That is not a coincidence. A modest growth target does not filter anything meaningful out of a company’s plan. It leaves the existing systems, the existing habits, and the existing mediocrity fully intact, because nothing about hitting 10 percent requires any of it to change. A founder who names a genuinely large number, the jump from $1M to $20M instead of $1M to $1.3M, gets a different kind of plan immediately, because that number makes it obvious how much of what the company currently does will not get it there.
Why Does Naming a Bigger Goal Change the Plan Itself?
Naming a bigger goal changes the plan because it acts as a filter. A modest target like 10 percent growth can be hit by doing roughly the same things slightly better. A target like 20x growth cannot. The moment a founder writes down $20M instead of $1.3M, most of the current sales process, marketing approach, and team structure visibly fails to clear the bar, and that failure is the useful part, not a problem to avoid.
Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson make this case directly in The Science of Scaling, built around what they call Frame, Floor, and Focus: name an impossible goal first, since it acts as a filter showing how much of the current operation would not meet that bar. Raise the floor by cutting whatever does not clear it. Then focus everything freed up on the most direct path. The model was built for ambitious founders. It maps onto a K-12 vendor trying to go from $1M to $20M almost without translation.
The Pattern: Ambitious Founders Planning Like Cautious Ones
I keep meeting K-12 organization founders who talk like they want to build something big and then plan like they’re trying not to lose what they already have.
A sales process built around the founder personally closing every deal. A marketing budget sized to last year’s revenue instead of next year’s ambition. A team structure where every important decision still runs through one person.
None of those are wrong choices at $1M. All of them become the ceiling at $5M, and the vendor who keeps them past that point is not protecting the business, they’re capping it.
The Diagnosis
This happens because modest goals feel safe and large goals feel reckless, so most founders default to the safe-sounding number without noticing that safety and stagnation are often the same thing in disguise. A 10 percent growth target does not ask anything hard of the business. It asks the business to keep doing what it already does, slightly more of it, slightly better. That is comfortable, and it is also exactly why so many K-12 vendors plateau at the scale where the founder is still the bottleneck for every major decision.
What to Do Instead
Write down the actual number you want, not the number that sounds reasonable to say out loud in a planning meeting. $20M from $1M is not a typo or an exaggeration, it is a different company than the one that exists today, and naming it honestly is the only way to see what has to change to get there.
Once the number is named, treat the plan as mostly about elimination, not addition. The instinct is to ask what new thing gets the company to $20M. The better question is what has to stop being true about how the company works, starting with whatever currently depends entirely on the founder personally. A sales process that only works because the founder closes every deal cannot scale past the founder’s calendar, no matter how good it is.
Raise the floor before you add anything new. Most scaling failures come from tolerating too much mediocrity for too long, not from a lack of good ideas. Cutting the parts of the business that don’t meet a higher standard, a channel that isn’t working, a hire that isn’t performing, a process that only exists out of habit, usually does more for growth than adding one more initiative on top of an already crowded plan.
If your organization is working through a version of this, let’s talk. You can see how Midday Advisors works with education companies on our services page, or read the Guide on why K-12 marketing stalls and the post on strategic, operating, and GTM plans.
Scott Noon is the founder of Midday Advisors, a K-12 go-to-market advisory firm.
Frequently Asked Questions
The goal’s job is not to be hit exactly, it’s to act as a filter that reveals what in the current plan would actually have to change. A founder who names $20M and reaches $8M has still built a fundamentally different company than one who named $1.3M and reached it.
Whatever currently depends entirely on the founder personally, most often the sales process. A business that cannot close a deal without the founder in the room has a ceiling exactly at the founder’s personal capacity.
The underlying mechanism, that a modest goal fails to filter out mediocrity, applies broadly, but a nonprofit’s version of “scaling” usually means program reach or revenue diversification rather than company valuation, so the specific moves look different even when the diagnosis is the same.
Test each part against the real goal, not the comfortable one. A channel, hire, or process that would still make sense on the path to $20M stays. One that only makes sense because it’s what the company has always done is a candidate to cut.
It’s from Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson’s book The Science of Scaling. The three-part model, naming an impossible goal, raising the minimum standard, then concentrating resources on the most direct path, was built for founders generally, and applies directly to K-12 vendors scaling past their first million in revenue.
