Where businesses break
I look for one of five patterns.
Not every stuck business is stuck because of the founder. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't: a key person holds knowledge nobody else has, a handoff between two teams quietly fails, a customer journey loses people somewhere you can't see. I look at the whole ecosystem before I decide where the problem actually sits.
Something is blocked.
Decisions might all funnel through one person. Your team may be constantly waiting. Processes might exist largely in people's heads. Sometimes that person is you. Sometimes it isn't.
Money, time or opportunity is leaking.
A lead form that doesn't work. Prospects who go quiet after real interest, or clients who complete one project and never come back, because nothing's designed to follow up. A handoff between two teams that's broken. Someone spending six hours a week manually doing something that could be automated. Businesses leak value in a hundred tiny ways.
Growth is outpacing and flooding systems.
Sales increase. The team grows. Volumes go up. But the systems and ways of working underneath haven't kept pace, and success starts to feel like chaos.
Nothing's broken. Nothing's moving either.
You've stopped growing, changing or noticing what's changed around you. There's almost always something new sitting inside the business: a customer segment nobody's considered, an offer nobody's packaged yet, or an opportunity nobody's spotted.
Something's not landing, and everything downstream gets harder.
Often it's positioning: selling to people who need convincing, instead of people who are already looking for exactly this. Sometimes it's tools that don't talk to each other, or a team or partner dynamic where tension gets managed rather than resolved. Occasionally the wider market gets harder, a new competitor, a tighter economy, and that's real too, though rarely the whole story. I bring in specialists where the fix sits outside my own lane: HR for team dynamics, developers for systems. What doesn't change is the diagnosis: something in how the business meets the world isn't working, and it's costing more effort than it should.