IDEAS / POST
The Missing Playbook
Lorraine McGregor and I had been working parallel tracks for years. She was helping companies unlock unrealized growth potential from operations and financial perspectives. I was doing the same, from the brand and narrative perspective. Both approaches delivered strong results.
But when we compared what we’d been seeing in companies trying to scale for sale, a pattern became unmistakable:
Even with top-tier advisors and strong strategies, performance stalled in the critical middle of the scale-up journey. The usual levers – operations, systems, financial optimization – weren’t moving valuation fast enough.
Why were capable leadership teams hitting invisible bottlenecks? And more important, why did it keep happening with alarming regularity?
The Hidden Performance Drag
The good news: if you ask people inside the organizations, they usually know what’s going sideways, and why.
The bad news: pressure from investors, competitors and customers can make it difficult to surface the truth. In simple english, people on the ‘inside’ suffer from a very human dynamic. They know, but they’re shy about telling.
This shows up not only during leadership transition, but also when:
- Results disappoint and pressure tightens,
- Customers shift faster than the company adapts,
- Competition intensifies and urgency spikes,
- Growth expectations outpace internal alignment.
Without a roadmap for how to evolve, leaders often push harder… but friction rises and progress slows.
This drives:
- Information gaps – issues everyone sees but no one escalates,
- Misaligned assumptions – each team member is confident they’re right,
- Execution friction – small disconnects compound into drag.
These aren’t cultural failures. They’re predictable dynamics of scaling under high expectations. And they’re challenging to see and surface.
When The Vision Isn’t Fully Transferable
Here’s what we discovered: The real blocker isn’t strategy or capability. Many acquisition-worthy companies grow on a founder’s instincts and personality. When the leadership model evolves (whether by ownership change or increased growth pressure) the company’s unifying purpose can blur or dissipate.
The following symptoms arise:
- Departments optimize locally instead of winning collectively,
- The story of “how we create value now” weakens,
- The battle cry becomes bloated or diluted, or simply repeated ironically,
- Momentum becomes fragile.
The Missing Playbook
1. Systems
Breakthrough companies install systems that sustain alignment through transition and adaptation:
- Safe Communication Protocols – So truth surfaces without repercussions.
- Execution Visibility – Clear line-of-sight from strategy to role-level decisions.
- Alignment Through Change – Shared priorities that hold steady under shifting conditions.
- Narrative Continuity – A clear, durable story of where value comes from, now and into the future.
2. Execution
We bring those systems online:
- Creating permission environments where truth can be spoken,
- Revealing patterns above and below the waterline,
- Removing friction at decision-making seams,
- Building unifying narratives that survive leadership and market shifts,
- Install the structures that sustain high performance over time.
This isn’t therapy or cheerleading. It’s disciplined work to eliminate drag and accelerate value creation.
The Playbook Applied
One client thought they had a single accounting issue. We surfaced 18 workflow + communication breakdowns.
Once addressed, EBITDA jumped from 0% to 12%, and valuation moved $7M → $18M with an offer on the table.
The Takeaway
Scaling for sale doesn’t stall because teams lack skill or will.
It stalls because the systems for adapting – to new leadership, new pressures, new expectations – just aren’t in place yet.
The missing playbook is the system that keeps everyone aligned, informed, and moving forward when the stakes rise and the path changes.