Growth breaks consulting firms. Here's how to fix yours.
I thought growing a consulting firm would be like stacking bricks. Turns out, it’s more like juggling knives. It’s risky. It’s messy. It’s thrilling. And it can cut you if you’re not careful. In Episode 02 of the Z Suite, Groundline GM Kyle James and I wrestled with the five things growth breaks fastest - and how to growth-proof them.
5 fast fixes for the stuff growth breaks.
1. Focus 🎯
Growth kills focus. The projects roll in. You start saying yes to everything, and suddenly nobody knows what you stand for. When I joined Nexient, we did a little bit of everything, and it was killing our margins. We only found real momentum when we narrowed what we did down a single line: life’s too short for crappy software. It became our rallying cry, but more importantly it became our filter. We started saying no to work, people got to know who we were and what we were good at, and that focus drove five years of fantastic growth.
Focus isn’t just about getting clearer about what you do. It’s also about getting sharp on who you hire. For Kyle all it took to unlock explosive growth in the UK was one good hire. Conversely, one wrong hire was all it took to slow Groundline right down in another.
Fast Fix: Write down, in one line, what your firm does better than anyone else, then test it out with the person in your firm with the strongest bullshit radar.
2. Culture 🫶
Growth kills culture. New hires, projects and clients dilute it. The wrong hires can wreck it completely.
The fix isn’t complicated team offsites though. It’s small rituals, inside jokes, shared values, repeated a million times over a year. That’s what keeps your “secret sauce” intact as headcount grows, and ask Kyle puts it - if everyone’s on the same ship, all singing the same song, like a bunch of pirates, then it’ll make your job so much easier.
Fast Fix: Add one small ritual to your next team meeting that reminds people who you are. For Kyle it’s recognising the small wins with a $50 note and a lego mini figure. What’s yours?
3. Risk ⚡
Growth kills risk. The bigger you get, the more you play it safe - and safe firms stop growing. Conversely, a stretch of growth can also make you overconfident, and you can end up taking stupid risks that almost sink the business. We once lost a 50-person project because we’d gotten too confident, didn’t bother having a tough conversation with a client, and that silence cost us millions.
I loved the way Kyle summed up his approach to risk - find a way to make it fail as quickly as possible, have a laugh, admit you stuffed that one up, and move on. The only way through is to take risks, fail them fast, laugh, and move on. Screw up fast, and move on even faster.
Fast Fix: Identify one experiment you’ve been sitting on. Run it this week, no matter how small, and push it to fail fast.
4. Ownership 🛠️
Growth kills ownership. The Ringlemann Effect explains why - the more people you’ve got pulling on the rope, the less effort they put in individually. But the firms that scale are the ones where everyone thinks like a leader. At Nexient we did this by giving everyone a shot at leadership. We built transparency into every role, so if you wanted to move into management, you could see the skills required, start learning, and plan against it. That openness created leaders at every level.
For Kyle it’s about giving leadership training to the whole team - by open-sourcing communication skills, conflict management, and courageous conversation training, everyone is armed to show up like a leader.
Fast Fix: Ask three people outside your leadership team to make a decision this week you’d normally make. Back them fully.
5. Consistency 🔄
Growth kills consistency. New projects, new clients, new hires - and suddenly delivery quality slips.
We learned the hard way: every new project needs a mix of old and new team members. The “old hands” carry your DNA, your standards, your culture.
At the peak of Nexient’s growth we were hiring people so quickly we had the mistake of having brand new consultants, working on brand new projects, for brand new clients. Nobody knew what we stand for, or how we worked, and it always ended badly. I learned the hard way - make sure you have someone who knows your culture deeply on every project.
Fast Fix: Check your next client project team. If it’s all new hires, add at least one seasoned insider.
Growth is just a series of risks. Take them. Fail them fast. Laugh at them. Move on.
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