08/06/2026
Everyone assumes mid-market growth is stalling because of uncertainty. During the last 18 months across the table from CEOs of $100Mโ$500M companies, we'd point to something else.
Here are the 3 reasons we believe growth actually falls off the agenda and not one of them is the economy.
1. It loses the calendar, not the argument.
No executive team we know votes against growth. It simply never gets the hours. Tariffs, a financing conversation that multiplies, an AI decision no one feels qualified to make, a key customer gone quiet โ these are leadership problems, and they arrive twenty a week. Growth stays on the list of what matters and slides off the list of what gets done this month. We see it every day.
2. It becomes everyone's priority, and therefore no one's job.
We all learned this in Management 101. When growth is "the whole team's focus," it belongs to nobody in particular. The moment leadership goes heads-down on risk, commercial momentum has no owner and unowned momentum doesn't hold.
3. Momentum gets treated as free to restart.
The assumption is that you can pick growth back up once things settle. You can't. Momentum is slow and expensive to rebuild and "once things settle" is a date that keeps moving. You know it, we know it.
Notice what isn't on that list: uncertainty. The environment is genuinely hard and it isn't reverting โ this is the operating environment now. But the threat to your growth isn't the uncertainty. It's the distraction.
That's the case for treating growth as something you govern, not something you hope for โ an owner, a cadence, a way to keep commercial momentum on the agenda while leadership handles everything else on it. It's the whole reason we say growth should be governable.
So the question isn't whether you believe in growth. It's this: what has moved ahead of it on your agenda this year โ not on the board slide, but in the hours that actually got spent? You probably don't need a team survey, you know the answer to this.
