You Can't Scale on Force of Will Alone
Sheer force of will doesn't get stuff done, right? It takes building coalitions, it takes hashing things out, and a lot more cycles than I would have thought that they would have taken.
When Erik joined his aerospace & defense advisory firm in 2022, the firm was around 50 people. Now it’s headed toward 100. That growth followed a specific inflection point: the founders stepped back, a new generation of partners took over, and they committed to scaling from day one.
The firm had operated for over a decade as what Erik calls a “lifestyle shop”—steady at 20 to 40 people, oriented around name-brand individuals clients knew personally. When someone needed help thinking through a hard problem, they trusted the founders as people and experts. Now they trust the firm.
“Clients used to be like, ‘Hey, we trust Bob to help us think through it, or Tracy,’ and now it’s ‘We trust the firm,” right? Which is obviously much more scalable than an individual.”
That shift has enabled the firm to expand into new practice areas because clients now associate the brand with analytical rigor and expertise rather than specific people. Growth also meant investing ahead of need: a CRM, AI tools, data scientists. Things a smaller firm couldn’t afford to pursue.
But that maturity, size, and resources came at a cost.
“When there’s 20 or even 40 people, an issue comes up between me and a colleague or me and a partner or something, I’ll just go chat with him or her, right? Just, ‘Hey, let’s, let’s figure this out and just problem solve at an interpersonal level and just hack it out and keep going.”
Now staffing decisions require following administrative processes and coordinating with other leaders. The informal problem-solving that defined the scrappy days has given way to standard operating procedures and bureaucracy. Erik sometimes misses that speed.
The firm’s biggest pressure point is their associates—what Erik calls simultaneously the most important and hardest role. The associates manage multiple projects for multiple partners while supervising teams of analysts. They often reach this career stage in mid to late twenties, right when they’re considering business school or other options. The firm has grappled with some burnout and turnover at this level, particularly among lateral hires who don’t get properly on-boarded.
Erik learned firsthand what happens when managers avoid the hard parts of the job. Early in his tenure, he inherited a situation where a junior staff member wasn’t performing and should probably have been put on a performance improvement plan a year earlier. Previous supervisors had avoided giving harsh feedback; one promised to “fix” the employee but didn’t follow through. It fell to Erik to deliver news the employee didn’t expect.
“That was absolutely brutal to like sit at conference room and, and give somebody, news that apparently didn’t, they didn’t expect to receive. As a senior leader, you’ve got to be comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. You’ve got to be comfortable giving bad news.”
The experience forced Erik to confront his own tendency to dance around negative feedback. But it also illuminated a systemic failure: if someone had been direct earlier, the outcome might have been different for everyone. Manager avoidance doesn’t just hurt the organization—it fails the people who needed honest guidance.
And Erik has made efforts to support associates. One experiment to support associates fell flat: bringing them together for lunch for an honest and open discussion about challenges.
“They aired some grievances, but I don’t know that it helped them feel any better. They just kind of were like, okay, I aired all my grievances, now what are you going to do about it? And we didn’t have any solutions at that moment.”
What has worked is creating a leaders’ working group—a bi-weekly forum where mid-level leaders connect horizontally, identify challenges, and solve problems together. The group monitors team health, coordinates staffing moves, and serves as a conduit between partners and the rest of the organization. The diversity of perspectives—people who grew up in the firm alongside lateral hires from competitors—creates unexpected coalitions and productive tension.
Erik’s advice for leaders navigating growth: prepare for everything to take longer than you expect.
Things that I would’ve thought were, were pretty easy to solve. And think also that it’s not just my ability to solve a problem. And what I mean by that is like, ‘Hey, I have one viewpoint,’ but in that principle’s working group, I may have like a clear, like, this is how this problem should be solved. But like sheer force of will doesn’t like get stuff done, right. It takes kind of building coalitions, it takes sort of hashing things out and a lot more cycles than I would’ve thought that they would’ve taken.”
He adds one more piece of advice for leaders navigating the growth that the firm has: think now about where your IP, data and expertise live. The firm has years of materials, research, and models scattered across individuals and their files. Before you can apply AI or other tools to scale efficiently, you have to collect and standardize what you already have.
“Our view is that we can’t really grow the way we want to grow if we just do more of the same projects with just more people.”
The technology question is still unresolved—they’ve spent a year just planning how to approach it. But Erik sees it as essential. For smaller firms, the lesson is clear: build that infrastructure into the fabric of your organization before you need it.