There’s a moment in every leader’s journey when things don’t feel wrong exactly, but they don’t feel quite right either.
You’re not putting out fires. You’re not fighting for survival. Sales might be steady, the team’s functioning, clients are happy, and from the outside everything looks fine. But on the inside, something’s tugging at your attention. A sense that the business is capable of something more, but it just isn’t moving fast enough to get there.
That could be the moment to hit reset.
Reset Isn’t about fixing failure
For a long time, I thought a reset was what you did when everything had gone off the rails, a last resort, a dramatic overhaul or dare I say ‘pivot’.But I’ve come to learn through experience, and sometimes the hard way, that resets are not just for salvage jobs. They’re also for embracing opportunity and unleashing potential.
Usually the business isn’t broken, it’s just outgrown the operating model it started with. Or the market has shifted and the business hasn’t quite caught up. Or we’ve set our sights higher, but we’re still playing by old rules and a historical mindset. In one of my own businesses we, or more correctly I hit that wall.
The growth ceiling you don’t see coming
We were growing steadily, had a good team, and felt confident in our market. But when a new opportunity came along, one that could have genuinely doubled our revenue in 18 months, we realised we couldn’t respond quickly enough. Our systems weren’t designed for it. Our decision-making process was too slow. Our culture was still leaning toward cautious evolution when the moment demanded bold repositioning.
I assumed we’d need new people and new resources. We didn’t. We just needed a new approach.
The £10m bottleneck
One of my clients, a well-established B2B services company, had just secured a major contract that could have taken them from £4m turnover to over £10m within two years.
On paper, it looked like a dream. But within weeks it became clear they weren’t ready to deliver at the scale and speed the new contract demanded. The team was strong, but the operational model was built around bespoke delivery, specialist knowledge, and a lot of founder oversight. The MD told me, “We’ve won the work but if we try to deliver it the way we’ve always done, we’ll burn out or even risk failure.”
We took a step back and over a series of reset sessions, we mapped out the new business model as if we were designing it from scratch to serve just this client, but without compromising their existing customers.
We didn’t touch the leadership structure at first. We focused on:
- Where the decisions were being made
- How delivery was managed
- What parts of the business needed to be “productised” or modular
- And how to build new capabilities without diluting their identity
Six months later, they had split their operations into two delivery tracks, one high-touch and bespoke, one fast-track and scalable. The same team delivered both, but they were empowered with clearer roles, better workflows, and more confidence in where they were going. They didn’t hire a single new full-time manager during that phase because they really didn’t need more people even though revenue was increasing fast. Internal feedback scores went up and profitability did too, not least because they hadn’t thrown money and resources at a challenge which was at its heart all about mindset. And perhaps most of all, the founder was no longer the cork in the bottle filtering every decision – exactly the same as I was almost 20 years ago!
Signals that it’s time for a reset
Sometimes the need for a reset whispers. Other times, it crashes through the door. In my experience, these are the signals that tend to show up first:
- Speed mismatch: Opportunities are coming faster than your business can respond.
- Stalled energy: The leadership team feels flat or overworked, even though the business is ‘doing fine’.
- Over-anchored in legacy: You catch yourself saying, “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it,” too often.
- Too many ‘OKs’: Everything’s working, but nothing feels exceptional.
- Disconnected ambition: The vision is exciting, but the organisation isn’t structurally or culturally aligned with it.
What a reset really looks like
Resets aren’t just strategy days and flashy ‘here’s our new culture’ presentations. Done well, they’re felt throughout the business.
They look like:
- Redefining roles to match future needs, not current habits.
- Letting go of sacred cows even the ones you created yourself.
- Unclogging decision-making by pushing authority closer to the action.
- Designing for agility not just efficiency.
- Reigniting belief across the team that they’re part of something ambitious again.
I remember one particular workshop with our leadership team. We started mapping out how we could deliver our services differently – faster, more flexibly, with fewer handoffs. At first the discussion was cautious, then someone said, “What if we scrapped the process entirely and rebuilt it around client speed, not internal comfort?” That was the turning point. Not long after, we rolled out a new delivery model. Same people. Same service. But better outcomes, and a more energised team.
Reset as a leadership skill
The ability to reset is a form of leadership maturity. It means:
- You’re not married to past success.
- You’re willing to reframe rather than retreat.
- You can see possibility where others see disruption.
Some of the best-performing businesses I’ve worked with have built this into their DNA. They reset proactively. They see opportunity not as a stretch but as an invitation to reinvent.
And the leaders who thrive in that environment are the ones who don’t wait for cracks to appear before they start asking better questions.
You don’t need a crisis to justify a reset. Sometimes, you just need the courage to say: “This could be better. Let’s build for that.”
When you do, you might just discover, like we did, that the talent, capacity, and answers are already in the business. All you needed was a new approach.
“In hindsight, every great leap forward I’ve been part of started with one honest conversation: not about what was wrong but about what could be better. That’s what hitting reset really means.”
— Mark Jarvis
Mark Jarvis
Founder | Interim MD | NED
Author of The Very Best Business Handbook You’ll Ever Own
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I help owners, founders and leaders create a scalable business that works without them, build a world-class team, and 10x profitability. Book a call with me here to see if we could work together.
Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?
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