There's a specific band of revenue — roughly €20M to €50M — where companies get stuck more reliably than anywhere else on the growth curve. The stall looks different in every company, but the underlying cause is almost always the same: the operating model that worked at €10M stops working at €30M, and leadership doesn't realize it until they're already stuck.
At €10M, a founder or small senior team can hold the whole business in their heads. Decisions happen fast because one person makes most of them. Coordination is cheap because everyone is close enough to talk directly. The company is essentially running on informal structure — and informal structure works beautifully until it doesn't.
The problem is that informal structure doesn't scale. As headcount grows and product lines multiply, the founder can no longer be in every decision. But because there's no formal decision-making structure to replace their judgment, decisions start routing back up to the top anyway — creating a bottleneck that looks like an execution problem but is actually a design problem.
The fix isn't hiring more senior people. New executives without clear mandates just add more weight to the bottleneck. The fix is designing a decision architecture: naming what gets decided where, by whom, with what information. It's unglamorous work, but it's what makes the difference between a company that breaks through the stall and one that spends three years wondering why growth has plateaued.