Breaking the cycle of high action and low clarity
Firefighting. Fire drills. Chaos. Pulled from pillar to post. Overwhelmed. These are the words I hear most often in first conversations with founder-CEOs of scaling businesses. They describe the state in rich detail – the morning that starts with a plan and ends with none of it done, the Tuesday that disappears into an escalation that shouldn’t have been an escalation, the Sunday night scroll through a full inbox when the week ahead already looks impossible. The vocabulary is remarkably consistent. So is the underlying pattern.
Here’s the uncomfortable thing about founder firefighting mode: it isn’t really about having too much to do. It’s about the relationship between action and clarity inside your business. Founders who are firefighting are nearly always in a high-action, low-clarity quadrant – doing a lot, but without the structural clarity that would let any of it compound. Fixing that isn’t about working harder, or about hiring more. It’s about changing the shape of the work so that fewer problems need the founder’s attention, and the ones that do can be solved instead of just survived.
Why founders end up here (and why it’s not personal)
If you’re firefighting, the first thing worth saying is that it isn’t a character flaw and it’s not the sign of a bad founder. Every scaling business goes through some version of this. The reason is simple: the thing that got you here – your ability to be in everything, hold the whole business in your head, move fast on instinct, respond to whatever needs responding to – is the exact same capability that starts failing you once the business gets bigger than one person can hold in their head.
Brent Lowe, a coach I respect who works with growing businesses, describes three traps that founders consistently fall into as their businesses scale:
Founder burnout. The founder is giving all the energy and time they can, but it’s no longer making the difference the business needs. More effort from the same founder, in the same mode, has stopped moving the needle.
Lack of a cohesive plan. The business is growing. The informal coordination that used to hold it together doesn’t hold it together any more. A new approach is needed for the next phase – but the founder hasn’t had the time or the clarity to design one.
Founder leadership trap. Being a visionary founder and creating a business from nothing demands one form of leadership. Growing a business sustainably takes another – and the gap between those two forms is where a lot of founders get stuck.
If you recognise yourself in any of these, you’re not failing. You’re at the point where the business is asking for a different kind of leader, and the transition to that leader is the work.
The action/clarity quadrant
The most useful frame I’ve found for thinking about firefighting comes from plotting action against clarity. Two axes, four quadrants:
Low action, low clarity. The business is drifting. Not much is happening and nobody is sure what should be. This is where very early-stage or badly stalled businesses live. It’s rare to meet a founder here who’s actively firefighting – more commonly they’re in a kind of frozen indecision.
Low action, high clarity. You know what needs to happen. Nothing is moving. This is usually a capacity or commitment problem, not a systems problem.
High action, high clarity. This is the goal state. Things are moving fast, everyone knows why, and the velocity compounds. Scaling businesses that get into this quadrant and stay there are the ones that break through the £3m–£15m danger zone.
High action, low clarity. Chaotic burnout. A lot of activity, very little of it directional. This is where firefighting founders live. It feels productive – you’re doing stuff all day – but the motion isn’t organised around a clear intentional purpose, and the business ends up constrained in its pace of growth because the founder’s energy is fragmented across too many things none of which are the most important.
Most founders who come to me describing firefighting are in that last quadrant. The fix isn’t to reduce action. It’s to add clarity – a clear intentional purpose for the business, well-defined accountability for people’s roles, and a shared understanding of what matters most right now. Without that, any attempt to “stop firefighting” will get swept away by the next round of problems.
Why founders resist the obvious fix
The obvious answer to low clarity is process – defined ways of working, agreed priorities, a rhythm for decisions. Founders almost always resist it. The reason they give is that process will kill off the innovation and speed that got the business here. That resistance is real, and sometimes reasonable, and also – honestly – usually a bit of a self-protective deflection.
The right kinds of process don’t kill innovation. They reduce operational complexity into repeatable, lower-risk work, which frees up the founder’s cognitive and emotional bandwidth for the bits of the business that genuinely do need them. Bad process is rigid, overbuilt and detached from the work. Good process is light, load-bearing, and invisible to the people running inside it. The difference is in how it’s designed – and in whether the person designing it actually understands the business, which is where most generic process initiatives fall down.
