Why one company added $10M while another stalled: a scaling-up case study

Executive overview

Two companies of similar size started working with a Gazelles coach in the same year, facing equally brutal market headwinds. One — Hawk Aerospace — added roughly $10 million in revenue within about a year. The other stalled.

The difference was not knowledge. Both had access to the same Scaling Up framework. The gap was execution: making hard people decisions fast, holding the line on process adoption, managing cash as the oxygen of the business, and refusing to pursue too many priorities at once.

Knowing the framework is not the same as running the framework.

People decisions determine trajectory

• Hawk's CEO Joe identified two wrong leaders within the first six to nine months and replaced both — including stepping into the president role himself.
• The design company delayed a necessary ops replacement because the person was pregnant; a legal workaround existed but wasn't fully pursued.
• The design company then hired three leaders inside 60 days. Chaos followed. Damage was hard to undo.
• Vern Harnish's guidance: replace no more than one key leader every six months to allow proper onboarding.
• Interjecting multiple new leaders into an existing company that is simultaneously adopting core values compounds the risk.
• Joe also held firm when his team resisted accountability tools — KPIs, huddles, performance targets. He drew a clear line: get on board or find another aircraft.

Cash is the oxygen — manage it like a pilot manages fuel

• Both companies had serious cash pressure: Hawk through the oil and gas downturn; the design company through retail disruption and a large technology investment.
• Hawk's CFO found cash in inventory and real estate. They managed a tight 18-month stretch without running dry.
• The design company made a major PLM system investment in the middle of the crisis. It eventually delivered value, but the timing created an avoidable cash crunch.
• Running out of cash is not like running out of gas in a car — you can't pull over. Miss payroll once in an early-stage company and you might survive. Miss it twice and you're done.
• The one-two punch that worked: drive sales as the primary number, manage cash as the counterbalance number.

Sales and systems: use what you already have

• Hawk had Salesforce in place but wasn't using it. Joe drove full adoption as his personal initiative.
• They built a coordinated outreach effort — law enforcement, past customers — with a long-term sales cycle in mind (18 months to three years in their industry).
• The design company's equivalent trap: a capable technology system dismissed as clunky, replaced rather than trained on.
• A common pattern: companies with solid systems replace them instead of investing in training and process refinement.
• Weekly tactical meetings kept everything on track across the sales and cash priorities simultaneously.

Priorities: pick fewer, execute better

• Both coaches and CEOs face the same failure mode — too many things on the list, too few actually executed.
• Strategy clarity (purpose, values, BHAG, core customer, brand promises) makes tactical decisions dramatically easier for the following year.
• A company will always have more things to do than time to do them. The question is which few things move the needle.
• The design company's lesson: delaying the PLM investment by six months while stabilising leadership would have been the right call. The coach reflects this was a moment to push back harder.

The value of an outside perspective

• Coaches are effective not because they are smarter but because they are not swimming in the company's water.
• Seeing patterns across 30 active CEOs and experience at Fortune 50 scale gives the coach a reference point the CEO cannot have from inside one company.
• The design company used some Scaling Up habits — not all. Partial implementation produces partial results. Every failure the coach recalled personally traced back to using the framework incompletely.
• Crawl before you walk, walk before you run: strategic tools like a BHAG require foundational work first. Jumping to the X Factor before values are in place does not compress the timeline — it undermines it.

Building culture alongside growth

• Hawk's HR lead Deb rebuilt the performance and compensation system over two years.
• She launched TINYpulse company-wide — a regular employee-sentiment pulse that gave floor-level maintenance staff a voice.
• Five Dysfunctions work started at leadership level and is being extended into the company.
• Employee satisfaction must be tracked alongside productivity metrics. Driving hard without measuring morale produces short-term output and long-term attrition.
• Core values adoption was a deliberate, multi-year effort — not a one-day offsite.

The strategic repositioning payoff

• After two years of foundation-building, Hawk developed a new brand promise opening access to new markets.
• This kind of strategic differentiation — the secret sauce — is not available at the start. It emerges from disciplined execution of the basics over time.
• Companies that want to skip to competitive differentiation before values, BHAG, and team stability are in place are attempting the final lap without running the first.