In Practice & Case Studies

Melanie Rieback tells this as a story about trees. In its early life, a tree grows almost exponentially. Then, at a certain point, its growth naturally slows.

It reaches full size, and rather than stagnating, finds new ways to thrive: channelling its energy into what's around it, and eventually dropping seeds that become new trees.

So the practical question when raising money is whether the growth that money expects matches the business's own curve. Roughly half of UK small businesses never take on any external finance at all. They are what the finance-industry data calls "permanent non-borrowers," building through revenue, personal savings, or simply staying small (Bank of England’s 2024 Quarterly Bulletin). In this short section, we’re focused on the other half: the ones who do seek funding, and what happens once they find it.

Jane ní Dhulchaointigh, one of this guide's co-authors and founder of Sugru, recognises the pattern from the inside. Sugru rode a genuine wave of early demand for its first few years. Then, the business kept expanding markets and segments to keep the growth going, raising capital to fund it. It ended in financial difficulty, and a change of ownership.

Investment capital usually carries someone else's assumptions about pace and control, which rarely match where a business actually sits on its own curve.

Jordan Fletcher, who leads Future Impact Ventures, a mission-locked venture fund, shares this from the funder's side. He suggests that the investment and commercial pull around a business can lead it in a direction its founders never intended. Imagine a company building underwater robotics for ocean-restoration that finds most of its demand in defence. Mission drift often begins with responding to the strongest commercial opportunity.

Navigating growth and capital dynamics will always be a dance between competing tensions. The design work doesn't remove those tensions; it changes how they're held. Building something that matters means facing into difference: challenging assumptions and having conversations that are not always comfortable. As Stella McKenna, who has spent years building the field around patient and mission-aligned capital, puts it:

No business grows in a linear way. Every founder journey and every organisational journey is different.

At times it can feel like one step forward and ten back; at others, twenty steps forward and one back. In many cases it can feel like turns of a spiral: circling the same issues and questions, cycle after cycle, iteratively maturing our responses as we develop. That being said, many businesses move through recognisable stages of evolution, each bringing its own threshold moments, tensions and decisions.

Patrick Andrews, another of this field guide’s co-authors, has spent over two decades working alongside founders. He writes in his book The Incomplete Circle about organisations moving through stages with very different needs: toddler, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, eldership, each with its own dangers and its own gifts. He returns to adolescence most: “Much pathology can be traced back to adolescence, a particularly perilous stage of life. The organisation is defining its identity, scaling its impact, and making choices about growth, governance, and purpose.” He points to the founders of Coffee Republic who shared a real example: when a new managing director arrived to professionalise the business, “the new people practically stampeded in and immediately controls and systems and training manuals were put into place... The change proved too much for many of the original team who all became disenchanted… Coffee Republic was not the same company. Now it was big business... We found this very sad.”

These thresholds are moments when the organisation may need different leadership, different capital, different advice, different governance, or a different understanding of success. Here we offer them as a pattern that may be useful to map where you are and design with.

Sophia Wyatt, co-founder of Library of Things, has lived this from the inside: after years of being a growth story, she found it harder than expected when the business reached its own version of thriving. "There came a point where we shifted from primarily focusing on growth to deepening our practice and purpose, clarifying ‘what’s ours to do’ as we became clearer about our role in the ecosystem", she says. Thinking about these thresholds in advance helps founders walk through transitions more intentionally, rather than only recognising them in hindsight, or missing them altogether.

This is also where ownership design matters. The choices made early about control, capital, mission protection and governance shape what remains possible later. If there is something the founder wants to protect (mission, independence, community benefit, product integrity, long-term stewardship), the right guardrails often need to be considered before the pressure arrives.

Guy Singh-Watson spent over a decade thinking about what this would look like for Riverford before he acted on it. When he transferred the majority of the business into an Employee Ownership Trust, he chose a lower sale price to avoid over-leveraging the company, and gave his team years, not months, to prepare. He describes the shift from sole decision-maker to one voice among many simply as "part of growing up." Looking back, he calls the day he sold the business "the happiest and proudest day of my life."

Few businesses reach maturity, never mind eldership. Most are contained by their ownership and capital design parameters, which require them to continuously pursue growth or exit. This makes it even more important to understand which threshold a business is actually approaching.

A core principle at Toyota is genchi genbutsu: go to the source to find the facts. Rather than relying on reports or assumptions, it means staying close to the people doing the work and the reality of the business.

For funders and advisers, it’s a reminder that understanding founders requires what systems thinker Nora Bateson calls warm data: the lived context that numbers alone cannot provide.

Founders are humans inside the business, as well as its architects. Every stage asks something of them personally, not just strategically.

A handful of these tensions show up again and again. They are deeply human responses to building something under pressure.

None of these tensions belong to founders alone. Teams, boards, investors and advisers all operate within the same pressures and assumptions. The point is not to eliminate these tensions but to recognise them. They reveal where the underlying design of governance, ownership and capital is either supporting the organisation or working against it.

Let's dive into the real people, ideas, circumstances, choices and tradeoffs they worked with: a car company that doesn’t want to sell cars, a steward-owned fund investing in steward-owned companies, an ownership structure designed to outlast everyone currently holding it.

Every case here is real, and they range across different sectors and stages of development. Explore them as evidence and inspiration. No single story is the model to copy exactly. Some show what becomes possible when the organisational architecture is designed on purpose, and some sit with founders wrestling with or looking back on their design choices.

Meet some of your wonderful selves, and get a flavour for the grit, spirit and values behind this systems-shifting work.