Why Big-Consultant Strategy Frameworks Fail $5–$50M Companies (And What to Use Instead)

Linda Orr
4 days ago
6 min read

If you lead a $5–$50M company, you’ve probably heard some version of:

“Can we do our strategy using the McKinsey 7-S framework?”
“We really believe in Blue Ocean Strategy—can you build our plan around that?”
“We just read [insert hot business book] and want to roll out the framework.”

I hear this all the time, especially from founders on Upwork:

“We need a strategy… but can you do it using X’s framework or Y’s book?”

There’s nothing wrong with these tools. McKinsey 7-S, Blue Ocean, OKRs, EOS/Traction, Rockfeller Habits, Lean Startup—they all contain useful ideas.

The problem is when a $10M company treats them as gospel instead of what they are:

Opinionated tools created by smart people with good marketing.

This post is about why big-consultant frameworks and best-selling strategy books often fail mid-market companies—and the simpler, more practical planning approach I use instead.

What Strategy Frameworks and Books Are Actually Good For

Let’s be fair first. Popular frameworks and books do some things well:

Shared language: Everyone can talk about “blue oceans” vs “red oceans,” or “rocks” and “scorecards,” or “7-S” dimensions.
Broader perspective: They remind you that growth isn’t just “more ads”—there’s structure, culture, systems, positioning.
Inspiration: Done right, they spark ideas you might not have considered.

Used lightly—like a lens or a checklist—they’re genuinely helpful.

They become a problem when a founder says:

“We want you to do our strategy, but you have to use [Framework X] from [Book Y].”

At that point, you’re no longer solving your business problem. You’re trying to make your business fit someone else’s story.

5 Reasons Famous Frameworks Break in Real Companies

1. They’re written for a different scale and context

McKinsey 7-S grew up in large enterprises. Blue Ocean was written using examples like Toyota, Cirque du Soleil, and Nintendo. EOS and Scaling Up assume a certain team size and leadership structure.

If you’re a $5–$50M company, you’re in a weird middle:

Too big for “wing it and hope”
Too small for multi-year transformation programs and big consulting teams

You don’t have five layers of management, a strategy office, and a dozen cross-functional project teams.

You have:

A handful of leaders wearing too many hats
Limited budget and time
A 12–18 month window to prove growth

When you copy a framework designed for a very different scale, you inherit complexity you can’t support.

2. They’re high on concepts, low on trade-offs

Most frameworks are intentionally abstract. That’s how they sell books and apply to any industry.

Common result in a planning session:

Lots of sticky notes under clever headings
Diagrams everyone nods at
Very little clarity on what you’re not going to do

Strategy is mostly trade-offs:

Which products aren’t going to get investment this year
Which markets you’re not entering yet
Which channels you’re consciously under-weighting

Books and frameworks rarely force those calls. They give you boxes to fill out. They don’t make you pick.

3. They ignore your actual unit economics

Most strategy books barely talk about:

Your true margins after returns, discounts, shipping, and service
What CAC you can afford by channel
How fast you need payback for cash flow to work
Which lines are vanity revenue vs real profit

So you get:

A beautiful “blue ocean” idea that only works at 70%+ gross margin
A “go global” vision that ignores your inventory or clinician capacity
A “double marketing” plan that would blow out your cash

You can’t copy a framework out of a book and expect it to respect your P&L. You have to start with your numbers and then selectively borrow ideas.

4. They overcomplicate execution for lean teams

Enterprise frameworks assume:

You can dedicate people to “the initiative” for months
You can spin up a project team for each pillar
You can afford experimentation overhead

In real life, you probably have:

A marketing lead who is also doing execution
A founder still involved in too many details
Teams that already feel maxed out

If your new strategy requires everyone to fill out 90-minute scorecards every week, build dashboards for 25 KPIs, and track progress on 12 “rocks” each quarter… you will get exactly three weeks of compliance and then quiet rebellion.

Good strategy for mid-market companies has to be lightweight enough to live in the real calendar.

5. They become a religion instead of a tool

The biggest red flag for me is language like:

“We’re a Blue Ocean company.”
“We run everything through EOS.”
“We just need someone to implement [Book X] exactly.”

When the framework becomes an identity, it’s hard to have honest conversations like:

“This part of the model isn’t working for us.”
“This exercise is overhead, not value.”
“This year we need a different lens.”

