Founders talk about the first one constantly. The second one is doing just as much damage, quietly, and almost nobody's checking for it.
As revenue grows, the structural cost of running a business grows with it — VAT, Employer's National Insurance, Corporation Tax all take a bigger bite, and not always in a straight line. Cross certain thresholds and the jump can feel sudden rather than gradual. This is real, it's widely felt, and it's a genuine part of why profit doesn't always keep pace with revenue as a business scales.
It's also not what GOAS does. Tax structure and thresholds are a conversation for an accountant, not a marketing and commercial framework — worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
Running alongside the tax squeeze is a second one that gets far less attention, because nothing forces you to notice it the way a tax bill does. It's every marketing decision, discount, cost line, and habit that was built for the business at an earlier size — left running unchanged as the business grew past it.
Unlike the tax squeeze, this one is completely within a founder's control. It just requires someone to actually go and check.
Here's an illustrative example — not a real client's numbers, just the shape of the mechanic. Say a business is running a blanket, unreviewed discount habit quietly costing it 2% of revenue in avoidable margin — the kind of thing covered elsewhere on this site. The percentage doesn't change as the business grows. The pounds absolutely do:
| Annual revenue | Same 2% habit, unreviewed |
|---|---|
| £500,000 | £10,000/yr |
| £1,000,000 | £20,000/yr |
| £1,500,000 | £30,000/yr |
| £2,000,000 | £40,000/yr |
Nobody signs off on this getting worse. Nobody decides to let it grow. It just does, automatically, because the habit itself never changed while the number it's a percentage of kept climbing. The tax squeeze arrives as a bill you can't avoid looking at. This one never arrives as anything at all — it's just quietly there in the P&L, in a place that never announces itself as declining.
When profit feels tight and the tax bill is genuinely part of why, it's easy — reasonable, even — to conclude the squeeze is entirely structural and outside your control. That conclusion is comfortable, because it means there's nothing to do but accept it. It's also frequently wrong. The controllable squeeze is usually still there, running in parallel, and the tax conversation can end up providing cover for it simply by being the louder, more visible problem.
This is the same thesis the whole of GOAS is built around: revenue can grow while profit doesn't follow, because what worked at a smaller size quietly stops working at this one — and nobody re-checked it. The tax squeeze isn't something GOAS touches. The other one is exactly what the method exists to find, score, and quantify.
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