Most Businesses Aren’t Built.
They Are Survived.
Why So Many Businesses Fail Without Business Design
We are told that roughly 20% of new businesses fail within their first year, and nearly 50% close their doors by year five¹,². For the remaining half that manages to survive those first few years, there is a different kind of silent struggle awaiting. Research shows that over 70% of small business owners report feeling overwhelmed or burnt out by the weight of their operations³.
What these numbers really mean is not just that failure is common but that even survival often comes at a cost.
You have a 50/50 chance of surviving at all.
And if you do, you are highly likely to end up running a business that feels like a constant, uphill battle.
A business that works but only if you keep pushing.
This high rate of failure is often treated as a force of nature, an unfortunate and inevitable tax on having and running a business. However, these figures are not driven by bad luck. They are driven by a fundamental disregard for the mechanics of how a business needs to be structured in order to function.
We have been conditioned to value hustle, speed, and constant activity over intentionally designing a business structure, because structure is often mistaken for bureaucracy, rather than recognised as the thing that allows a business to work without constant force. Just as a building requires a blueprint to translate an architectural vision into a stable, enduring structure, a company requires a business design that aligns its vision, market research, idea validation, and structural pillars into a unified, functioning whole. In this context, business design refers to intentionally designing the business model and operating model as a coherent system before execution.
But why do we accept these odds in business so easily?
We wouldn’t move into a house where the architect said, “We just started building and hoped the second floor would hold up.”
We wouldn’t trust a surgeon who said, “I’ll just start the incision and figure out the procedure as I go.”
Yet, in business, there is a pervasive belief that we should “just get started” and figure it out later, as if there are no steps available to validate and design the business before committing our lives and resources to it.
The truth is that “just getting started” is not a substitute for solid foundations. We cannot use the need for future agility as an excuse for a lack of structure. There is a time for learning as you go and integrating those learnings but that is a strategy for growth only once the core foundations are stable and the business is already working.
Relying on tactical improvisation at the start doesn’t create flexibility.
It creates fragility.
Success is not, and should not be, a roll of the dice. It is a result of structural integrity. These odds of failure and struggle are not a reflection of a hard market, but of a business design flaw.
And the good news is that this flaw can be fixed.
The Leap of Faith
The typical journey of a business begins with a burst of passion. There is an idea, a few promising conversations, and perhaps the first few happy clients. In the excitement, founders move from idea to incorporation almost instantly.
Before they realise it, they are running a business (making decisions, committing resources, setting direction) without a blueprint.
Analysis of thousands of failed ventures shows that misreading market demand and structural flaws, both part of business design work, account for 65% of failures⁴. Most founders skip this initial design phase because they believe doing is more important than intentional design work, effectively building a house on sand and wondering why the walls are cracking.
This mistake isn’t limited to first-time owners. Even massive companies with teams of experts are not immune.
This is exactly what happened with Quibi, a streaming service launched by some of the biggest names in Hollywood with $1.7 billion in funding. They set out to revolutionise video by offering high-end, 10-minute clips for a subscription fee. They focused entirely on execution (hiring stars and building apps) without validating whether their core value proposition fit how people actually consumed content in a world where similar content was freely available elsewhere.
They didn’t fail because they lacked funding, talent, or ambition.
They failed because speed of execution replaced design.
The Cost of Guessing
As mentioned earlier, when a business survives its first five years without proper design, it often enters a second, more exhausting stage, joining the 70% of business owners who struggle to keep it running.
From the outside, the business may look fine.
From the inside, it feels heavy.
Because there was no blueprint at the start, visibility is eventually lost.
Decisions feel harder than they should.
Problems keep reappearing in different forms.
The business demands more effort, but it’s not obvious where that effort is actually going
This leads to two major traps:
Trap 1: Focusing on Symptoms Instead of Root Causes
When a business feels heavy, the natural instinct is to work harder to fix the immediate difficulty. Most owners end up spending their lives and resources fighting symptoms while the root cause remains untouched. It is like removing water from a boat with a hole in the bottom. Working harder and better buckets change nothing if you are focusing on the water, not fixing the place where the water is coming from.
Effort cannot compensate for a flawed structure.
Trap 2: The Multiplier Effect of “Solutionizing”
Because the real problem hasn’t been identified, owners often default to solutionizing, effectively buying tools or services in an attempt to fix what appears to be the problem. New software, applications, or marketing strategies are introduced without knowing whether they are actually needed or effective.
Data shows that companies waste over 30% of their software spend on features they never use because they are throwing tools at a problem they haven’t defined⁵.
Marketing is a particularly dangerous example because it acts as a multiplier. If your internal operations are disorganized and your business design is flawed, marketing will simply expose those failures to a larger audience while accelerating resource drain.
More exposure only amplifies what is already broken.
The Power of Knowing: The Only Path Forward
There is no alternative to understanding your business structure. You can choose intentional business design, or you can choose a gamble that eventually collapses. Many mistakes that feel inevitable can be avoided simply by slowing down and engineering a path to success before committing your resources.
The difference between design and luck is evident in businesses like Zara. They didn’t become a global giant just by having nice clothes. Their success was the result of a deliberate structural design. Before expanding, they engineered a supply chain capable of moving designs from drawing board to store shelf in two weeks, allowing them to respond to the market in real time.
Another example is Southwest Airlines, which designed a point-to-point model using a single aircraft type (Boeing 737). This was not an operational convenience but a business design decision that structurally reduced maintenance, training, and operating costs. Competitors could not replicate this advantage without rebuilding their businesses from the ground up.
These were not tactical choices.
They were design decisions made before growth.
So What Now?
If this way of thinking resonates with you, or if you recognise your business in these patterns, the next step is not another tool, tactic, or hire.
It is visibility.
Whether you are a founder trying to understand if your business idea can actually work and be turned into a successful business, or an existing business owner trying to understand why the business feels heavy and where resources are being wasted, the answer is the same: gaining visibility into how the business is currently structured, and how it would need to be structured to work the way you need it to.
If you are ready to stop guessing and start making informed decisions, you can book a free call to explore whether business design is the missing piece.