Scaling Isn’t Always Growth
The Hidden Cost of Being Everywhere
Growth should feel like momentum. But more often than not, it starts to feel like drag. The more you bolt on, the harder it gets to move with any kind of clarity.
We see it all the time. A brand hits its stride, starts generating serious revenue, and decides to go wide. Wholesale? Sure. Amazon? Why not. Retail? Of course. And just like that, they’re juggling six channels, two continents, and a mounting list of operational headaches.
On the surface, it looks like growth. Underneath, it’s chaos.
Every new channel brings its own rules, systems, and processes. Inventory gets sliced in more directions. Teams split their time trying to make workflows meet in the middle. Reporting becomes a scavenger hunt. And somewhere along the way, the brand starts to lose grip on what’s actually working.
We worked recently with a £15m brand who looked, on paper, like they had it figured out. Strong DTC numbers. Loyal customers. But peel back the top layer, and the foundation was creaking. Fulfilment varied wildly by channel. Data was scattered. Teams were burnt out from duct-taping five different sales motions into something vaguely operational.
The kicker? Some of those channels were barely moving the needle. They were adding complexity, not scale.
In audit sessions, you see the real picture. Departments pushing for different platforms with no cross-functional view of what’s manageable. Founders who haven’t had a minute to step back and ask: are these moves worth the cost?
This isn’t about being risk-averse. It’s about making space to see clearly. Because sometimes the smartest thing a business can do is stop. Strip things back. Get brilliant at the thing that was already working.
We’ve advised brands to cut channels that technically deliver revenue but stall the engine elsewhere. Retail expansion paused. Marketplace deals shelved. Not forever. But until the core business can actually carry the weight.
What we often find isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s a tangle of decisions made with good intent and no real thread between them. The result is a commercial strategy that reads like a wishlist and an ops team held together by good will and Google Sheets.
One leadership team told us they didn’t know which channels were profitable, just that they were all under pressure. That’s not scale. That’s survival.
There’s a cost to being everywhere. And it usually shows up as friction. Slower launches. Patchy customer experiences. Teams spending their time fixing instead of building.
The brands who win long-term tend to look boring in the short term. Fewer distractions. Deeper focus. More time spent on what they know they can do brilliantly. The stuff that compounds.
It doesn’t look like hypergrowth. But it feels like control. And it gives you the foundation to grow with intent, not just with noise.