It always starts the same way. Things are clicking. Your team is small, scrappy, and getting the job done. But then, without warning, the wheels start to wobble. Communication falls apart. Projects get dropped. Customers get frustrated. And leadership starts doing work they thought they left behind years ago.

That’s not bad luck. It’s the 3-and-10 rule in action.

I first noticed the 3-and-10 pattern while working at a small company. They were right at one of those early inflection points. Communication was cracking. Decision-making was inconsistent. And most tellingly, staff were finding out about important changes after they’d already been rolled out.

Leadership felt reactive. Employees felt confused. And no one knew why it suddenly felt hard.

Later, I heard the concept spelled out in a podcast: teams, systems, and processes tend to break every time a company triples or 10x’s in size. 3 people. 10 people. 30 people. 100. And everything made sense.

Since then, I’ve seen the 3-and-10 rule show up in dozens of small to mid-sized businesses, especially in organizations without the resources to proactively build for scale.

Most business owners are sprinting, not scaffolding. They grow into problems, rather than planning around them.

What Starts to Break

It’s rarely just one thing. At that first 10-person jump, everything started breaking at once:

• Communication: Employees heard about changes too late (or not at all).

• Transparency: The leadership team assumed alignment that didn’t exist.

• Processes: No one owned key handoffs, so things slipped through the cracks.

• Frustration: Employee pulse surveys made it clear: communication was the #1 complaint.

In another company I advised, the president was constantly in the weeds- not because he liked it, but because he had to be. Their revenue had grown, but their people hadn’t. The sales team was under-trained, which meant ops teams were inheriting messy project scopes. And the president was stuck cleaning up after every deal.

That’s the 10-to-30 stage breakdown:

• The right hand (sales) makes promises the left hand (ops) can’t fulfill

• Middle management is underdeveloped or missing

• Leadership turns into a bottleneck instead of a bridge

🛠️ How I Help Businesses Course-Correct

My go-to move isn’t to jump in with answers, it’s to ask better questions.

• I start with leadership interviews to understand how departments should interact

• I spend time shadowing key roles, often uncovering unseen blockers

• I run employee pulse surveys to hear what’s not being said out loud

• And sometimes we survey clients, because frontline communication breakdowns always trickle down to customer frustration

Even simple fixes can move the needle: having the CEO send out weekly updates, or starting department-specific briefings.

What seems “obvious” to leadership is often completely invisible to the rest of the team.

Scaling Without Chaos: The Real Play

The trick isn’t fixing what’s broken, rather it’s building ahead of the break.

I often coach leaders to scale ahead of their need, whether that’s software, people, or process. It means choosing tools that can grow with you. It means spotting the people who might be your next great leader, and giving them resources before the cracks form.

When you’re a team of 3, communication can happen in a hallway. At 10, you need structure. At 30, you need systems.

And if you wait until it breaks to address it, you’re already late.

Closing Thoughts

If your business feels like it’s outgrowing itself every few months then it probably is.

The good news is, these breaking points aren’t signs of failure. They’re clues that it’s time to build the next version of your company, on purpose. Let’s jump on a call to discuss your goals.