what you do - and get five different answers.
Not wildly off - just orbiting slightly different planets.
The alignment that once came effortlessly now feels like a game of ‘close enough.’

The founder’s original clarity has diffused across the organisation.
What began as a sharp, lived, energising understanding has quietly dissolved into meetings, decks, onboarding docs and inherited assumptions.
The signal is still there - but being warped and fractured by scale.

Growth has multiplied complexity, but your story hasn’t evolved to match.
More products, more customers, more opportunities, more expectations.  Yet the message still wears the outfit from chapter one. It technically fits - but it restricts movement.

Your marketing sounds increasingly generic - even though your product or service aren’t.
When you started, you stood apart.  Now, the category chorus has harmonised around the same phrases, frameworks, and claims, and your voice has blended into the background.

Decisions are getting slower - not because you’re unfocused, but because there’s no shared frame of reference.
As you scale, choices multiply. Without a clear, agreed narrative to guide them, teams end up re-explaining context and intent every time. What should be a quick alignment becomes a slow negotiation.

Growth changes you.  It stretches your model, your people, your ambitions. But if you don’t also evolve your purpose, mission, positioning and vision, the organisation is effectively running on an outdated operating system.

Your success is holding you back. Not because you grew too fast - but because you didn’t pause to redefine the story that should guide what comes next.

Here are four places I take clients when we do this work:

1. Revisit your Purpose
What change are you actually here to make now?
Not in year one, but today.

2. Reset your Mission
What do you do, for whom, and how?
Fewer words, more truth.

3. Re-establish your Positioning
What meaningfully sets you apart now?
Not the story you’ve always told, but the one that is genuinely distinctive.

4. Refresh your Vision
Where are you headed?
Pain a picture of a future your team can gather around.

Individually, these are helpful.  Together, they create the blueprint to support the next stage of growth.
If you’re between £10m and £30m, here’s the reality: Your narrative won’t update itself.  And without updating it, you cap your potential, often without realising that’s what’s happening.

A clear story isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’ at this stage.  It’s strategic infrastructure. And for many businesses, the next chapter only becomes possible once they rewrite the one they’ve outgrown.