If you’ve ever watched your business grow faster than you could keep up—if revenue is climbing while your people, systems, and sanity feel stretched to the breaking point—you’ll understand why I founded Guide to Greatness®. I wanted to make business growth more predictable and sustainable for leaders like you.
In 2005, three months before my tenure review at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, I made a decision that many people called crazy. I resigned my faculty role, moved to Arizona, and launched a speaking and consulting practice.
It was a whirlwind of over 100 speaking engagements over a two-year timespan with the release of my first book, Catch! A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness. Honestly, I didn’t have everything figured out, but I kept seeing a pattern in the way businesses grow—and struggle—that I couldn’t ignore.
The problem I saw everywhere
Working with small and midsized businesses across industries, I watched smart, committed leaders trying to grow without a clear map. They were hitting revenue milestones but still firefighting the same issues; adding people and software but not getting true capacity; and blaming themselves, their teams, or “timing” when things felt chaotic.
Back in 1998, I had read Larry Grenier’s work on organizational life cycles. His insight that companies move through distinct phases of growth and crisis immediately resonated. But it also exposed a gap: there was no framework that could help CEOs, COOs, and leadership teams predict what was coming and use it as a compass and a map for sustainable growth.
Any company can grow; sustainably growing is a different game.
Sustainable growth means the winds of growth are not only recognized, but your systems and processes are built to harness them—from a nice breeze all the way up to a full-on hurricane. Without that, growth feels like hanging onto the kite; with it, growth becomes something you can actually steer.
Guide to Greatness as my field lab
From day one, I didn’t want another theoretical model. I wanted to roll up my sleeves and create a framework that worked inside real organizations—construction firms, medical practices, manufacturers, SaaS companies, nonprofits, municipalities, and more.
Over nearly two decades of consulting, I kept asking three questions:
- Do companies move through recognizable stages as they grow?
- If so, what truly defines those stages?
- What has to mature for a business to sustain each next level?
Early on, I focused on four forces that shaped day-to-day life inside a business: leadership, culture, political structure, and reward structure—what I called the Four Pillars of Organizational Greatness.
Over time, my work showed that those pillars weren’t enough by themselves. There were additional patterns in focus, metrics, decision-making, and how progress actually happened. Through decades of testing and refinement, those pillars evolved into 10 key elements that together describe how a business is wired to grow.
Those 10 elements deserve their own article, so I’ll save the details for a future post. For now, what matters most is this:
When those elements are aligned with your true stage of maturity, growth gets easier, more honest, and far more predictable.
And yes, there really are six stages.
The six predictable stages of business growth
The Growth Alignment Framework™ is built around six predictable stages of business maturity. These stages are not defined by revenue, headcount, or years in business. They’re defined by how your organization actually behaves—what it focuses on, how it leads, and how work really gets done.
Each stage has a defining Crisis Catalyst™—a recurring challenge or breaking point that signals you’ve outgrown your current way of operating and must evolve in you want growth to be sustainable rather than fragile.
Here’s a high-level look:
Stage 1—Starting Up
- Scrappy, all-in, figuring out if the lights will stay on.
- Crisis Catalyst: Can we bring in enough steady money to keep going?
Stage 2—Getting Organized
- Gaining efficiency, clarifying roles, taming the chaos.
- Crisis Catalyst: Can we handle more work without things breaking down?
Stage 3—Growing Bigger
- Expanding with intention: more customers, more people, more complexity.
- Crisis Catalyst: Are we consistent across departments, locations, or regions?
Stage 4—Pulling Together
- Integrating and simplifying what greater growth created; cutting bureaucratic fat.
- Crisis Catalyst: Have we simplified the complexities of greater growth?
Stage 5—Innovating Together
- Cross-functional collaboration and shared problem-solving become the norm.
- Crisis Catalyst: Are our teams integrating and innovating together?
Stage 6—Staying Fresh
- Continuous renewal, distributed leadership, and a culture that doesn’t fossilize.
- Crisis Catalyst: Are we staying fresh and relevant? Do we have the data to tell us when to shift between growth and infrastructure?
Every organization from every sector—from service businesses and clinics to manufacturers and online platforms. But here is the crucial part: Stage 6 is not “better” than the others. The goal is not to chase the highest number. It’s to honestly know where you are and build the most mature version of that stage that aligns with your goals.
Some of the healthiest, most profitable organizations I’ve worked with chose to master Stage 2 or 3 because it best suited their vision, capacity, and stakeholder value.
The Crisis Catalyst: the gate between stages
One of the most powerful patterns to emerge from this work is what I call the Crisis Catalyst. Every stage has a specific crisis question, a recurring friction or constraint that signals you have reached the edge of your current way of operating.
Until you resolve that stage’s Crisis Catalyst, you cannot truly move to the next stage and sustain it, no matter your revenue or headcount.
For example, if you’re in Stage 2 but can’t honestly answer yes to, “Can we handle more work without things breaking down?”, you might grow top-line numbers but will feel stuck in firefighting, delays, and rework. Too often, leaders treat these crises as bad luck or isolated problems.
In reality, I’ve learned that they are predictive gates. Addressed well, a Crisis Catalyst becomes a Growth Catalyst—a launchpad to your next level. Ignored, it becomes the reason you keep circling the same problems quarter after quarter.
From framework to playbook: the book
The work that began when I founded Guide to Greatness in 2005—that’s been refined inside real organizations for nearly twenty years—has now become a book.
Guide to Greatness: A Leader’s Playbook to Predictable, Profitable Growth publishes December 1, 2026.
In it, you’ll find:
- A deep dive into all six stages of maturity
- The 10 elements that reveal your true stage
- The Growth Readiness Scorecard™
- Stage-specific Crisis Catalysts and practical steps to move forward
- Stage-based stories from some of my favorite clients
Future posts will explore each stage, unpack the 10 elements, and share real-world stories of organizations putting the Framework to work.
Your next step
If you’re wondering which stage your business is actually in—or sensing that different leaders on your team would answer that question differently—the best next step is to get clear together.
The Growth Readiness Scorecard™ is a diagnostic designed for that purpose. It gives you and your leadership team a shared, honest picture of where you are now and what needs to mature next.
- Take the Growth Readiness Scorecard™
- Book a 30-minute discovery conversation
- Join the interest list for book updates and pre-order details
