Why Growth and Mid-Market Businesses Are Struggling with the Basics – And What They’re Doing About It

Many growing companies are firing on all cylinders regarding sales, culture, and product. The sales are soaring, the team is buzzing with energy, and the product is making waves across the UK. But behind closed doors, chaos reigns. Invoices sit unpaid, financial reports are overdue, and the business is stuck firefighting instead of steering the ship.

For many growth-stage and mid-market businesses, this isn’t just a bad day, it’s the norm. These companies often shine in innovation and customer focus, yet stumble over the basics: finance, operations, and systems.

These foundational pieces can quietly throttle growth, turning success into a double-edged sword. The question is, why does this happen, and what’s changing the game?

The Mid-Market Growing Pains

Expansion from an intimate 20-person team to 100+ people, and venturing into new markets, sounds thrilling, but this is where the cracks start to show.

Processes that harmonized in the early phases creak under strain. Patchwork tools spawn information silos, and founders and CFOs are left trying to complete a jigsaw with pieces that don’t match.

Deferred financial visibility means cash flow nightmares, delayed vendor payments, or unexpected shortfalls. Most traditional financial systems were built for corporations, not companies. In scale-up operations becomes a quagmire of manual processes, with employees stuck in spreadsheets instead of delivering value.

Managers, already struggling with a load of competing priorities, are left firefighting back-office mayhem instead of future-gazing. A classic case of growth outstripping infrastructure. Mid-market firms don’t need every feature — they need clarity, speed, and control

The Rise of Modern Tools Built for Scale

Thankfully, a new breed of financial platforms is stepping up, tailor-made for businesses in growth mode. These tools strip away the fluff of enterprise systems, delivering powerful functionality at a fraction of the cost.

For example, Panax – a cash management platform built for mid-market and growth-stage finance teams- provides real-time visibility into cash across multiple accounts and entities, with no need for implementing a full treasury system, with its 1-year implementation roll-outs.

Another financial reporting tool is Joiin – it tackles multi-entity reporting, pulling data from platforms like Xero or QuickBooks to simplify life for businesses with subsidiaries.

And there’s Pleo – An intuitive expense management solution that automates expense tracking and approvals, freeing up time and tightening spend.

With an approval workflow platform, ApprovalMax integrates with accounting software to streamline workflows, enforcing controls without the faff. These solutions bring enterprise-grade insights to lean teams, boosting visibility and agility.

All of these platforms are giving finance teams the visibility, control, and agility they need without the legacy baggage. They minimize disruption and leverage existing tech stacks. Unlike legacy systems requiring costly upgrades, these tools scale effortlessly, accommodating increased transaction volumes and new business units without breaking the bank.

Legacy Tools Aren’t Built for Them

The financial systems of these companies were not designed for them. They are designed for corporate giants with huge budgets. Consider bloated software with six-figure setup costs, months-long integrations, and a Snowdon-like learning curve.

Growth companies don’t need every bell and whistle, they need to decide quickly with clarity, move at high velocity, and have control to maintain agility. Bulky and rigid, these old tools will leave lean teams swimming in complexity when all they need is a lifeline.

These technologies are the business equivalent of running a sprint in hiking boots, sluggish, clumsy, and woefully out of context. Mid-market organizations and growth companies, by nature agile, need tools that can keep pace with them, not hobble them.

Imagine a successful startup crippled by a legacy platform that cannot accommodate data from a new buy, slowing business to a crawl. The outrageous cost diverts budgets that should drive innovation or delight customers, as a manual workaround drudge drains hours and energy. In an era of rapid transformation, these dinosaurs operating on outdated systems quietly stifle growth.

What Smart Businesses Are Doing Now

The most effective UK founders aren’t waiting for a crisis; they’re leveling the back office. Today, they’re selecting modular, cloud-based tools that expand with them, sidestepping risk from inflexible, monolithic systems.

By making operations and finance strategic levers, rather than admin exercises, they’re building a platform for long-term growth. Suppose a CFO detects a cash squeeze before it ever occurs, or an operations lead snuffing out inefficiency before it’s out of reach.

These businesses aren’t resolving crises, they’re building a backbone to match ambitions, where essentials drive progress, not get in the way. These cloud-based tools give real-time insights into data, enabling companies to make smart decisions on time.

They also ensure compliance with evolving regulations, evading risk exposure. By leveraging these new technologies, companies can streamline operations, enhance collaboration inside teams, and get on with reacting to evolving markets.

Back to Basics, But Smarter

There are just too many UK mid-market and growth-stage businesses that are great at innovation and sales but struggle with operational building blocks like financials and systems.

As teams and markets expand with them, manual approaches and bloated tools create inefficiency, bottlenecks, and blind spots in books. Legacy corporate systems designed to scale for corporations all too often hinder rather than help.

Ambitious businesses are choosing to adopt agile, cloud-based financial tools like Panax, Pleo, Joiin, and ApprovalMax that provide real-time visibility, automation, and scaling.

These tools empower lean teams to make better, faster decisions, stay agile, and turn back-office operations into strategic assets supporting infrastructure that scales with ambitions. It’s back to basics, just smarter.