Scaling a company is often romanticized. The thought of more customers, more revenue, more talent, more surface area ignores the part in between, the messy middle, where everything temporarily gets worse.
Quality dips. Culture wobbles. Overhead explodes. Systems creak under weight they were never built to carry. And founders, managers, and teams start to wonder: Is this normal? Or are we just doing it wrong?
You are scaling
There’s a myth that if you’re scaling correctly, you’ll avoid the chaos. But every system, when stressed, reveals flaws. Every process, when multiplied, exposes bottlenecks. What worked with 5 people will break with 15. What worked with 15 will drown at 50.
Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma illustrates how systems optimized for one stage become liabilities at scale, not because they were poorly designed, but simply because their success introduces rigidity.(The Innovator’s Dilemma)
Everything that scales eventually breaks the assumptions it was built on. The job is not to prevent breakage, it’s to adapt faster than the consequences of it.”
Why the middle feels so chaotic
In early stages, clarity is high and the project is small. Everyone knows everything. The culture is implicit. Quality is hand-checked. But as the team grows, things get... noisier. Context gets diluted. Standards start to vary. The culture is there but just distributed. You haven’t yet figured out how to make it legible at scale.
Meanwhile, the overhead spikes. You’re suddenly introducing middle managers, processes, policies. Each one solves a short-term problem but adds long-term complexity. And the original team wonders what happened to the speed, the energy, the fun.
McKinsey reports that 70% of fast-growing companies face challenges threatening their sustainability, including talent management, governance, and culture.(ProjectManagement)
Push through but push intentionally
This is the stage where many teams panic and overcorrect: they tighten control, add layers, clamp down on risk. But bureaucracy is not the cure for chaos. It’s a reaction to an unacknowledged mess.
The better approach is to push through with intention. Acknowledge the dip without catastrophizing it. Focus on a few things:
- Codify what’s working before you scale it. Don’t let standards be assumed, write them down, test them, share them.
- Over-communicate context. As teams grow, understanding becomes uneven. Make vision, priorities and reasoning explicit.
- Give culture new scaffolding. If it was once carried by proximity, it now needs rituals, symbols, and documentation.
- Be patient with the lag. The quality won’t immediately return to pre-scale levels. That doesn’t mean it never will. Be patient, it just means the system is recalibrating.
Andy Grove, in High Output Management, emphasizes that scaling means “building an organization capable of building itself.” This requires both structure and patience.(McKinsey & Company)
The dip is a good sign
If your team is frustrated, your docs are messy, your onboarding feels shaky, and your once-perfect culture seems diluted, congratulations. You’ve reached the part where real scaling begins.
Most teams don’t talk about it because it’s uncomfortable to admit that growth introduces friction. But friction does not always mean failure. As Newton’s third law of motion states “For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction”. If you treat it like a signal, not a threat, it will guide you toward stronger foundations.
Final thought
The messy middle is the process. Don’t confuse growing pains with permanent decline. Everything that scales breaks a little. Then, if you’re intentional, it rebuilds stronger.
So keep going. Just don’t assume it’s supposed to be clean.
Sources
- Clayton Christensen’s concept of scaling rigidity—The Innovator’s Dilemma (probinism.com)
- McKinsey report: 70% of fast-growing companies face sustainability challenges (ProjectManagement)
- Andy Grove on scaling: “building an organization capable of building itself” (High Output Management) (The New Yorker)
