BLOG SERIES: THREADS
The Tangled Business Series
STAGE
Recognition
READ TIME
2 mins
It doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t take much either.
Just a series of small decisions — each one sensible at the time, given the resources we had and the stage we were at. Taken on their own, every single one was the right call.
But businesses aren’t collections of isolated decisions. They’re more like a knitted jumper. Every thread connects to the others. And when one part gets caught, the tension shows up somewhere else entirely.
That’s how tangles form. Not through bad decisions. Through good ones made at different times, in different seasons, without quite knowing how they’d sit alongside everything that came before — or after.
If none of this sounds familiar yet, you’re in a minority. A genuinely small one.
How it actually happens
Sometimes it starts with speed. Something stops working, so you fix the obvious thing. It works — but it shifts the tension somewhere else in the jumper, and you don’t always notice straight away.
Sometimes it happens in seasons. The website built two years ago was designed for the business we were running then. The offer made sense. The messaging was right. But the business evolved and the structure around it… mostly didn’t.
Sometimes it’s a specialist. You hired someone brilliant to do one specific thing — and they did. Exactly that one thing. The knock-on effects on everything else weren’t their job to consider, and they didn’t know your business inside out anyway. So the new thing works, but we didn’t think about what it changed around it.
And sometimes we end up with a system that works perfectly — but the different specialists who built the different parts didn’t pass on the details of how or why. So now we’re left with something we can’t quite trace.
One of my favourite things about being a founder is that I have the ability to move quickly, adapt, fix things — but this is also what makes tangles more likely.
When we’re solving something quickly, we’re working at the surface. What’s happening underneath doesn’t always get a look in.
None of this makes us careless.
It makes us someone who was getting on with it.
What a tangled business actually feels like
It rarely announces itself dramatically. It’s more of a slow friction.
- Marketing feels harder than it used to.
- Something’s slightly off with the messaging but it’s hard do see exactly what.
- Content that used to work has quietly stopped.
- And that new offer, the one we were so excited about, just isn’t landing the way it should.
- Something about our online presence feels mismatched — like different parts of it are speaking to different people.
- Which, quite possibly, they are.
The pieces of every business — messaging, audience, offers, content, customer journey — all pull on the same threads. Change one and the tension shifts everywhere else.
Not always immediately.
Not always obviously.
But it does.
For many of you this will sound familiar — good.
That means the threads can be found. And followed back to where things first became caught.
If you’re curious about why one small adjustment can create even more work for yourself, that’s exactly what this is about >
The Tangled Business Series
More posts from this series
