Every growth company eventually meets the same wall, and almost every leadership team misreads it. Revenue flattens, the board asks questions, and the instinct is to declare the strategy dead and start over. Greg Kish, a revenue leader whose work spans some of the largest venue environments in sports and entertainment, argues that the instinct is usually wrong. The strategy is often fine. What has changed is the organization around it, and the mechanics that produced early wins have quietly stopped working at the size the business has reached. That distinction matters commercially, because rebuilding a sound strategy burns years and capital solving a problem that was never the problem.
Diagnose The Friction Before Prescribing The Fix
Kish’s first move when growth stalls is to resist the rebuild. “I think the first mistake is assuming a plateau automatically means the strategy is broken,” he says. “Sometimes the strategy is right and the execution around it has simply become more complicated as the organization has grown.” What he wants to know is where the friction sits. Is the product still relevant? Has the customer changed? Is pricing right? Are marketing and sales pointed at the same audience with the same value proposition? Do people understand who owns what, and are decisions taking longer than they used to? Those are operational questions, not strategic ones, and they are answerable in weeks rather than quarters.
The default corporate response runs in the other direction. “I’ve seen organizations respond to a slowdown by immediately adding more: more people, more technology, more campaigns, and more process,” Kish says. “Sometimes the better answer is subtraction. Remove the friction and see if the underlying strategy still performs.” That is an uncomfortable prescription for leadership teams under pressure to show momentum, because subtraction looks like inaction from the outside. Kish’s point is that it is the cheaper test. If the fundamentals hold – refine. If the customer, market or economics have genuinely shifted – rebuild. “Activity can make an organization feel like it’s responding to a plateau without addressing what caused it.”
The Early Model Was Never Built To Scale
The deeper issue is that early-stage revenue models are held together by things that do not survive growth. A founder sits in every major sale. Ten people around one table solve problems in real time without a process existing to describe how. Relationships paper over gaps that nobody has documented. All of it works, and none of it is a system. “Early success can hide a lot of things,” Kish says. “You can get away with a lot when ten people are sitting around the same table.” Then the company adds headcount, customers, products, markets, and layers of leadership, while the revenue model underneath stays exactly where it was. That is when the cracks appear, and they appear as a plateau.
What separates the companies that get through it is a willingness to interrogate their own success. “Scaling isn’t simply doing more of what worked,” Kish says. “It’s understanding why it worked and determining which parts need to become repeatable without losing the things that made the organization successful in the first place.” That second clause is the hard part. Standardization done badly strips out the judgment and relationship equity that drove the early numbers. Kish frames the transition plainly: “Eventually you have to move from great people creating outcomes through individual effort to a system that allows great people to create those outcomes consistently. That’s a very different challenge.” It is also a different skill set, and most leadership teams are promoted for the first one.
Clarity Is The Operating System, Not The Slogan
On large projects, Kish defines clarity as a test anyone in the building should pass. Can people answer the same way: what the organization is trying to accomplish, why it matters, what is happening right now, who owns each piece, and how success will be measured? Simple to write down, but brutally difficult to achieve across venues like SoFi Stadium, Levi’s Stadium, and AT&T Stadium, where fixed deadlines, enormous revenue expectations, multiple organizations, and thousands of simultaneous decisions collide. “You can’t eliminate that complexity,” Kish says. “What you can eliminate is confusion.” In practice, this means establishing ownership, sequencing decisions, making timelines visible, and pushing decision rights down so everything does not funnel back through a handful of executives. “Scaling with clarity isn’t about creating more process. It’s about creating enough structure that people can move faster without constantly having to ask what they’re supposed to do next.”
That discipline is about to be stress-tested. AI is making activity nearly free, and Kish sees the risk clearly. Sports and entertainment organizations have long operated around predictable rhythms, the season, renewal windows, sponsorship cycles, and major on-sales. Better data and AI open the possibility of a continuous year-round customer relationship across ticketing, premium, partnerships, and hospitality. But the technology inherits whatever structure it is dropped into. “If your data lives in different places, your departments have different objectives, nobody owns the customer journey, or your value proposition isn’t clear, AI can simply help you create confusion faster,” Kish says. The right question is not how to use AI but what needs to get better for the customer and the business, and where AI meaningfully accelerates that. His read on what comes next follows from it: creating activity becomes easy, deciding what matters stays hard, and revenue leaders will need fluency across product, marketing, data, technology, customer experience, and people, because those functions already operate as one revenue system whether the organization chart admits it or not. “The organizations that win won’t necessarily be the ones doing the most. They’ll be the ones that understand what matters, make better decisions faster, and create an environment where their people and technology can execute together.”
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