Scaling-Up Is Not Accidental: What Separates Mid-Sized Businesses That Plateau From Those That Grow

December 08, 2025

“What got us here won’t get us there.” It’s more than a cliché – it’s the mindset and organizational maturity that separates mid-sized companies that continue to grow from those that plateau.

The Need For Enterprise-Wide Maturity

Successful mid-sized companies, in most cases, have 10, 25, even 75 years of proud history. They’ve weathered market cycles, built loyal teams, and found success through grit, guts, and good instincts. But now, growth is slowing, alignment is slipping, and frustration is festering.

These ambitiously agitated businesses are on the cusp of their next growth stage but stuck in a familiar trap: the very muscles that built the company are maxing out. They are hitting the enterprise-wide “Maturity Wall.”

McKinsey highlights that mid‑market firms (those anywhere from $30M to $900M) often stall in performance unless they reinvent how they work and adopt a structured transformation. Key issues include lack of operational discipline, unclear strategy alignment, leadership not knowing how to grow themselves at this point, and thus not knowing how to develop their organization. (McKinsey: 2023) 1

These mid-market businesses aren’t startups. They’re legacy-rich firms. But they’ve outgrown the ways that got them to this point. There’s a pressing need – the need for the entire organization to mature and step-up to the next level.

Embedded Growing-Pains

These challenges aren’t due to failure – but no company is immune to growing pains. No matter how successful and sophisticated your mid-sized business, studies show these embedded growing-pains – or maturity walls – are inevitable. Another McKinsey study indicates that about 78% of companies that had successfully built a product and found product‑market fit (PMF) still fail to scale — they either stop growing or get acquired before achieving scale (McKinsey, 2022) 2

Or consider case studies out of Harvard’s Business School that call this the “Complexity Cliff.” As firms grow, the number of interpersonal touchpoints grows exponentially—not linearly—making informal communication, legacy decision rights, and organizational structures liabilities instead of strengths. (Harvard Business Review, 2021) 3

The Silent Killers of Scaling-Up

A consistent pattern of challenges emerges among mid-sized businesses 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 – growing internal complexity, processes, and data fragmentation, underperforming teams, cross-departmental inefficiencies, role confusion, and outdated vision. What’s more, the days show these obstacles often overshadow market conditions as the key barrier to sustainable growth:

73% of mid-sized businesses struggle with data trapped in disparate systems, making timely and accurate decision-making difficult. 4

Here’s how this actually looks inside your business:

  • Lack of process definition
  • Departmental silos
  • Inter-departmental conflicts
  • Reliance on emails/manual tasks
  • Over-emphasis on individual expertise, performance
  • Days filled with reactionary sprints
  • Win the day (or quarter) mentality rather than win the season
  • Organizational complexity with doses of ambiguity and territorialism

The National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM) notes that talent management, digital skill gaps, and inability to scale processes (all aspects of growing internal complexity) have significant and measurable impacts on company performance and growth rates. 10

Deloitte’s Mid-Market Technology Trends Report adds that productivity, efficiency, and cost management (again, all internal operations) are mentioned
more as top challenges for mid-sized businesses than external competition or market factors. 11

10 Signs You’ve Hit The Maturity Wall

  1. Your leadership team meets more, but decides less (or worse, can’t decide)
  2. Decision-rights are fuzzy, meetings are longer, and consensus becomes currency
  3. You’re hiring more—but still bottlenecked
  4. People wear too many hats, and handoffs are sloppy
  5. Operational drag creeps in
  6. What once worked on whiteboards now demands automated processes
  7. Your best talent doesn’t want to leave, but they also don’t see a clear path forward—or upward.
  8. You’re busy, but not better.
  9. Execution feels like motion, but not momentum.
  10. There’s little to no new market penetration, no innovation runway, no true evolution.

Performance Paradox: Your Past Success Is Now Stalling Your Growth

These are the real obstacles impeding mid-sized companies from growing – more so than dealing with external headwinds like market shifts.

In other words, the systems, people, structures, decision-making matrix, team dynamics, leadership functions, mindsets, and maturity levels that “worked” for you up to this point are now impediments to growing further.

