Success is something every business strives for. More customers, increasing sales, growing profits and a team that expands as the business develops.
But what happens when the thinking and behaviours that made a business successful in the first place are no longer what it needs to succeed in the future?
At our October 2026 Connect Over A Cuppa session, Keith Rice, a specialist in business psychology and organisational development, explored this question through the work of Larry Greiner and Ichak Adizes, two influential thinkers on how businesses grow, mature and sometimes decline.
It was a fascinating discussion, not simply about the stages of business growth, but about the people, decisions and assumptions that shape what happens along the way.
And perhaps most importantly, whether we recognise when our businesses need to change.
When Early Success Becomes a Distraction
Imagine a business that has developed a successful product or service.
Customers are buying, revenues are increasing and the founder is understandably confident. Opportunities seem to be appearing everywhere.
Why not introduce another product? Enter a different market? Acquire another business? Start something completely new?
There is nothing inherently wrong with expansion. Diversification can create significant opportunities, particularly when the business has the financial resources, people, management capability and systems to support it.
But sometimes early success creates the belief that everything we touch will be equally successful.
We can find ourselves chasing new opportunities while overlooking the considerable potential within the business we already have.
This was one of the challenges highlighted through Adizes’ organisational lifecycle model.
Adizes describes a Go-Go stage, when sales are growing, confidence is high and founders can become more interested in diversification than consolidation.
The danger is that ambition begins to outpace the organisation’s ability to deliver.
It raises an important question:
Are we expanding because we have identified a genuine commercial opportunity, or because previous success has made us overconfident?
The Danger of Believing Our Own Success Story
Consistent growth can change how we think.
We begin to believe that we understand our customers better than anyone else. That our competitors cannot match us. That the market will continue to behave as it always has.
And perhaps that the way we’ve always done things is the reason we’ll continue to succeed.
Over time, board meetings and strategy discussions can become less about exploring the future and more about perpetuating the present.
We review performance, discuss how to sell more of the same products and look for ways to improve existing processes.
All worthwhile activities.
But where is the curiosity?
Where are the questions about changing customer expectations, emerging competitors, new technologies or opportunities that don’t fit our current business model?
In Adizes’ lifecycle, organisations can move from their most effective stage, Prime, towards Stability, when the focus on customers, innovation and new sales begins to weaken.
The business may still be profitable. Indeed, its financial performance might look reassuring.
But the early signs of decline can be cultural rather than financial.
Sometimes the greatest risk to a successful business is that it stops questioning why it is successful.
The Founder Can’t Do Everything Forever
Another interesting aspect of Keith’s session was the changing role of the founder.
In the early stages, the founder often drives almost everything.
They win customers, develop products, solve problems, recruit people and make the important decisions.
Their energy, knowledge and determination are central to the company’s success.
But as the business grows, those same characteristics can become a constraint.
The founder cannot continue making every decision or personally overseeing every aspect of the organisation.
New skills are needed. Management structures become more important. Responsibility needs to be shared.
And this can be uncomfortable.
What happens when you recruit someone who knows more than you about a particular part of your business?
Are you prepared to let them challenge your thinking?
Will you genuinely give them the authority to make decisions, even when they approach things differently?
Developing a capable management team means more than recruiting talented people. It requires the founder to change their own role.
It also means recognising that the people needed to take the business forward may not fit the mould of those who helped build it.
Recruiting only people who think like the existing leadership team can reinforce established assumptions rather than introduce fresh perspectives.
As businesses grow, leadership becomes less about having all the answers and more about creating an organisation capable of finding better ones.
Different People, Different Priorities
Keith also introduced Adizes’ four management roles, often referred to as PAEI:
- Production: Getting the job done and delivering results.
- Administration: Creating systems, controls and efficient processes.
- Entrepreneurship: Looking ahead, developing ideas and identifying opportunities.
- Integration: Bringing people together and ensuring different parts of the organisation work effectively.
Each plays an important role in a successful business.
But they can also create natural tensions.
Production wants to get the order completed. Administration wants to ensure procedures are followed.
Sales and marketing may want to explore a new opportunity, while operations is concerned about capacity and delivery.
An entrepreneurial founder might be excited about launching a new service, while the finance director wants to understand the costs and risks.
These differences are not necessarily problems. In fact, they can be valuable.
The challenge is ensuring that everyone is working towards a common purpose.
A business dominated by entrepreneurial thinking may generate more opportunities than it can realistically deliver.
One dominated by systems and procedures may become efficient at doing things customers no longer want.
And a business focused entirely on today’s production targets may overlook tomorrow’s opportunities.
The objective isn’t to eliminate these differences. It’s to balance them.
