Speed is a conditional advantage
Everyone talks about speed, but speed is useless if the system chokes.
Everyone talks about speed, but speed is useless if the system chokes. I learned this the hard way.
A client recently ended our engagement because my pace was out of sync with the rest of the org capacity.
And in hindsight, it made sense.
↳ If you flood the pipeline faster than design, ops, or sales can absorb, you don’t get more growth, you create bottlenecks.
You can have the best strategy and the cleanest execution, and still fail because you pushed a system past its limit.
↳ Speed without capacity in mind is just chaos in motion, not velocity.
Which led me to think…
Every company has their own invisible “absorption rate, the pace at which it can take in new work, new change, new opportunity.
• If you match it, the whole system goes smooth.
• If you exceed it, the system doesn’t accelerate.
Because speed isn’t a universal advantage.
↳ It’s a conditional advantage.
It works only when the rest of the org can move in sync.
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Which raises bigger questions for any team:
→ Are you moving at the right speed for your system?
↳ Or are you chasing “fast” without checking if the rest of the machine can keep up?
→ How do you increase the absorption rate without creating lag-time?
↳ How do you push growth without triggering friction?
These are the things no one puts in a playbook.
But they’re often the difference between the 0.1% who make it and the 99.9% who just try.
It definitely made difference in my operator experience.
And I’ll use this hard earned lesson with my future clients:
- Find their absorbption rate early
- And match it to align with the whole ship
Have you ever seen speed backfire?
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I’m collecting anonymous “untold startup stories”.
The messy, uncomfortable truths we skip in case studies and testimonials.
Because if we don’t talk about them, we can’t fix them.
PS. DM me if you want to share your story
(I’ll keep it anonymous).
Let’s make the startup world a little more real.