At the RIGHT Time

I once coached a CEO who was proud of his growth. Double digits, year on year. He talked about it the way people do when they expect to be congratulated.

I asked him what the potential was.

He said forty per cent.

I suggested that twelve per cent was underperforming then!

He didn’t love hearing that. But my point wasn’t that twelve was bad — twelve is a number most businesses would take. My point was that his mindset had become the ceiling. He’d stopped asking what was possible and started defending what was comfortable. The market wasn’t limiting the business, the competition or the economy. It was being limited by the story he was telling himself about what good looked like.

I worked with the Scottish Tourist Board around the same time. They needed twelve per cent revenue growth. They were used to two or three. We seated the Tourist Information Centre managers in a room and asked them to list every reason they couldn’t achieve 40 or even 50 per cent growth. They filled the page.

Then we pointed out that every single reason on that list was them. Not the market. Not the budget. Them.

So we asked them to be bold. No risk, just try. The average increase across the entire Scottish estate was twenty-five per cent. One nineteen-year-old worked out that by bundling slow-moving stock with fast-moving stock, she could turn over inventory quickly and replace it with product that actually sold. She didn’t need a strategy consultant. She needed permission to think.

Most businesses aren’t short of ambition. They’re short of honest conversations about the gap between where they are and what they’re actually capable of.

The symptoms are familiar. Always reactive, always catching up, always solving today’s problem with no time left for next month’s opportunity. Planning that either doesn’t exist or sits in a document nobody looks at. Leaders who are brilliant at keeping the business running but rarely get the chance to think about where it’s going.

The business stays busy. But busy and forward aren’t the same thing. And the longer the gap goes unexamined, the more normal it starts to feel.

Examples:

• Reactive meetings
• Feedback saved for appraisals
• Slow or stalled decisions
• Late response to problems
• Wins that go unmarked

It starts with an honest look at what’s actually possible — not what’s comfortable, not what’s been achieved before, but what the business is genuinely capable of if effort is pointed in the right direction at the right time.

That means creating the space to think beyond this week. It means having a rhythm — planning, reviewing, adjusting — that keeps the business moving forward rather than just staying afloat. And it means being willing to ask the uncomfortable question: is the ceiling we’re bumping against real, or is it one we built ourselves?

Sometimes the biggest friction in a business isn’t a broken process or the wrong people. It’s a mindset that stops asking what else is possible.