Growth doesn’t move in a straight line, and neither does resilience
In brief Business growth doesn't move in a straight line, it moves in S-curves: a fast climb, a plateau, and an inflection point that either pushes you forward or leaves you behind. We've lived through several of these moments in our seven years as a Bristol creative agency, the sharpest being the year we lost our biggest client. This is what we did with that moment, why it led us to define our business purpose, Building Better Together, and what we'd tell any founder facing their own moment of change.
“Every moment of change needs something to ground you and move you forward. For us, that’s purpose.”
Bryony Cozens, Managing Director, Something Familiar
What a moment of change actually looks like in business
Growth doesn’t move in a straight line. It moves in S-curves: you grow fast, you plateau, you hit an inflection point. What you do at that point decides whether you move into the next curve or stall where you are. Every business faces these moments. The ones that adapt grow. The ones that don’t get left behind.
Ours looked like this. For four years we nearly doubled revenue annually, grew from three people to ten, and won work we were genuinely proud of, including a campaign that made it into Brand New (design’s answer to Vogue), a logo on the Herts FC kit, and a placement in EA Sports FIFA. It was brilliant, and a bit mad.
Then, in year five, we lost our biggest retained client. Revenue dropped significantly. It was our first real loss, and it was hard.
How we handled losing our biggest client
The obvious response was a new business push: tenders, ads, thought leadership, dozens of networking events in a single year. We did all of that. But it wasn’t the thing that actually mattered.
The real work was internal. It was that we’d lost our purpose and our direction.
So we used the inflection point to find that again, rather than paper over what was missing. We realigned our purpose. We rebuilt how the business actually runs. We’re in the process of rebranding right now, directly off the back of that year.
Why purpose matters more in the hard years than the easy ones
Coming out the other side, we had a much clearer sense of who we are. And here’s the thing we’d tell anyone facing their own moment of change: you need something to ground you and move you forward. Something that helps you make decisions, say no to the wrong things, and stay clear on why you’re doing any of this at all.
For us, that’s our business purpose: Building Better Together. Building, because it’s active and ongoing, a better business is never something you arrive at. Better, for our team, our clients, our community, and the planet. Together, because you don’t do this alone, you build it with the people around you.
We ran the same exercise with our whole team that we use to define personal purpose: four questions on what makes you unique, what matters most to you, what brings you joy, and why you exist. Mine came out as: to light the way for change, guiding myself and others through transformation with courage, compassion, and curiosity.
That’s the test for any purpose statement, personal or business. Does it describe who you already are, or who you’re pretending to be?
What we’d tell another business facing a moment of change
If you’re in the middle of your own inflection point, here’s what actually helped us:
- Fix the internal stuff before it becomes external. The processes you skip while growing fast are exactly what breaks when growth stalls.
- Be honest with your team, quickly. We told our team what had happened and what it meant financially, plainly and without spin.
- Let your values make the hard calls for you. When budgets are tight, your stated values get tested for real. They should decide what gets cut, not the other way round.
- Come back to something that grounds you. A clear purpose doesn’t remove the hard decision, but it gives you a shared reference point that isn’t just whoever argues loudest.
- Don’t confuse activity with progress. More networking events and more tenders felt productive. The internal reset is what actually mattered.
Why we’re sharing this
This isn’t a story about a bad year. It’s a story about what a bad year is for. Every business will hit a moment like this eventually. The businesses that come out stronger aren’t the ones that avoid it, they’re the ones that use it.
If you’re a marketing or business leader navigating your own moment of change and want to talk it through, get in touch.
Bryony Cozens is Managing Director and co-founder of Something Familiar, a Bristol-based creative agency and B Corp working with founders, growth-stage businesses, and private equity portfolios on brand, digital, and campaign work.
FAQs
A moment of change is an inflection point where a business’s usual pattern, whether steady growth, a plateau, or a setback, breaks and forces a decision. Growth theory calls this an S-curve: businesses grow fast, plateau, then hit a point where they either adapt into a new growth curve or stall. How a business responds at that inflection point, not the event itself, is what determines what happens next.
An S-curve describes a common pattern in business growth: a fast initial climb, a plateau as the initial advantage wears off, and an inflection point that decides the next phase. Businesses that recognise they’re at an inflection point and adapt (fixing internal weaknesses, changing direction, or realigning around purpose) tend to move into a new growth curve. Businesses that keep doing what worked in the last phase tend to stall.
The instinct is usually to focus outward: more sales activity, more marketing, more networking. That’s reasonable, but it’s rarely the whole answer. Losing a major client often exposes internal weaknesses that were always there, just hidden by good revenue. Fixing processes, role clarity and client agreements alongside the new business push is usually what actually determines whether the business comes out stronger.
Something Familiar’s business purpose is Building Better Together: building because it’s active and ongoing, better for the team, clients, community and planet, and together because it’s built with the people around you, not alone. It was defined by the three founders following a difficult year, and is now used across client selection, hiring, and financial decisions.
Something Familiar uses a four-question exercise for both individuals and the business as a whole: what are your unique qualities, what matters most to you, what brings you joy, and why do you exist and what impact do you want to make. The answers to those four questions typically point toward a short purpose statement that should describe who you already are, not who you’re aspiring to become.
