Most growing businesses don’t think they have a focus problem.
They think they have a capacity problem.
If you talk to founders at this stage, you’ll hear versions of the same thing:
“We have a lot going on.”
“We’re juggling too many priorities.”
“We just need to execute better.”
What’s usually happening is simpler and more dangerous.
The business has too many initiatives and no clear way to decide which ones matter.
Initiatives feel responsible until they don’t
New initiatives almost always start with good intentions.
Someone sees an opportunity.
A risk shows up.
A competitor does something interesting.
A customer asks for a feature.
A metric dips and needs attention.
Each initiative, in isolation, sounds reasonable.
That’s why they’re so hard to say no to.
The problem isn’t any single initiative.
It’s what happens when none of them are explicitly deprioritized.
The hidden tax is not effort. It’s fragmentation.
When initiatives pile up, teams don’t slow down immediately.
They stretch.
They multitask.
They context switch.
They attend more meetings.
They try to keep everything moving a little bit.
From the outside, it looks like progress. Internally, it feels exhausting.
The real cost shows up in places that are harder to measure:
- Shallow thinking instead of deep work
- Slower decisions because context is split
- Lower-quality execution across the board
- Increased coordination overhead
- Quiet frustration from high performers
Nothing is broken enough to stop the machine.
Everything is broken enough to prevent momentum.
Why this gets worse as companies grow
Early on, teams can carry a surprising amount of ambiguity.
People talk constantly. Decisions are informal. Context is shared organically. Initiatives blur together without causing immediate damage.
Growth changes that.
As headcount increases:
- Communication becomes asynchronous
- Context stops being shared by default
- Decisions require alignment instead of instinct
- Small misunderstandings compound
At that point, initiative sprawl stops being inconvenient and starts being expensive.
The same number of initiatives now creates exponentially more drag.
More initiatives feel safer than fewer
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
Many leadership teams keep initiatives alive because killing them feels risky.
Stopping something requires:
- Admitting it’s not the priority
- Disappointing someone who cares about it
- Accepting sunk costs
- Making a clear tradeoff visible
Adding another initiative feels safer. It keeps options open. It avoids confrontation. It preserves political balance.
But optionality has a cost.
When everything is important, nothing is decisive.
Teams optimize for activity when priorities are unclear
When direction is fuzzy, people default to what’s measurable.
Marketing ships campaigns.
Product builds features.
Operations adds process.
Finance adds controls.
Everyone is working. Everyone is busy.
But activity becomes decoupled from outcomes.
This is why companies can look productive while slowly drifting off course. The system rewards motion, not progress.
The compounding effect no one plans for
Too many initiatives don’t just slow the business down.
They change behavior.
People stop taking ownership because nothing feels finishable.
They hedge decisions because priorities might change.
They wait for direction instead of pushing forward.
Over time, urgency turns into caution.
That shift is subtle, but it’s one of the earliest signs that a company is losing its edge.
Why this isn’t a planning problem
Most companies respond to this by planning harder.
More roadmaps.
More OKRs.
More quarterly resets.
More prioritization frameworks.
Those can help, but only if there’s a willingness to make real tradeoffs.
The issue isn’t lack of planning.
It’s lack of decision clarity.
Specifically:
- What are we explicitly not doing right now?
- What would we stop if this initiative succeeds?
- Which outcomes matter more than others this quarter?
- What are we willing to let degrade to protect focus?
If those answers aren’t clear, no framework will save you.
What fewer initiatives actually buy you
When companies reduce active initiatives, a few things happen quickly:
- Decisions speed up
- Quality improves without extra effort
- Meetings get shorter
- Ownership becomes clearer
- Energy returns
Not because people suddenly work harder, but because effort starts to compound instead of canceling itself out.
Focus is not a motivational tool.
It’s a structural one.
Where outside perspective helps
Inside the business, every initiative has a story.
Someone fought for it.
Someone promised results.
Someone tied their credibility to it.
That makes objective prioritization hard.
An external advisor earns their keep here by doing something simple and difficult:
Helping leadership see the full cost of keeping things alive, not just the cost of stopping them.
Not by dictating answers.
By forcing clear tradeoffs into the open.
The takeaway
Most businesses don’t suffer because they lack ideas.
They suffer because they lack restraint.
Too many initiatives don’t make a company ambitious.
They make it fragile.
Progress doesn’t come from doing more things.
It comes from doing fewer things on purpose.
