UNCAPPED: THE UNFINISHED CEO · ISSUE 03 · OCTOBER 5, 2026
ELASTIC IDENTITY
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow is our doubts of today.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
The ceiling you keep bumping into is rarely a law of nature. It is a belief with a long track record.
CEILING SHIFTER
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
— Stephen King
You don’t have to believe in the 30x number. You only have to spend fifteen minutes working on what it breaks.
Picture budget season at a company doing $6 million. The owner writes next year’s goal on the whiteboard: double it.
Nobody argues. Sales will add two reps. Operations will add a second shift. Finance builds the model in an hour, and the model works. The meeting ends early, and everyone leaves a little relieved. A year from now they will be tired, on plan, and running exactly the same company.
That relief is the part worth noticing. A goal that fits inside the business you already have never asks the business to change. It only asks everyone to push harder.
So what would a goal have to look like to ask for more?
Same structure, same team design, same decisions, turned up. That is why most doubling plans end in exhaustion instead of transformation. The plan never asked the business to become anything. It asked it to be more of itself, faster.
Engineers find the weak part of a design by loading it past anything it will see in service. At twice the load, everything bends and holds, so you learn nothing. At thirty times, you find out which parts were carrying the weight all along.
Do that to your goal. Nobody expects thirty times anything, and this is not a promise to anyone. It is a question with one job: to make incremental thinking visibly useless. Once pushing harder can’t get you there, you stop asking how to work more and start asking what the business would have to become.
The answer is almost never effort. It is structure, who decides, who you sell to, and what you believe you are allowed to charge.
Write down next year’s goal. Multiply it by 30. Then answer one question on one page: what breaks first?
Don’t solve it. Name it. Not the sales number but the thing underneath: the approval only you can give, the one customer who carries too much, the price you set years ago and never revisited. Most owners find the answer they have been avoiding for a long time. That is the real project.
Tell me what broke first. I read every one of these myself.
The goal was never the point. The redesign it forces is. None of us builds the next version of a business by working harder at this one. Most of us are one honest page away from knowing what needs redesigning, and that page costs fifteen minutes and a little willingness to look.
If this one landed, send it to someone who’d recognize themselves in it.
Until next time,
Paresh Patel
Managing Director, ActionCOACH South Carolina
Connect with me on LinkedIn
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