(TL;DR) After a capital raise, business momentum dips not because of bad strategy but because of predictable leadership traps:
1. The Success Hangover
Momentum dips because the financial plan never becomes a company-wide rallying cry.
2. Sacred Zombie Cows
Focus scatters because every project gets funded.
3. The Infinity Trap
Leaders run harder and end up back in the weeds instead of leading at the next level.
4. Governance Theatre
Processes multiply while true accountability weakens.
5. The Barbell of Doom
Team performance stalls as underperformance drags on or rushed hires fail.
These traps burn runway and delay growth, diminishing valuation and return on capital. The earlier you spot and fix them, the faster you convert your raise into real momentum.
Kerching! The money from the fundraise drops into your bank account. You’ve got the plan, the vision, the resources. Everything you need for the next stage of world domination!
Except… it doesn’t quite turn out how you imagined.
WTF happened?
I’ve coached founder-CEOs of €20M–€200M businesses through IPOs, buyouts, and multi-hundred-million-dollar rounds (and beyond), and I see the same five traps play out over and over.
⚠️ The insidious thing is that these aren’t “intellectual” business problems. They’re leadership problems, challenges that strike at your confidence, your courage, and the way you lead.
This is what I call the 10X Reckoning – the moment where you either step up as the leader of the next-stage company, or stall and watch growth flatten.
Here are the five silent traps that burn through runway, frustrate investors, and leave founders wondering why the plan isn’t landing.
1. The Success Hangover
The financial plan never becomes a bold rallying cry.
I once worked with a founder who’d closed a $100M round six months earlier, but was struggling with mediocre growth. When we dug deeper, the familiar problem of the “success hangover” emerged:
The financial plan was there; the energy wasn’t.
When a raise closes, the natural instinct is to focus on numbers, projects, investor updates.
The senior team works hard to deliver the plan, but somehow the magic doesn’t come.
⚠️ The reason? The financial plan was never going to be enough to galvanise the whole company.
Your job now isn’t to crack the whip; it’s to translate the investor deck into a story, a mission, a movement that everyone can feel.
Until you do, you’ll be running on the fumes of yesterday’s ambition, burning cash and investor goodwill quarter by quarter.
2. Sacred Zombie Cows
Focus scatters because every project gets funded.
More money means you can finally say yes to all the projects you’ve been putting off: update the brand, fix the tech debt, expand into new segments.
One client I worked with had 27 “strategic initiatives.” We cut it to 5, and momentum quickly returned.
⚠️ The post-raise paradox is this: your ambition just went up by a factor of 10, which means 90% of your projects are no longer going to move the needle enough.
They’ve become “walking dead” distractions you’re still emotionally attached to: hence “Sacred Zombie Cows.”
Killing them takes more than a silver stake. It means difficult conversations with senior people and letting go of old priorities that once felt important.
Spot them, kill them, and your capital suddenly starts to work 2–3x harder. But until you do, your new capital will be spread too thin to make a difference.
3. The Infinity Trap
Leaders run harder and end up back in the weeds.
This one feels like hustle. It looks heroic.
But it’s actually slowing you down.
After a raise, pressure mounts, complexity increases, the organisation expands, and leaders respond by trying to be everywhere at once.
Founders stay in decision loops, execs firefight, meetings multiply.
Everyone ends up working one level lower than they need to.
Bottlenecks form, starting with you and the exec team.
⚠️ The deeper truth is this: you’re still leading like you always have. But the new company needs you to operate at a different altitude.
The surface challenges are redesigning decision rights, freeing up your calendar, and turning functional managers into enterprise leaders who co-own the business plan. The deeper challenges are your own need to add value, exert control and avoid the ‘wobble’ that comes with delegation.
One founder I worked with freed up 40% of his time in 90 days, and called it “the scariest and most liberating thing I’ve ever done.”
The Infinity Trap is so pervasive it can feel ‘normal’, but every week you spend firefighting is compounding leadership debt you’ll have to pay down later.
4. Governance Theatre
Processes multiply while true accountability weakens.
When informal ways of running the business break down, the instinct is to add process: meetings, dashboards, reports.
⚠️ It’s Governance Theatre: it looks like rigour, but often just makes the company slower.
One founder I worked with had a shot at a 10X future but his business was tracking at 8-10% annually. All the processes in place. What was missing? The usual: real accountability for performance.
Real speed comes from clarity, ownership and accountability. When you move from assigning tasks to assigning outcomes, and when your leaders learn to have tough follow-through conversations, you get an organisation where everyone knows what winning looks like and moves faster to achieve it.
Until then, you have bureaucracy, not accountability.
5. The Barbell of Doom
Underperformance drags on or rushed hires fail.
This is the painful one.
Founders wonder who “has what it takes” for the next phase of growth, and then oscillate between the two ends of the “Barbell of Doom”: misplaced loyalty and knee-jerk cuts.
⚠️ They keep some people too long, and replace others without ever giving them a true chance to step up.
Either way, months are wasted. Even the new hires often don’t work out.
The plan slips, as the business waits for the right team to be in place.
The problem usually isn’t talent. It’s a failure to reset the bar for what excellence looks like at this new stage. When you do, you create a “winnable game” for each leader, make expectations explicit, and earn the right to act decisively when it’s clear someone can’t make it.
The result is a team that self-levels: top performers thrive, misfits exit cleanly, and the company moves forward without drama.
The Pattern
These traps can appear in any order — but I often see them unfold like this:
First the strategic lull…
...then the proliferation of projects…
...then the heroic overwork…
...then the process bloat…
...and finally the painful talent reckoning.
The earlier you spot them, the easier they are to break, and the faster you can convert your raise into real momentum.
Breaking the traps
If one of these traps feels uncomfortably familiar, you (or your leadership team) might be right on schedule for your own 10X Reckoning.
Each of these traps require more than a tactical fix. They require a shift in how you (and your team) lead – your mindset, habits and leadership – which is why they often don’t get addressed.
➡️ Reconnect the business to new energy, not just the old plan.
➡️ Kill Sacred Zombie Cows instead of politely feeding them.
➡️ Step up to architect-level leadership instead of getting lost in the Infinity Trap.
➡️ Drive real accountability instead of hiding behind Governance Theatre.
➡️ Reset leadership standards instead of swinging on the Barbell of Doom.
If you want to know which traps you’re in and what to do about them, I run Momentum Diagnostics for investors, founders and leadership teams. So if you’d like to avoid a mediocre 12 months:
Founders: Let’s run a Momentum Diagnostic with your team.
Investors: Let’s talk about using this framework as a portfolio value-add.