A strong management team doesn’t need everyone to think alike. It needs people with different strengths who understand how their contributions fit together.
When Business Partners Want Different Things
We also discussed the challenges that can arise when a business has two owners.
At the outset, both may share the excitement of building something successful. But as the business develops, their ambitions can diverge.
One might want rapid expansion, new markets and greater investment. The other might prefer a profitable, manageable business that provides financial security and a good quality of life.
Neither ambition is necessarily wrong.
The difficulty arises when those differences remain unspoken or are never properly resolved.
The same applies to how the partners see their roles. One may be commercially driven, while the other concentrates on technical delivery or operational control.
Those complementary skills can be a real strength, provided there is agreement about the direction of the business and how decisions will be made.
This is where having a shared vision becomes important.
Not simply a statement displayed on the wall, but a genuine understanding of what the owners want the business to become, why they want it and what they are prepared to do to achieve it.
Growth Needs More Than Enthusiasm
Greiner’s work on business growth highlights how organisations move through different stages, often encountering a crisis that requires a different approach to management.
The systems, structures and leadership behaviours appropriate for a small business may not be sufficient for a larger one.
And growth creates new demands.
How do we identify and evaluate opportunities?
How do we encourage innovation without constantly distracting people from delivering today’s work?
How do we respond when customer needs change?
How do we develop managers and give them greater responsibility?
How do we ensure departments work together rather than protect their own priorities?
These are not questions that can be answered simply by employing more people or introducing more procedures.
They require the business to develop the capability to manage change.
And that capability needs to evolve as the business grows.
The objective, as Adizes describes it, is to reach and maintain Prime: a stage where the organisation balances entrepreneurial energy, effective management, commercial performance and the ability to respond to change.
Importantly, reaching that stage isn’t the end of the journey.
Remaining there requires constant attention.
A Reality Check: Where Is Your Business Today?
One of the most useful parts of Keith’s session involved asking attendees to consider where their own organisations sat within the lifecycle.
It’s a deceptively simple question.
Is your business actually where you think it is?
A company may have grown considerably in turnover but still rely on the founder for most important decisions.
It may have developed sophisticated management systems but lost some of its responsiveness to customers.
It may be profitable today but have little understanding of where future growth will come from.
Different departments might even be operating at different stages of development.
Keith’s exercises encouraged us to examine these differences and consider the balance of management roles within our organisations.
But identifying where we are is only part of the challenge.
We also need to ask:
- Where do we actually want the business to go?
- What needs to change to get there?
- Do we have the people, financial resources and management capability to support that ambition?
- Are the owners and leadership team genuinely aligned?
- And perhaps most importantly, do we have the appetite to make the changes required?
Sometimes the answer may be that the business doesn’t need to grow significantly larger.
It may need to become more profitable, resilient, innovative or less dependent on its founder.
That’s a perfectly legitimate ambition.
The important thing is that the direction is deliberate rather than simply a continuation of what has happened before.
A Final Thought: Keep Asking Different Questions
One of the things I find most interesting about working with businesses is how often their greatest strengths can, over time, become constraints.
A founder’s determination can become reluctance to delegate.
A successful product can create resistance to innovation.
A strong company culture can discourage people who bring different ideas.
Well-established systems can make an organisation less responsive.
And years of commercial success can encourage the belief that tomorrow will look much like yesterday.
None of these changes necessarily happens overnight.
They develop gradually, often while the business still appears to be performing well.
Keith’s session was a useful reminder that business growth isn’t simply about increasing turnover, employing more people or entering new markets.
It’s about recognising how the organisation itself needs to develop.
And sometimes that means challenging the thinking that made us successful in the first place.
Perhaps the most important question for any business leader isn’t simply, “How do we keep growing?”
It’s “What needs to change about the way we think, lead and operate if we’re going to achieve what we really want?”
About Our Speaker: Keith Rice
Keith Rice is a business psychology specialist, trainer and former business consultant with experience in organisational development, management systems and the psychology of individuals and organisations.
His October Connect Over A Cuppa session, The Right Thinking for the Development of Your Business?, drew on the work of Larry Greiner and Ichak Adizes to explore business lifecycles, management roles and the challenges organisations encounter as they grow.
Keith Returns in January 2027
Following October’s session, Keith will return to Connect Over A Cuppa on Thursday 21 January 2027 for Is Your Mindset Holding Your Business Back?
This practical follow-up will explore leadership mindset, values, business ambition and how our responses to success and failure influence the decisions we make.
Through interactive exercises, attendees will have the opportunity to challenge their thinking, clarify what success looks like and explore practical approaches to achieving their ambitions. Click here to book.