Business dreams and business realities: can growth be planned?

My professional insights · Lyudmil Karaulanov · 14 min read

Published: 3 August 2026 · Version 1.0

Imagining a larger business is one of the pleasures of being an entrepreneur. You see the new customers, the people you would recruit, the opportunity to do something for which you have not previously had the capacity. That picture can give meaning to a long and difficult period of work.

In my view, a good plan preserves the connection between that ambition and what the organisation can actually sustain. It therefore makes room for constraints too: money, time, supplies, managers and the right to change direction. The dream is then given conditions in which it can be pursued responsibly.

A dream is not a strategy

Ambition answers the question, “What do we want to achieve?” Strategy answers others as well:

• What critical resources does growth depend on?
• How much risk can the company bear without jeopardising its survival?
• What internal capabilities need to be built in advance?
• What happens if the market develops more slowly than expected?
• Which decisions can be reversed, and which commit capital irreversibly?
• What signal will indicate that the original proposition needs to be reconsidered?

A business vision can be bold. The business architecture is best kept sober.

A plan does not become stronger by including high growth percentages. It becomes stronger when it clearly shows what must hold true in terms of processes, resources and capacity for those percentages to be achieved.

Snowball growth or growth step by step?

Snowball growth is attractive because it promises a rapid increase in value. Each new customer or user makes it easier to attract the next. This logic works for digital products, network services and platforms, where an additional user does not require a proportionate increase in costs.

Not every business is built that way, however. Manufacturing requires capacity, raw materials, energy, people, quality control, warehouses and working capital. Professional services are constrained by available time, knowledge and the ability to train new specialists. Trading depends on supplies, inventory and credit risk.

When rapidly growing revenue is planned on the basis of capacity that grows step by step, the system reaches its critical point:

• orders increase, but lead times lengthen;
• sales rise, but quality falls;
• people are recruited, but there is no time to train and integrate them;
• customers arrive faster than the company can serve them.

Growth then does not increase resilience. It accelerates the organisation's exhaustion.

The risks of rapid growth

Growth is usually regarded as a good result. Yet it is also a source of new risk.

Higher turnover requires more working capital. More customers increase receivables and the administrative burden. New markets bring different contractual, tax and regulatory dependencies. An expanding team weakens the informal coordination that worked so well in the small company.

A business can be profitable in accounting terms while suffering a severe cash shortage because it pays suppliers before collecting its receivables. It may have demand but lack the people and capacity to meet it. It may have contracts but no management structure capable of overseeing their execution.

The strategic question, therefore, is not simply how fast the business can grow, but how much growth the system can sustain without losing quality, control and available cash.

A forecast is a hypothesis, not a promise

When a forecast is turned into a promise on which a manager's personal worth depends, it becomes difficult to revise. It seems more useful to me to make clear which assumptions underpin it and what change would trigger a review. An honest update can be a sign of good management.

The original assumptions may prove wrong. Raw material prices change, supplies are disrupted, new competitors emerge, customers alter their habits and financing becomes more expensive. This does not make forecasts unnecessary. It makes them useful when they are built around several possible scenarios rather than one preferred version of the future.

A mature plan does not promise a fixed figure in five years. It shows within what ranges of demand, prices, capacity and financing the objective is achievable, and what will be done if the assumptions change.

Scenarios in conditions of high uncertainty

For most companies, three main scenarios are sufficient:

• base case: developments follow the most likely expectations;
• accelerated: demand grows faster and the system needs to increase its capacity;
• adverse: revenue falls, costs rise or a key external dependency is interrupted.

For each, it is useful to establish in advance:

• what resources will be needed;
• which costs can be reduced or deferred;
• what cash reserve will be maintained;
• which critical assets must not be put at risk;
• what change will trigger a reduction in scale or an end to the investment.

Strategic foresight does not seek a single accurate forecast. It uses different possible developments to test whether today's decisions will hold up.

The risk of extending the present into the future

Forecasts are often made by simply extending the current trend with a ruler. If sales have grown by a certain percentage over the past two years, the same percentage is entered for the next five.

The current trend, however, is not a law of nature. Growth may be due to a temporary advantage, an unusually cheap resource, one major customer or the founder's extraordinary energy. Before extending the line, it is useful to examine what actually produced it:

• sustainable demand or a temporary market shortage?
• a repeatable model or a one-off opportunity?
• organisational capability or exceptional overwork?
• a profitable operation or turnover quietly supported by another activity?
• a functioning process or complete dependence on a particular person?

A forecast is only as reliable as the assumptions beneath it.