Scale-up complexity grows exponentially with headcount, revenue and number of products. You cannot outrun that complexity through sheer founder willpower. The founders who try to tend to be the same founders still describing firefighting eighteen months later, just more tired.
The structural moves that actually get you out
In my fractional COO engagements, the pattern of how to get a founder out of firefighting is reasonably consistent. The specifics are always bespoke, but the shape looks like this:
1. Name the intentional purpose. What is this business actually for, over the next 12 to 18 months? Not the vision statement. The specific direction that lets the leadership team say yes or no to things without asking the founder. Without this, you cannot create clarity downstream, because there’s nothing to be clear about.
2. Put a goals framework around it. Translate the intentional purpose into a small number of goals for the next quarter, owned by named people. Three to five is usually plenty; seven is too many. This is the minimum goal structure that a business can use to hold itself to account without the founder being the structure.
3. Install an operating cadence. A weekly leadership meeting that’s about solving the hard problems, not about sharing status. A monthly review of the goals. A quarterly planning session. These are the rhythms that give the goals somewhere to live. Most firefighting businesses either don’t have these rhythms or have them nominally but use them badly.
4. Define accountability for the top five operational decisions that keep landing on your desk. Who owns hiring decisions at this level? Who owns pricing changes? Who owns client escalations? Make the answers explicit, in writing, and defend them when somebody uses them.
5. Build pattern recognition into the team closest to the problems. Most recurring fires need the same class of judgment each time. Teach that judgment explicitly rather than solving it yourself every Tuesday. This is where the competence lens on accountability and the firefighting lens meet – the same fix unlocks both.
None of these moves are glamorous. All of them are load-bearing. Taken together they move the business from the high-action, low-clarity quadrant into high-action, high-clarity – which is where growth stops being grindingly expensive.
The founder work that runs alongside the structural work
Here’s the bit founders least want to hear. The structural moves above are necessary but not sufficient. The other half of the work is on the founder themselves – the unconscious influences you’re having on your business, the reasons you keep saying yes to things you know you should say no to, the ways in which the firefighting has started to feel comfortable because at least it’s familiar.
Part of my fractional COO engagements is a standing check on the founder themselves – not in a therapy sense, but in a practical one. What’s in your week that shouldn’t be? What are you saying yes to that the business doesn’t need? Where is your energy going that isn’t creating value? Where is your anxiety driving decisions that calm consideration would answer differently? This is the half of the work that founder coaching addresses more formally, and it often runs alongside the structural work rather than being a separate thing.
“Simon is an outstanding coach. His calm presence and thought-provoking questions helped me see challenges from new perspectives and overcome obstacles that had been holding me back at work. Each session left me with practical insights that strengthened my relationships with colleagues, leading to better collaboration, faster decisions, and improved outcomes.”
Mark Moreton, Director of Learning and Development, CVS Group
Three questions to ask yourself this week
If you’re reading this from inside firefighting mode, here are the three questions I’d ask you to sit with this week, in that order.
1. How clear are you on the intentional purpose for your business over the next 12 months, and how is that clarity actually landing with your team? Not the aspirational vision. The directional clarity that lets somebody say yes or no to a decision without checking with you.
2. As a founder, which specific symptoms of firefighting do you recognise in your working week? Name them. If you can’t name them, you can’t design around them.
3. Which five decisions are landing on your desk most often, and who should own them instead? Write the list. It usually takes about 15 minutes, and it’s almost always a useful starting point for a real structural conversation.
Next step. Firefighting is a state you can stay in for years if you let yourself. It’s also a state that very few founders get out of by trying harder on their own. Most get out of it through a combination of structural work (goals, cadence, accountability, role clarity) and founder work (deciding what not to say yes to, trusting the system, protecting your own focus). If you’re in it and can’t see your way out, a conversation might be the most useful 30 minutes you spend this month.
