In my work, I have the opportunity to engage with a wide range of leaders, professionals, and industries. Manufacturing, building, professional services, technology, different markets, different challenges, different levels of sophistication. Yet regardless of the strategy on paper, the sales process being used, or the marketing tactics being deployed, sustainable business growth almost always comes down to one single concept: culture.
Every business has a culture. The real question is not whether you have one, but whether your culture is actually aligned with the growth you say you want.
Many organizations talk about growth, but far fewer are truly aligned for it. Growth is uncomfortable. It exposes misalignment, inefficiencies, and hard truths about people, processes, and leadership behaviors. When growth stalls, it’s easy to blame sales, marketing, or “the market.” In reality, those are often symptoms, not the root cause.
If you say you want growth, you have to ask yourself some hard questions:
- Are you truly aligned for growth, or just talking about it?
- Are you willing to realign the business to support growth?
- What roadblocks, structural, procedural, or personal, are you willing to remove?
- Are you open to moving team members into new roles or under new leadership where their skills better align?
- Are you holding onto control in ways that limit speed, trust, and accountability?
- Are you being honest with yourself about wanting growth, or are you unwilling to rethink how the business is actually aligned?
Here’s the bottom line: real growth requires real change.
Creating effective growth processes almost always demands realignment across the organization. That includes:
- People: Roles, responsibilities, and sometimes reporting structures must evolve.
- Resources: Time, budget, and focus must be reallocated to what truly drives growth.
- Strategy: Clear priorities must replace scattered initiatives.
- Tactics: Marketing, business development, sales, and operations must work as one system, not silos.
Culture shows up in how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and how aligned teams truly are. If the culture resists change, growth will always stall, no matter how good the sales playbook looks.
So ask yourself honestly: What am I truly willing to do to create a culture of growth and alignment?
If the answer is “not much,” that’s okay, but stop kidding yourself about wanting growth.