The fastest way to destroy value in a high-potential company isn’t a bad market, it’s scaling a business that isn’t ready to grow. And this article highlights one of the few ways you can identify and take action before you find out the hard way.

Mid-market companies ($20M–$200M in revenue) often attract private equity attention for their expansion potential. Yet many hit a ceiling post-close, not because of market miscalculations, but because internal maturity—across leadership, systems, and culture—lags behind external ambitions. Scaling when this is present magnifies disorder, not value. This is what we call the “growth trap”: a condition where external growth initiatives overwhelm internal capacity, suppressing returns and elongating the value creation timeline, ultimately delaying or

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