The Revenue Stages of a Company Are a Lot Like Child Development

Why Your Company Behaves Exactly Like a Growing Child

“If you’re feeling frustrated, your company may simply be acting its age.“

As a CEO, you’re not just scaling revenue. You’re raising an organization through predictable developmental stages.

And just like children, each phase comes with behaviors, breakthroughs, and breakdowns.

Here’s what I see inside companies every day:

0 to 1M: The Infant Stage

Behavior:

  • Needs constant care
  • Survives on founder energy
  • Every system is manual
  • Everything feels fragile

Leadership Requirement:

You carry the whole thing. You are the lifeline, the nourishment, the safety.

1M to 3M: The Toddler Stage

Behavior:

  • Takes first independent steps
  • Wanders, experiments, touches everything
  • Creates chaos but surprises you with brilliance
  • “No” becomes a theme from customers, team, and systems

Leadership Requirement:

Guardrails. Structure. Consistency.

You can’t baby it anymore, but it’s not ready to self-regulate either.

3M to 10M: The Childhood Stage

Behavior:

  • Curious, growing quickly
  • More voices and opinions that still lack alignment
  • Complexity ramps up fast
  • Needs predictability and rhythm to feel safe

Leadership Requirement:

Culture imprints here.

Your company absorbs what you model, not what you say.

10M to 25M: The Preteen Stage

Behavior:

  • Identity confusion
  • Pushback on rules
  • Wants freedom but can’t fully handle it
  • Growth spurts followed by awkward stalls

Leadership Requirement:

You must evolve before the company can.

Alignment, communication, and recalibration are essential.

25M to 50M: The Teenage Stage

Behavior:

  • Strong opinions
  • Desire for autonomy
  • Bold moves and equally bold mistakes
  • Constant boundary testing
  • Rising pressure to perform

Leadership Requirement:

Clear, steady leadership.

Empowerment with accountability.

This is where many CEOs start masking instead of leading.

50M to 100M and beyond: The Young Adult Stage

Behavior:

  • Ready for bigger rooms but still needs direction
  • Capable of major breakthroughs
  • Can scale quickly or collapse under pressure
  • Needs systems, communication pathways, and real governance

Leadership Requirement:

Mature decision making, experimentation, and strategic depth.

This is the shift from firefighting to architecting.

What It Really Means When Your Company Feels “Off”

If your company feels “off,” it may be acting its age while you expect it to act older.

The mismatch is the real friction.

If you want clarity on your next stage of growth, I can help you find it.

→ Start Your Next Stage of Growth

Be Willing to Unlearn What You Think You Know: Why Modern Leaders Must Release Old Assumptions to Grow

By Dr. Diane Dye

In almost every executive room I facilitate, there comes a moment when a leader who is brilliant, experienced, and deeply successful hits an invisible ceiling. Not because they lack knowledge. But because the knowledge they’re relying on is built for a version of their business that no longer exists.

That’s when I offer to share a line that has become central to my teaching:

“Be willing to unlearn what you think you know.” — Dr. Diane Dye

This idea is not new. But considering our growing need for agility and innovation it is newly urgent.

While this phrasing reflects how I teach the principle, the concept of unlearning is rooted in well-established leadership and philosophical traditions. Understanding those roots helps leaders see just how essential, timeless, and necessary this practice really is.

Where the Idea Comes From: A Brief Look at the Foundations of Unlearning

Alvin Toffler and the Future of Adaptability

The futurist Alvin Toffler predicted the modern dilemma in Future Shock (1970). His famous line still echoes through leadership circles:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Toffler understood that the pace of change would outstrip even the sharpest intellects unless leaders were willing to release outdated models. He wasn’t talking about forgetting. He was talking about making space for better information.

The world we operate in today is exactly the world he warned us about.

Zen Philosophy and the Power of Beginner’s Mind

Long before innovation labs and executive training existed, Zen philosophy taught Shoshin which is the concept of “beginner’s mind.”

Beginner’s mind is the willingness to approach a situation:

  • without ego
  • without assumptions
  • without the weight of past experience

It’s openness. Curiosity. Flexibility.

It’s the opposite of the rigid certainty that keeps leaders stuck.

How My Teaching Fits Into This Tradition

My phrase “Be willing to unlearn what you think you know” is simply a practical, modern expression of these timeless ideas:

  • Toffler’s insistence on adaptability
  • Zen’s call for openness
  • The real-world pressure leaders face when strategies that once worked suddenly stop producing results

It’s a bridge between theory and the day-to-day reality of executive decision-making.

Why Unlearning Is the Hidden Superpower of Today’s Leaders

Unlearning is not abandonment.

It’s evolution.

High-performing leaders often struggle not because they lack skills but because:

  • They’re anchored to old models
  • Their early strategies have become limitations
  • Their success created blind spots
  • Their identity is tied to outdated ways of operating

Unlearning is the process of loosening the grip on “what used to be true.”

Here’s how I teach it:

Unlearning is updating.

When the landscape shifts, your assumptions must shift with it.

Unlearning protects your legacy.

It ensures your past success doesn’t become the reason you stall.

Unlearning creates fresh capacity.

You can’t innovate on a full hard drive.

Unlearning restores perspective.

It reopens doors that certainty quietly closed.

The Leaders Who Grow Fastest Share This One Trait

They remain students.

They don’t cling to what made them successful. They stay curious, experimental, inwardly honest, and outwardly adaptable.

They embody both Toffler’s insight and the spirit of beginner’s mind, even when they’ve built companies worth tens or hundreds of millions.

The leaders who thrive are those who are willing to say:

“What if I’m wrong? And what else could be possible?”

That question alone can unlock years of stalled growth.

A Closing Thought

The world doesn’t reward the most knowledgeable leaders anymore.

It rewards the most adaptable.

Whether you draw from Toffler, Zen philosophy, or modern executive tools, the truth remains:

Your next breakthrough rarely requires more information.It requires the courage to release the assumptions holding you back.

And that begins with the willingness and humility to unlearn what you think you know.