In their Ten Rules of Growth, Mckinsey states: “Companies hit a point where the old playbook stops working. What got you from $1M to $10M or even $100M becomes the very thing that prevents you from scaling beyond it.” 2

Case Study: Rebuilding The Future

12Mid-market firms often under-estimate the complexity and nuance of “how,” “when” and “what” needs to transform to break through their maturity wall. In 2023, a mid-sized service provider faced flat productivity, siloed teams, and unclear decision rights. A performance firm was hired and led an organization-wide transformation that aligned leadership teams, clarified roles, and introduced formal governance. Within months, the company saw significant improvement in leadership decision-making speed, accountability, and morale. This is what transformation looks like. It’s not a rebrand. It’s a rebuild.

What Must Happen to Mature

If you’re at the “maturity wall” here’s a small sampling of what needs to happen:

  • Your org. chart must be redefined – by design, not history; by position, not person. Titles aren’t structure. Reporting lines need to reflect strategy.
  • Leadership roles need to become less operational, more strategic. Stop solving fires. Start architecting the future.
  • Departmental silos must become cross-functional organisms because scaling happens when teams think and create across, not just down.
  • Your executive cadence needs to mature from firefighting to quarterly strategy, annual foresight, and long-horizon thinking.
  • You must shift from people dependency to process dependency.
  • Upgrading performance and accountability structures
  • Succession can’t be seen as an event but a sustaining system where growth and information isn’t trapped inside individuals.
  • Creating alignment from boardroom to back office

This is the type of work and transformation that’s required within mid-sized organizations to break through the maturity wall.. It’s deep. It’s difficult. But it is the way forward.

Red Flag #1 – “We Can Fix This Ourselves”

According to research by PwC, 72% of mid-market firms that attempt major organizational change without external expertise either stall, reverse course, or abandon the effort entirely 13

“There is a false confidence that the same team that built the business can transform the business. But transformation is a different skill set entirely.” 13 — PwC, 2023

Why does this happen? Because transformation requires objective diagnosis, outside pressure, and strategic engineering.

It’s not a question of intelligence or ability. It’s about paying the “Dumb Tax” – something you want to avoid – wasting time, money, and morale trying to DIY this transformation. Consider this – your current team might have experience pushing through 2 or 3 major transformations (collectively); meanwhile, the performance experts have hundreds under their belts.

Case Study: Seven-Lever Redesign

A $50M+ industrial manufacturer struggled with inefficient processes, data silos, and lack of digital integration despite solid revenue. The organization called in the performance experts who implemented a seven‑lever transformation—redefining operating model, performance metrics, leadership cadence, and cross-functional accountability. As a result, the company unlocked faster decision-making, higher productivity, and improved scalability by embedding maturity into processes rather than simply adding headcount or tech. 14

Transformation Requires Expert Intervention Midsized companies hitting the maturity wall almost never self-correct on their own. According to KPMG’s 2023 report on mid-market growth, “Only 18% of mid-sized firms that attempt organizational transformation without outside guidance achieve sustained results. The rest either revert, stall, or create new structural confusion.” 15

Gallup’s longitudinal studies confirm that companies with outside performance intervention see 22% higher profitability and 21% greater productivity compared to those that “go it alone” 16. This is because transformation isn’t about motivation—it’s about systemic reinvention. And it’s near impossible to lead transformation when you’re entangled in the very system that needs to change.

Red Flag #2: “More Moxy” Will Solve This

In the early days of a company, growth is often powered by instinct and improvisation. The smarts and savviness of the founder or the executive leaders will carry the team over the goalline. But at scale, those traits turn into traps. For mid-sized companies, their size alone now prevents their scaling and maturity problems from being solved by a handful of dynamic, talented A+ players. In fact, the goal of scaling-up is the exact opposite of an overreliance on individual expertise, performance.

According to a Boston Consulting Group meta-analysis of 1,100 mid-cap firms, companies that failed to install enterprise-wide growth systems during their scaling phase were “4.5x more likely to shrink or be acquired at a discount within 7 years.”

What’s worse: most of them didn’t see the decline coming. Because stagnation at scale isn’t loud, it’s slow, subtle, and self-justified by past success.

Who Can Help You Get There?

At this inflection point, you don’t need cheerleaders. You need organizational engineers and performance experts.

