The Messy Middle: when your kitchen and bathroom business outgrows the way it runs

There’s a reason so many kitchen and bathroom businesses get stuck at one showroom, or somewhere between £1m and £1.5m.

It isn’t a lack of ambition. And it isn’t a lack of effort.

It’s that, at a certain point, more sales stop making the business easier. They start making it harder.

You can sell another kitchen tomorrow

You can’t create another experienced designer, project manager or installation team overnight.

Sales can grow quickly. Operational capacity can’t. So the projects get bigger, more jobs stay open while new ones begin, and eventually the gap starts to show:

• Jobs overrun.
• Profit disappears into return visits.
• Customers start chasing.
• Your team gets stretched.
• And every problem still finds its way back to you.

It’s not a sign you’ve built a bad business

I’ve been through it in different businesses, at different stages. Each time the symptoms looked different, but the pattern underneath was the same:

Success creates demand. Demand creates complexity. Complexity exposes an operation that hasn’t caught up.

I call it the messy middle. It’s an unavoidable part of growing a successful business — and the way out isn’t working harder. It’s building the right systems, in the right order.

Read the full story

I’ve written the whole thing up — the £12,000 kitchen that became an £80,000 project, the showroom we couldn’t cope with, and the five weeks I turned off the marketing and put my tool belt back on. It’s free: get the free guide, The Messy Middle.

And if you’re in the middle of it now, apply to work with me.