There is a certain restlessness you can feel when a business is growing without a map. It shows up in small ways. A finance director checking forecasts twice in the same meeting. A founder promising delivery dates with a flicker of hesitation. I’ve seen it in industrial estates outside Birmingham and co-working floors in Shoreditch, places where ambition hums loudly but direction sometimes whispers. Planning, when it works, rarely announces itself. It sits quietly behind decisions that seem instinctive at the time. The warehouse expansion that happens just before capacity tightens. The product line that gets trimmed months before margins…
Author: Staff
A few years ago, I was standing in a draughty warehouse on the edge of the Midlands, listening to the owner of a family-run logistics firm explain why he’d just turned down his biggest-ever contract. The numbers worked. The demand was real. Yet he shook his head, quietly certain it would pull the company into a shape it couldn’t sustain. That moment has stayed with me, because it captured something that rarely appears in glossy strategy decks but sits at the heart of business planning in the UK. For many UK SMEs, business strategy is routinely confused with ambition. Bigger…