What We're Seeing

You're Fixing the Wrong Problem

Before prescribing a solution, diagnose the real constraint.

By Fred Soller · 2026-08-14

The Growth Mistakes Smart Companies Keep Making

Spend enough time inside growth-stage companies and you start seeing the same movie. Different company. Different product. Different market. Same mistakes.

Most aren't dumb mistakes. They're usually reasonable decisions made by smart people. But growth doesn't happen in isolation. Product, sales, marketing, customer success, leadership and capital all have to work together as a system. When they don't, companies can spend an enormous amount of time and money fixing the wrong problem.

I've learned this the hard way. And I've seen it play out enough times now that the patterns are unmistakable.

At Big Wheel Performance, we have seven experienced operators working with founders, CEOs, investors and leadership teams across different industries and stages of growth. We also serve on boards and advisory boards, giving us a broader view of what's working, and what keeps breaking. The companies are different. The patterns aren't.

The Resume Trap

Consider what happens when you hire for the resume instead of for the job. A CEO will tell me, "We need a CRO who knows our industry." Maybe. Industry experience can be helpful, but it's rarely at the top of my list.

My first question is always: Have they built this before? Have they created the infrastructure, processes, team and operating cadence required to turn selling into a repeatable growth engine? Have they generated pipeline when there wasn't enough? Have they built the forecasting discipline, sales methodology, messaging and accountability needed to scale? Most importantly, have they done it at your stage?

Here's the problem: A CRO who successfully managed a $500 million organization might be completely wrong for a $15 million company trying to reach $30 million. At the larger company, the brand already existed. Marketing generated leads. Sales operations produced reports. Enablement trained the team. Recruiting found candidates. Finance built the models. Then that executive joins a growth-stage company and discovers that half of those functions don't exist, and the other half are being handled by three people wearing twelve hats.

That's a completely different job.

Can someone who has never done it before succeed? Absolutely. Everyone has a first time. But give them a sherpa. If you're hiring someone to make a climb they've never made before, surround them with someone who knows the mountain. Potential combined with experience can be powerful. Potential masquerading as experience gets expensive.

It's not just insurance. It's good practice. Michael Jordan and Tom Brady got even better with coaching.

The False Certainty of Early Success

Then there's the confidence that kills momentum: believing you have product-market fit when you don't. I've sat across from founders who will tell me with complete certainty, "We have product-market fit." And when I dig deeper, the story often goes like this: A handful of wins, especially founder-led wins, doesn't prove product-market fit. Neither does having customers in 15 different industries. In fact, that may be evidence of exactly the opposite.

Real product-market fit means a clearly defined group of customers consistently buys, uses and values your product because it solves an important problem better than the available alternatives.

If I ask who your ideal customer is and the answer is, "Honestly, we can sell to almost anybody," I get skeptical immediately. I'm sure you can. Your technology may legitimately solve problems in healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, logistics, retail, technology and another 25 industries. But should you be trying to serve all of them right now?

When you're a $10 million company trying to become a $25 million company, you don't have the resources to be everything to everybody. Every new vertical brings different buyers, terminology, problems, competitors, use cases, integrations and proof points. Your salespeople have to become proficient in ten different industries. Marketing has to create ten different stories. Your website ends up saying a little about everything and nothing particularly compelling to anyone. You become relevant everywhere and differentiated nowhere.

I'd rather be an assassin in one or two verticals than a jack of all trades and master of none. Where do you win disproportionately? Where do customers immediately understand the problem? Where are sales cycles shorter and win rates higher? Where do you have credible references? Where do customers get value quickly, stay and expand? That's where the next dollar should go.

Narrowing your ICP can actually help you grow faster. The message gets sharper. Sellers become experts. Marketing dollars go further. Implementations become more repeatable. Every new win makes the next one easier. Real product-market fit isn't, "We've proven we can sell this to 30 industries." It's, "We know exactly who needs this, why they buy it, how to reach them and how to do it repeatedly." Those are two very different companies.

