The 6 hidden costs of "we'll figure it out as we go"
"We'll figure it out as we go" is the operating model that gets you to a first ceiling. It is also the operating model that keeps you there.
There is a phrase that comes up in almost every leadership conversation I have with a growing business.
“We’ll figure it out as we go.”
The person saying it usually says it with real confidence, and they have earned it. Most of them have figured a lot of things out as they went and built a real business doing it. The phrase is not wrong. Most companies do operate this way for the first few years.
The trouble is that the phrase keeps getting used long after it has stopped working. What works for a five-person team in year one is the most expensive thing the same business is doing by year three. The cost is invisible because nobody is sending you an invoice for it. It is paid in time, in people leaving, in the founder being tired, and in things that just never quite get done right. None of that shows up in a P&L. So the team keeps using the phrase, keeps believing it is working, and keeps paying for it.
This is a piece about six specific costs the phrase produces once a business is past its first ceiling. Why those costs stay invisible until something forces the issue. And what to actually do about it.
Why the phrase is hard to leave behind
There is a stage where this is the right way to run a business. When the team is small and the founder is in every meeting, figuring it out as you go is exactly what you should be doing. You do not need written rules when six people sit in the same room. You do not need documented process when everyone is in the same conversations. Trying to formalize all of that too early just gets in the way.
So the phrase becomes something the business is proud of. It sounds like adaptability. It sounds like hustle. It sounds like a founder who is willing to make decisions without waiting around. And we tend to celebrate it. The companies whose stories get told are the ones that figured it out. The companies that tried to lock down every process on day one usually never made it far enough for anyone to write about them.
By the time the phrase has stopped working, the company has built its whole identity around it. Letting it go feels like letting go of the thing that got them here. So most teams hold onto it long after the math has stopped working.
The six costs nobody can see from the inside
These are the costs we see almost every time in a business that crossed its first ceiling without realizing it.
One. The same decisions get made over and over. Every week, the team is having the same conversation about pricing exceptions. About how to handle an upset customer. About how to interview the next hire. About which marketing thing to try next. None of these were ever turned into a default, so all of them come back up every time. Multiply that by 52 weeks and a few years, and the cost of constantly re-deciding the same things is enormous.
Two. The knowledge that runs the business lives in three or four people. Not in any document, not in any system. When one of those people goes on vacation, the work that depends on what they know slows down. When one of them leaves, the work stops. The business has been quietly relying on the same handful of people to carry it, and nobody noticed because they kept carrying it.
Three. Customers get a slightly different version of the business every time. Without a set process, one customer’s onboarding is different from the next one’s. The follow-up is different. The way an issue gets handled is different. From inside, it looks like the team being responsive and adapting to each customer. From outside, it looks inconsistent, and inconsistent is one of the quietest things that can kill a brand.
Four. Hiring is much harder than it should be. You cannot train someone on a process that was never written down. The new hire spends their first six months trying to figure out what the rules are, then trying to get everyone else to agree on them. They take twice as long to actually be productive. And a meaningful percentage of them leave because the role was never clear in the first place.
Five. The founder ends up being the engine for longer than necessary. Every decision routes back to them. The big strategic moves get delayed because the founder is busy making small day-to-day calls. The founder’s calendar fills up with small judgment calls that should have been settled a long time ago. By the time the team realizes this is the bottleneck, the founder has been exhausted for a year.
Six. You cannot actually tell what is working. Without a consistent process, you cannot measure anything consistently. You think one channel is your best because the last big deal came from there, but you have no real way to prove it. You think one type of customer is your most profitable, but you cannot really back that up either. Decisions get made on gut feel because the data underneath has never been collected the same way twice in a row.
If three of these sound familiar, the business has reached the point where it has outgrown the phrase. If five of them do, the business has been past that point for a while.
How you actually notice
It usually does not come from one big dramatic event. It comes from a bunch of small frustrations that, one day, suddenly all look like the same problem.
The same Monday meeting keeps coming back to the same three issues. A senior team member leaves, and the team realizes nobody else knew how the third-largest customer’s account actually worked. A new hire quits at month five because nothing about the role was ever clear. A customer leaves, and the team realizes the version of the business they experienced was not the version the team intended.
These are not separate problems. They are different symptoms of the same thing. The way the business has been operating has stopped working, and naming that is the first move.
What to actually do about it
The fix is not to suddenly try to write down every process in the business. That is the overcorrection, and it almost never sticks. It is also expensive in its own way.
The right move is to look at the three or four decisions the team is making over and over and turn each one into a default. Not a forty-page policy document. A one-line rule that the team agrees on and follows. “Pricing exceptions over $X go to leadership.” “Upset customers get routed to this person.” “Any new marketing channel runs a 90-day test before we commit budget.”
Each time you turn a repeated decision into a rule, you move a little bit of knowledge out of someone’s head and into the business itself. That is what it actually means to go from “figuring it out as we go” to operating from a real system.
You do not have to do all of this at once. Three or four real defaults, agreed on by leadership and actually followed, are usually enough to start the shift. The team feels the difference within a quarter. The founder’s calendar starts to clear. New hires get up to speed faster. The Monday meeting stops looping on the same questions.
“We’ll figure it out as we go” was always doing something useful. It was buying the business time while it figured out what it wanted to be. The problem is that most businesses keep buying that time long after they have figured it out. And the cost of that does not show up anywhere on a financial statement. It shows up in the work that does not get done, because the team is busy re-figuring out something they already figured out last Tuesday.
If this piece named anything you have been feeling about the business, that is the recognition. The next move is to pick the first three defaults and write them down.
If you can tell the way the business is running is no longer serving it, but you cannot quite name which defaults to set first, a Systems Audit is the right first conversation. We map what is being decided over and over, what those repeated decisions are costing, and which rules would pay off the most in the next 90 days.