Scale-up Growth Strategy: If Your Team Can’t Explain It in 2 Minutes, You Don’t Have One.
- Laura Derbyshire
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
At the Business Leader Summit here in London in Westminster Hall, M&S CEO Stuart Machin said something that landed harder than most strategy decks ever do.
“Protect the magic. Modernise the rest.”
That was it. Two lines.
A strategy for M&S, a business with decades of heritage, complexity, legacy systems, and a very public turnaround story.
And yet, in that moment, you could feel it. The room understood it instantly, because it was clear.
That’s the bit most scaleups miss.
The strategy problem no one wants to admit
Walking out of that session, I overheard a few conversations that will sound very familiar if you’re running a growth business.
“Is our strategy actually clear?”
“We’ve got that massive document… but does anyone really get it?”
“We probably need to get it down to one page.”
This is the reality in many scaleups.
There is a strategy. It exists somewhere - usually in a deck, or in the founder’s head, or in a board discussion that made total sense at the time.
But it hasn’t translated.
So inside the business, people are doing good work… just not always in the same direction.
This is where most scale-up growth strategy starts to break - not because the thinking isn’t there, but because it hasn’t been made clear enough to travel across the business.
Why Scale-up Growth Strategy Fails Without Clarity
When a strategy is clear, something quite powerful happens.
Decisions speed up.
Teams stop second-guessing.
Budgets get focused instead of diluted.
Agencies actually know what they’re trying to deliver against.
You don’t need to keep re-explaining the direction, because people can feel it in how the business operates.
A strong scale-up growth strategy isn’t just direction from the top; it’s something the whole organisation can actually use.
And from an investor perspective, it matters even more. A strategy that can be explained in two minutes is easier to believe in. Easier to model. Easier to back.
Later that day, a founder on one of the panels said he "runs a £100m business where the strategy fits on a single page and can be explained in a couple of minutes", whether he’s talking to someone in sales or a private equity partner.
What clarity actually looks like in practice
This isn’t about reducing your business into something simplistic.
Marks & Spencer isn’t simple. Your business isn’t simple either.
But strong strategy has a spine.
“Protect the magic” gives you a very clear sense of what must not be lost - the brand, the trust, the thing people come back for.
“Modernise the rest” creates permission - actually, a mandate - to change what’s holding the business back.
Two directions. Working together.
In scaleups, this is often where things drift. And that’s when teams start pulling in different directions. Marketing is doing one thing, product another, leadership is saying something else again. Not because people aren’t capable. Because the strategy hasn’t been made usable.
Where most scaleups get stuck
The pattern is pretty consistent.
A strategy gets created - often thoughtfully, often with good input. It gets written down. Shared. Agreed. And then… it fades. Not intentionally. Just gradually.
Because nothing has translated that strategy into something people can hold on to day-to-day.
So the business defaults back to activity: more campaigns, more channels, more ideas, more noise.
But without a clear through-line, it doesn’t compound.
The shift that actually unlocks growth
The turning point isn’t more execution.
It’s moving from strategy as a document to strategy as a shared language.
When everyone - from leadership to your agencies - can describe where you’re going in the same way, things start to click.
You see it in the quality of decisions. In how quickly teams move.In how consistent the brand starts to feel. In how much less friction there is. Growth doesn’t suddenly become easy. But it becomes aligned.
And that’s what allows it to scale.
A simple test
If you want to know where you are, try this.
Ask five people in your business to explain the strategy.
If you don’t hear a consistent answer - and if it takes longer than a couple of minutes to get there - that’s your constraint: clarity.
