# Team Growth Ceiling

#concept #leadership #team

`Status: tentative` — single source, a promotional-style leadership clip with anecdotal evidence only. Speaker identified 2026-07-20 as [[dan-martell]] (confirmed by the vault owner), who also carries [[marketing-system]] — so this page and that one are **one author, not two independent voices**.

## Summary

A company's growth is capped by its people's growth: to double the business, each team member must roughly double too. The ceiling is human, not market. Leadership's job is to make that math explicit and run mechanisms that force honesty about who is growing — rather than silently tolerating stagnation.

## Current Understanding

The single source ([[2026-07-19-your-company-cant-outgrow-your-team]]) proposes one thesis plus four mechanisms:

1. **State the growth math out loud** — "the company doubling means you doubling" cannot stay implicit. *"Good got you on the team. Great keeps you on the team."*
2. **Teach a philosophy, not a task list** — the speaker's "Business Athlete" framework (only two of seven practices captured: *have a coach* — people own their own development; *have a practice schedule* — "practice until we can't get it wrong"). Behaviors, not skills.
3. **Public scoreboard, private criticism** — everyone's standing visibly posted creates self-driven accountability; hard conversations stay in the 1-on-1.
4. **The Keeper Test** (via Netflix) — "would I fight to keep them against a 30% offer?" Every "no" becomes a documented development plan or a departure; the point is forced honesty, not fast firing.
5. **Values as hire → inspire → fire** — screen for values before skills, tie decisions to them, and name the violated value at every firing. *"Values aren't what you say they are. They're what you tolerate."* Includes the aphorism *"Complexity fails, simple scales."*

This is the vault's first page about **running the delivery organization** — distinct from Branch A (selling) and Branch B (AI's labor shift), though it becomes more load-bearing if Branch B is right: in a 2–3 person AI-era team, one non-growing person is a third of capacity.

**What the author attribution reveals (added 2026-07-20).** With the speaker identified as [[dan-martell]], this page and [[marketing-system]] turn out to be the same argument pointed in two directions:

| | Internal (this page) | External ([[marketing-system]]) |
|---|---|---|
| The stall | Company plateaus | Revenue plateaus (~$1.5M) |
| The misdiagnosis | "The market is capped" | "The market is capped" |
| The real cause | People stopped growing | No system was ever built |
| The mechanism | *"Practice until we can't get it wrong"* | *"The only thing you control is the volume of the reps"* |

Two things follow. First, Martell's unifying claim is **the ceiling is never the market** — every plateau is relocated to something the founder controls. Second, both halves run on the same engine: **deliberate practice at volume**, applied to people in one case and to publishing in the other. That coherence makes the worldview easier to evaluate as a whole — and see Contradictions for why it is also the reason to discount it slightly.

## Evidence

- All claims: [[2026-07-19-your-company-cant-outgrow-your-team]] — anecdotal leadership talk, no data; framework only partially captured (5 of 7 practices missing).
- Author: [[dan-martell]] — attribution confirmed by the vault owner 2026-07-20 (curator testimony; the clip itself names no speaker).
- Same author applying the same practice-at-volume mechanism outward — [[2026-07-20-referrals-will-sink-your-business]], [[marketing-system]]

## Related Pages

- [[dan-martell]] — the author; his other material sits in Branch A
- [[marketing-system]] — the same "the ceiling is never the market" argument aimed outward
- [[future-of-engineering-work]] — team collapse 8→2–3 makes per-person growth rate more decisive, strengthening this thesis for small teams
- [[methodology-as-moat]] — internal philosophy-as-operating-system is the inward sibling of the outward "sell your proven method"
- [[sales-discipline]] — same consistency-over-intensity logic applied to selling instead of people development
- [[overview]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- **No counter-evidence in the vault, but no support either** — single anecdotal source; nothing tests whether public scoreboards or the Keeper Test work outside larger sales-flavored orgs.
- **The cross-branch coherence is not corroboration.** This page and [[marketing-system]] agreeing that "the ceiling is never the market" is **one man's worldview stated twice**, not two findings. Note the convenience, too: a founder coach whose diagnosis is always "the constraint is internal and fixable" is describing a world in which coaching is always the answer. That is a reason to hold both pages `tentative` independent of the missing data.
- **"Have a coach" is one of the seven Business Athlete practices** — taught by a coach. Not disqualifying, but it belongs on the record beside the framework.
- **Possible tension with tiny teams:** the Keeper Test presumes you could part with a "no" — in a 2–3 person team each member may be a single point of failure, making the test harder to act on (raised, unresolved).
- Growth framing assumes headcount-stable scaling through people development; Branch A's productization logic scales through *method*, not people — the two are complementary but unreconciled by any source.

## Next Questions

- ✅ Speaker identified ([[dan-martell]], 2026-07-20). Still open: recover the full Business Athlete framework (7 practices) and the three values — his other published material is now a findable route to both.
- Does the vault's owner ([[eugene]]) even have a team yet? If solo, this concept is dormant until first hire — worth flagging in any 90-day plan query.
- Find a source on people-development vs. process/productization as the scaling constraint for small agencies.