The Flickinger Performance Group is a nationally recognized partner for mid-sized companies that have hit the maturity wall. They work exclusively with $30M – $900M organizations ready to break through the maturity wall. Their experts specialize in organizational diagnostics, performance re-alignment, and architecture, as well as diving in with a hands-on developmental approach to accelerate the skills, mindsets, and maturity needed at the next level. Their work isn’t surface-level consulting—it’s surgical restructuring.

Scaling Up Is a System, Not a Single Player Sport

The Flickinger Performance Group specializes in scaling-up organizations. Not only do we design it, but we also dive in and develop, coach, and push the actual building of it. We focus on the enterprise, not just a single executive. Our method is holistic and battle-tested. We’ve helped dozens of organizations accelerate to their next stage of growth.

If you’re feeling a stall, you’re probably not imagining it. If your best people are stuck in cycles of reactivity or comfort, the problem isn’t just them – it’s the operating system of your business.

Here is the final word: scaling up is not just about growing revenue and profit. It’s about growing up as a company – an enterprise-wide maturing.

Organizations that fail to transform internally won’t just plateau—they’ll decay. Unfortunately, the longer a business delays its transformation, the more costly and painful it becomes, especially for businesses that are now way too big to “wing it.”

Final Word to CEOs

If this resonates, you’re not doomed, but you are at risk of missing the transformation window. Your next phase of growth won’t be built on hustle. It will be built on maturity. And you don’t have to go it alone.

Works Cited

  1. Unleashing the Power of Midcap Companies (May 8, 2024): McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/unleashing-the-power-of-midcap-companies mckinsey.com+13mckinsey.com+13mckinsey.com+13
  2. The Ten Rules of Growth (2022): McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-ten-rules-of-growth
  3. Why Do We Keep Reorganizing? March 2021. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2021/03/why-do-we-keep-reorganizing
  4. Three Strategies to Help Your Midsize Company Grow: Part 2, Workday US https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/feature-stories/3-strategies-hr-feature-story-cio-hr.pdf
  5. Three Strategies to Help Your Midsize Company Grow: Part 3, Workday US https://www.workday.com/en-us/pages/feature-stories/three-strategies-to-help-midsize-companies-grow-fs.html
  6. Three Strategies to Help Your Midsize Company Grow: Part 4, Workday US https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/feature-stories/three-stratigies-feature-story-cio.pdf
  7. Three Strategies To Help Your Midsize Company Grow: Part 1, Forbes/Workday. https://www.forbes.com/sites/workday/2018/04/26/three-strategies-to-help-your-midsize-company-grow-part-one/
  8. Understanding Data Silos: Part 1, Data Ideology. https://www.dataideology.com/understanding-data-silos/
  9. The Transformation Imperative for Midcap Companies: Podcast transcript (Aug 16, 2024): McKinsey @ Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-transformation-imperative-for-midcap-companies mckinsey.com+4mckinsey.com+4podcasts.apple.com+4
  10. Talent Skills Gap Remains a Challenge for Middle Market Firms: National Center for the Middle Market/Brookings. http://hrdailyadvisor.com/2017/09/19/talent-skills-gap-remains-challenge-middle-market-firms-says-report/
  11. 2023 Mid-market Technology Trends Report: 2023. PR Newswire/Deloitte. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/middle-market-tech-spending-high-and-on-the-rise-ai-leads-tech-investment-priorities-deloitte-private-report-301968366.html
  12. From Pain to Performance At Mid-Market Companies: 2024. Boston Consulting Group. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/pain-to-performance-at-midmarket-companies
  13. Family Business Survey: 2023. PwC https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/family-business/family-business-survey.html
  14. How Seven Steps Can Help Midsize Industrials Crack the Transformation Code. March 24, 2025. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/how-seven-steps-can-help-midsize-industrials-crack-the-transformation-code
  15. U.S. Mid-Market Outlook Survey: 2023. KPMG https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2023/midmarket-survey.html
  16. The Right Culture: Not Just Employee Satisfaction: 2022. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236441/right-culture-not-employee-satisfaction.aspx
  17. The Scale-up Conundrum: Evolving startups from founder-led growth to industrialised scalability: 2025. McKinsey. https://www.mckinsey.com/uk/our-insights/the-mckinsey-uk-blog/the-scale-up-conundrum?utm

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