IDEAS / POST

The Moment Your Company Should Accelerate is Exactly When It Sometimes, Well, Doesn't

A conversation with Marnie Larson on why growth stalls at inflection points, and what’s actually going on when it does.

Lorraine McGregor is a value creation advisor – the person founder-led companies call when growing feels harder than it should, and the board is starting to ask uncomfortable questions.

I help those same companies figure out what they’re actually saying to the market, and why it stopped landing.

Together, we occupy a strange corner of the business world together: non-obvious problems, chronically misdiagnosed by people with more systematic approaches than ours.

31,000 Companies that Can’t Move

What we’ve learned, between us, is that companies are far less systematized than they’d like to believe. A lot of the speed bumps they hit aren’t structural failures, but idiosyncrasies made manifest.

A founder blind spot that nobody has the courage to name.
The value proposition that calcified three years ago and has been misdirecting the sales team ever since.
The story the company tells about itself that stopped being true at some point.

These are the things that make companies stall.

If the numbers are any indication, the stalling is happening at a head-turning rate. Maureen Farrell of the New York Times recently reported that private equity, an industry whose entire business model depends on buying companies, making them more valuable, and selling them, is currently sitting on 31,000 companies it can’t move, at a valuation of $3.7 trillion. The dark joke making the rounds, according to the Times, is that many of these firms have already raised their last fund. They just don’t know it yet.

That’s the world Lorraine and I are trying to make sense of, one stalled company at a time. Which is why we started our podcast, Where Growth Stalls.

For this episode, we wanted someone who’d lived inside this problem rather than observed it from a distance.

Marnie Larson spent over two decades at StarGarden Corporation (as COO, then CEO) steering a software business through the full cycle of what we’re talking about: growth, stagnation, reinvention, and eventual transition. She’s now Sr. VP of Sales, Marketing, and HCM at OnActuate, which means she gets to run the same experiment in a new context.

Marnie is not someone who studied rooms where things went sideways. She was in those rooms.

The Playbook that’s Working Against You

As we dug into the conversation, we kept returning to one observation that’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s obvious in hindsight. The playbook that got you here is often the thing actively working against you getting to the next stage.

When you’re inside a company, the habits and instincts that drove early success feel like core identity.

The founder who knows every customer by name.
The scrappy “figure it out” culture.
The value proposition that was sharp and differentiated at $5M in revenue and has since become a kind of inherited mythology.
The story everyone can tell, even if they didn’t live it directly.

At a certain size, a company stops being driven by the founders’ relationships and instincts, and starts needing to be driven by clarity that can survive a conversation the founder isn’t in the room for.

Marnie put it in simple, clear terms. There’s a moment in every company’s life where it needs to stop selling on the strength of personal relationships and start selling on the strength of a value proposition that can stand on its own.

But many companies don’t. They treat it as a sales problem, a marketing problem, or a hiring problem, and throw resources at the symptom while the actual cause sits upstream, untouched.

You’re Not Looking at A Current Problem

Lorraine’s frame was characteristically unsentimental. The value a company thinks it’s creating and the value the market actually sees are rarely identical, and the gap between them doesn’t show up in the gross profit numbers (the most important measure of success) until well after the window to close it has started narrowing.

What a future investor or acquirer will actually pay for tends to arrive as a surprise at exactly the wrong moment. By the time the cost of sales climbs or growth visibly decelerates, the underlying cause is usually years old.

You’re not looking at a current problem. You’re looking at the bill arriving for decisions made when things still felt fine.

Seeing The Signals

The signals are always there. They’re just not where leadership is looking.

What are those signals?

Sales cycles keep lengthening even as the product keeps improving.
Deals go quiet after promising starts.
New hires “just don’t get it,” when the real issue is that nobody has articulated “it” in a way that survives outside the founding team’s heads.
Customer passion becomes customer comfort, then customer apathy.

These aren’t random frustrations. They’re all downstream of the same root cause: the clarity that built the company hasn’t scaled with it.

The Stall Was Never The Ceiling

The counterintuitive part is that the remedy almost never involves more activity.

When leadership teams feel the stall, the instinct is to accelerate: more hires, more features, more spend, more motion. Or, just as commonly, to make it personal. Find whoever is underperforming and push them to fix it, or double down on what worked before and assume the team must be executing it wrong.

Both responses feel decisive. Neither touches the actual problem.

The move is almost always the opposite of decisive-feeling.

Slow down, look upstream, and find the place where the story broke. Reconstruct the value proposition from the outside in, the way a skeptical customer or investor would encounter it, rather than defending the version that lives inside the building.

It’s uncomfortable work. It asks leaders to question things that feel foundational.

But the companies that do it tend to make a useful discovery: the stall wasn’t a ceiling. It was a signal. And signals, unlike ceilings, can be acted on.