The Product Mirage

Years ago, when I was a sales leader, a CEO told me, "The best salesperson we have is our product." I remember thinking: Then why aren't we growing?

The company had a good product. Nobody was questioning that. It had also been stagnant for years. The product wasn't exactly flying off the shelf. That stuck with me because I've seen versions of it ever since.

Founders understandably love their products. When growth slows, the natural reaction is often to add another feature, build another integration or wait for the next release. Before long, the company is building the Taj Mahal of product while sales has three reps, marketing has no real budget, positioning is unclear, outbound is inconsistent and nobody can explain where next quarter's pipeline will come from. But damn, that product roadmap looks good.

The product has to work. If it doesn't solve a meaningful problem, we have a much bigger issue. But there's an uncomfortable truth companies occasionally forget: Nothing happens until something gets sold.

Think about two companies. Company A has a solid growth engine, customers coming in, cash being generated and a product with identifiable gaps. Company B has an incredible product but can't consistently generate pipeline or acquire customers. Which problem would you rather inherit? Give me Company A.

Revenue buys time. Revenue creates cash flow. Customers provide feedback. And real customers have a wonderful way of telling you which product problems actually matter versus the ones we convinced ourselves mattered around a conference table. Can a bad product eventually destroy a good growth engine? Absolutely. But I'd much rather fix product gaps while customers are paying us than wake up with a beautiful product, limited runway and no reliable way to sell it.

A great product doesn't sell itself. If it did, that company wouldn't have been stagnant.

The Founder Dependency

The transition from early traction to scalable growth reveals another critical mistake. "The founder can sell it," we hear. Great. Can anybody else?

Founders possess things a newly hired salesperson simply doesn't: authority, credibility, passion, deep product knowledge and usually a compelling story about why the company exists. Then we hire four salespeople, give them the founder's PowerPoint and wonder why they can't reproduce the results. Because we never built a sales engine. We had a talented founder selling.

The goal isn't to remove the founder from sales. I want founders involved in strategic opportunities. The goal is to understand why founder-led sales works and turn as much of it as possible into a repeatable system. Until someone besides the founder can consistently sell it, I'm not convinced you've proven scalability.

Addicted to Hopium 

Then comes the quarter when everything depends on one or two monster deals. You pull up the pipeline and realize that hitting the quarter—or the year—depends on them. Everybody knows the deals. The CEO knows them. The board knows them. They're discussed every Monday morning. Somewhere along the way, the company's growth strategy has quietly become: Man, I hope we close Acme. That isn't really a pipeline. It's a prayer.

Go chase big deals. I love big deals. But a healthy growth engine needs enough volume, diversity and coverage that losing one deal doesn't blow a hole in the entire year. Here's a simple exercise: Remove the two largest opportunities from the pipeline. What does it look like now?

A company may tell me it has $20 million in pipeline. Take away two whales and suddenly it has $6 million. That's the number worth discussing. Heroics can win a quarter. Systems build companies.

The Capacity Illusion

When revenue is behind plan, the instinct is immediate: "Hire three more reps." Hold on. Before we do that, let's figure out what's happening with the people we already have. Do they have enough pipeline? Are they targeting the right accounts? Does the positioning work? Are opportunities converting? Do we understand why we win and lose?

This is where companies confuse capacity with productivity. If the machine works and needs more throughput, add capacity. But if the machine doesn't work, adding three people just gives you a larger broken machine. You're not scaling. You're just amplifying the problem.

The Busy Trap

Calls are up. Emails are up. Marketing generated a hundred leads. We've doubled our LinkedIn output. Everybody is busy as hell. Revenue hasn't moved.

Activity is comforting because it's easy to count. Outcomes are harder. Are we creating qualified pipeline? Is it converting? Are sales cycles improving? Are win rates rising? Are customers staying and expanding? Twenty demos that aren't converting aren't necessarily evidence that you need forty demos. Maybe you're talking to the wrong people.