The culture of planning and the defensive reflex

If you have worked in an unpredictable environment for a long time, your caution has a history. I would not call it a lack of ambition. The more interesting question is which protections remain useful and which now restrict opportunities that could reasonably be explored.

Such behaviour is often a sensible adaptation to an unstable environment. The problem arises when the defensive reflex becomes a permanent way of managing:

• investments are postponed indefinitely;
• the business remains dependent on the founder;
• people are not developed “because they might leave”;
• processes are not documented;
• long-term relationships are avoided, even when they provide predictability;
• all profit is withdrawn rather than some being converted into productive capability.

Fear of uncertainty thus creates precisely the fragility from which the business is trying to protect itself. Adaptability and a rapid response are strengths. They become weaknesses when strategy is replaced by constant improvisation and accumulated knowledge remains locked in the founder's memory.

The philosophy of long-lived enterprises

Japan has enterprises known as shinise, some with histories of a hundred years or more. Their long horizon does not mean a detailed budget stretching decades ahead. The point is to preserve and renew the organisation at the same time, securing continuity, trust and the transmission of knowledge between generations.

A hundred-year horizon requires a clear position on several fundamental questions:

• What value does the company want to continue creating?
• What must not be sacrificed for a short-term financial result?
• How will the next managers and owners be prepared?
• What proportion of profit stays in the business as capital and capability?
• When does tradition preserve identity, and when does it begin to obstruct change?

This is not an attempt to divine the distant future. It is the building of the system's ability to move through different futures.

The means of production as the foundation of freedom

Growth depends not only on demand but also on the business's ability to deliver what it has promised. The means of production are not just machinery and buildings. They include the entire infrastructure without which delivery is impossible:

• production capacity;
• technologies and rights to them;
• access to raw materials and energy;
• premises and logistics;
• skilled people;
• knowledge, procedures and documentation;
• information systems;
• financing and working capital;
• permits, certificates and market access.

A business may have customers and a strong brand, but if it depends on someone else's production capacity, a single supplier or technology it does not control, its growth is conditional. It exists only as long as the other party provides the necessary resource on acceptable terms.

Ownership, control or secure access?

Wanting to own everything you need is natural. Your own premises and equipment provide peace of mind, but require capital and maintenance. Contractual rights of use are also part of the choice: the question is how much security is needed and what it costs.

• Does the resource need to be owned?
• Is access secured for the long term sufficient?
• Is there another supplier?
• Can the resource be replaced within a reasonable period?
• What happens if its price rises sharply?
• Who holds the rights to the technology, data and customer relationships?
• Does the company know how to restore the process on its own?

A strategic asset is not necessarily the one with the highest accounting value. It is the resource without which the business loses the ability to fulfil its core promise.

Excessive provision is a risk too

The desire for independence can lead to the opposite extreme. The business buys excessive capacity, accumulates assets it does not fully use and ties up capital in anticipation of future growth. The means of production that were meant to provide freedom then become a permanent burden.

Machines require maintenance. Buildings incur costs. People remain on the payroll in quiet months too. Technology may become obsolete before the planned volume is reached. Where the model allows, therefore, I prefer capacity to be built step by step, with each investment linked not only to the desired future but also to verifiable signals that it is actually beginning to materialise.

The right to withdraw as part of strategy

It is difficult to abandon a direction that you have persuaded others to follow. It is therefore useful to agree at the outset what would prompt reconsideration. Withdrawal when conditions change then fulfils the shared agreement rather than causing sudden disappointment.

Owners easily become emotionally attached to an idea because of the money, time and public commitments invested in it. New adverse facts then begin to look less like information and more like obstacles to be overcome at any cost. A mature plan includes:

• a threshold at which the investment is reassessed;
• a maximum acceptable loss;
• a deadline by which the project must validate its core assumptions;
• conditions for reducing its scale;
• the possibility of selling, separating or restructuring the operation;
• criteria for bringing it to a definitive end.

The right to withdraw is not a lack of resolve. It is protection against ambition becoming an endless obligation.

Where is the point of instability?

What this concept means →

It appears when the expected development begins to be treated as certain and all resources are organised around it. Or when the desire for independence leaves the business with capacity and costs for which there is insufficient work.

For me, the most valuable feature of a plan is the ability to notice change in time. Growth deserves preparation and courage. It also deserves enough honesty to acknowledge, in good time, that an assumption is no longer true, without that denying the work invested up to that point.

This material is of a general analytical nature and does not constitute individual legal, tax, financial or investment advice.