At that point, the framework is no longer helping you think. It’s telling you what to think.

Strategic Planning Best Practices That Do Work for $5–$50M

So what should planning look like if you’re not worshiping a single book or framework?

Here’s the pattern I’ve seen work consistently.

1. Start with your numbers and constraints

Before you talk about oceans, rocks, or 7-S, answer:

What’s our revenue target range for the next 12–18 months?
What contribution margin do we need?
What can we realistically spend on marketing as a % of revenue?
What CAC and payback period are acceptable?

This doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be explicit.

Then ask:

“Given these numbers, what’s actually possible?”

That simple step will kill a lot of book-inspired fantasies fast—and highlight the few moves that can actually create the outcomes you need.

2. Identify the real bottleneck

Instead of filling every box of a famous framework, ask:

“What is the single biggest constraint on growth right now?”

It’s usually one of these:

Offer & positioning – People don’t clearly understand why you are the best choice.
Operations & delivery – You can’t deliver cleanly at higher volume.
Data & measurement – You can’t see what’s working well enough to double down.
Demand & marketing – Not enough right-fit people are hearing from you.

Your strategy should be built to attack that bottleneck first, not spread effort evenly across a template from somebody’s book.

3. Choose 3–5 bets, not 20 initiatives

From there, pick 3–5 bets that:

Attack the bottleneck
Support your financial targets
Are actually resourced

For each bet, define:

Owner
Success metric(s)
What you are not going to do because this is more important

If a framework encourages you to start 12 new priorities at once, it’s a bad fit for your stage.

4. Translate bets into a 90-day roadmap

This is where most frameworks stop and real strategy starts.

For each bet, map the next 90 days:

What happens in Month 1, 2, and 3
Which dependencies must be cleared
How progress will be tracked (simply)

You’re not writing a 5-year vision. You’re committing to 90 days of focused work that get you closer to your targets and teach you something.

5. Build a simple operating cadence

Finally, make sure the plan can live in your actual calendar:

Weekly: topline performance + progress on a short list of priorities
Monthly: channel/cohort review and small adjustments
Quarterly: reset the 90-day roadmap

Borrow whatever you like from EOS, OKRs, Scaling Up, etc.—but keep the minimum set of rituals your team can actually sustain.

How I Use Frameworks (Without Becoming a Framework Person)

When a client says:

“We love Blue Ocean / EOS / OKRs. Can you work within that?”

My answer is usually:

“We’ll borrow the pieces that actually help your business—and ignore the rest.”

Practically, my process as a fractional CMO looks like:

Numbers & constraints
- Revenue, margin, CAC, payback, cash, capacity.
Growth equation & bottleneck
- Where growth really comes from today (channels, segments, offers).
- What’s most constraining that equation.
90-day growth roadmap
- 3–5 bets tied to that bottleneck.
- Guardrails and simple KPIs.
Lightweight operating system
- Enough structure to keep everyone aligned.
- As little overhead as possible.

If a well-known framework or book has a tool that helps with one of those steps, great—we use it. But we never let the tool drive the plan.

A Quick Example

Say you’re:

~$12M in revenue
Healthy but flat the last 18 months
Spending on Meta/Google with murky attribution
Reading Blue Ocean and 7-S and feeling like you “should” implement something big

Instead of a year-long rollout of someone else’s system, a practical plan might be:

Clarify the target:
- Grow from $12M → $16M while keeping contribution margin ≥ X%.
Diagnose bottleneck:
- Data is unreliable; no one trusts CAC.
- Paid is stale; no creative testing discipline.
Pick 3 bets for next 90 days:
- Clean up tracking and build a simple performance dashboard.
- Design and run a structured creative testing program.
- Tighten offer + landing page on top product line.
Set guardrails:
- Blended CAC cap.
- MER floor.
- Ops signals (inventory, support tickets, refunds) monitored weekly.

You might still use OKR language or a few EOS concepts—but the plan is driven by your numbers and constraints, not by chapter headings from a book.

If You’re Drowning in Frameworks and Still Don’t Have a Plan

If you’ve read the books, admired the diagrams, and still don’t have a clear 90-day plan that the team can execute, it’s not because you’re missing the “right” framework.

It’s because you need:

A sober look at your numbers
An honest call on the bottleneck
A few focused bets
A simple way to track and adjust

That’s the work I do as a fractional CMO for $5–$50M companies.