This matters because it's where strategy and execution diverge. Activity isn't productivity. And productivity isn't necessarily progress. Progress is revenue. Everything else is just motion.

Technology as a Shortcut

The temptation to buy technology before building the process has become even stronger with AI. New CRM. Intent data. AI SDRs. Conversation intelligence. Sequencing platforms. Another dashboard. Great technology can accelerate growth. But technology doesn't create strategy.

If your ICP is wrong, AI can help you contact the wrong prospects dramatically faster. If your messaging doesn't resonate, automation can help thousands more people ignore it. If your sales process is poorly defined, entering seven stages into Salesforce doesn't magically create a methodology. Build the operating system first. Then use technology to make it faster and better.

The companies that nail this understand: Process first, then tools. Not the other way around.

The Organizational Siloes

Many organizations operate as four different companies that happen to share a roof. Marketing celebrates lead volume. Sales complains about lead quality. Product builds against its own roadmap. Customer success discovers what was promised after the contract gets signed. Then everyone attends the quarterly meeting and explains how somebody else's number caused their number.

That isn't a growth engine. Growth is a system. Marketing needs to hear what sales is hearing. Sales needs to understand why customers stay. Product needs to hear patterns from prospects and customers. Customer success should influence who sales targets in the first place. The companies that do this well learn faster. And in a growth-stage company, speed of learning is a real competitive advantage.

The Conviction Trap

The plan called for 40% growth. We're halfway through the year and running at 12%. Don't worry. "The second half is going to be huge." We've all heard that one. Then September arrives. Then October. Eventually, everyone quietly acknowledges what the data was telling them six months earlier.

Hope is important in entrepreneurship. But hope is not a strategy. It's a terrible operating system. One of my favorite questions to ask CEOs and leadership teams is: What has to be true for this plan to work? If those things aren't happening, change something. Change the market. Change the message. Change the coverage model. Change the talent. Change the investment. Change the plan. Just don't spend another two quarters defending assumptions the market has already disproven.

The Credential Mistake

Before accepting a recommendation from a consultant, advisor or your own team, ask a simple question: Have you ever actually done this? Then ask an even better one: What happened when it didn't work?

If they can't answer the second question, I'd be nervous. Scar tissue matters. It's the difference between studying growth and being responsible for it. There's a big difference between evaluating an organization and building a deck explaining what should change versus having carried the number, built the team, made the bad hire, rebuilt the pipeline, implemented the technology, missed the forecast and had to explain it to the CEO or board.

The Real Problem

These may look like separate mistakes, but they usually point to the same underlying problem: The company has misdiagnosed what is actually preventing growth. And when the diagnosis is wrong, the investment is usually wrong too.

We've seen companies replace sales leaders when the real problem was pipeline. Hire more salespeople when the real problem was positioning. Buy technology when the real problem was process. Build more product when the real problem was commercialization. Claim product-market fit when they had only a few unrelated wins. Chase enormous deals because they didn't have enough underlying pipeline to make the number any other way.

The result is lost time, wasted capital and another year of explaining why growth didn't happen.

Before prescribing a solution, diagnose the real constraint. Is it the product? The market? The positioning? The pipeline? The talent? The execution? The retention? Or has the company simply outgrown the infrastructure that got it this far?

That is the work Big Wheel Performance was built to do. We are operators first. We've carried the number, built the teams, implemented the systems, made the mistakes and lived with the results. We work between strategy and execution - the place where good plans most often break down.

Growth-stage companies don't have unlimited time or capital. Before you spend more of either, make damn sure you're solving the right problem. If your company is working hard but growth still isn't happening, don't start with another hire, another tool or another initiative.

Start with the diagnosis. Let's find the real constraint, and fix it.

Fred Soller is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Big Wheel Performance. He helps enterprise and mid-market companies build and scale global revenue organizations by driving GTM alignment, execution discipline, and exit readiness.