Europe’s small and medium-sized businesses are entering 2026 with stronger momentum, but the continent’s latest business data points to a problem that revenue growth alone cannot solve. The European Commission’s 2025/2026 SME report found that Europe’s 34 million SMEs increased real value added by 2.5% in 2025, while employment rose 1%. The figures mark a solid recovery, yet Brussels is increasingly turning its attention toward the productivity gap that emerges once companies attempt to convert expansion into durable economic performance.
That productivity question has become particularly pressing as European companies confront a slower macroeconomic environment. The European Commission’s Spring forecast projects EU GDP growth of just 1.1% for 2026, with productivity growth expected to reach only 0.7%. For companies operating in that environment, adding people or pursuing another market does not automatically create a stronger enterprise; growth has to generate more capacity inside the organization itself.
Technology is exposing the same divide. The Commission reports that AI adoption among European enterprises remains heavily skewed by company size: 55% of large businesses used AI technologies in 2025, compared with 30.4% of medium-sized companies and only 17% of small firms.
The gap matters because digital infrastructure can determine how much work a growing organization can absorb without allowing administrative complexity to consume the gains from expansion. Europe has no shortage of companies capable of growing; the harder question is whether their internal systems, leadership structures, and decision-making processes can keep pace with the growth they are pursuing.
Michor Pleijzier, CRO of ScaleUp Company, has spent his career focused on that precise fault line between growth and scalability. Working with companies typically ranging from around 20 employees to much larger organizations, Pleijzier argues that the first major organizational shift arrives when founders can no longer rely on informal systems to coordinate a growing workforce.
“You can’t work with Post-its anymore,” he argues. “You need a CRM system, and that’s where you start also with forming a management team.”
The transition can be difficult, he argues, because founders often continue operating as though the company was still small. Pleijzier identifies alignment at the management level as one of the most persistent weaknesses he encounters. A founder may decide to pursue Germany, switch attention to France, then return to Belgium, leaving the wider organization to interpret priorities that have changed before the previous ones have been executed. “The biggest thing is that they don’t have the buy-in and the alignment with their management team,” he argues. “They jump ship all the time, so they don’t create a framework for everybody to work with.”
The deeper issue is ownership. As organizations expand, the founder can become the central approval point for decisions that should sit elsewhere in the company. Pleijzier calls this the “founder’s trap”: bringing increasingly capable people into the organization while still requiring the founder to authorize almost everything they do. “They become the bottleneck for their own growth,” he argues. “You have to get better people than yourself.”
A company that depends heavily on one founder’s relationships, knowledge, or decision-making can struggle to function during an absence, let alone withstand an ownership transition. Pleijzier considers this a crucial test of scalability. “If you want to sell your company, what do you sell? Your contacts?” he asks. “We make sure that when you’re on holiday or on a sabbatical, the company still runs. That’s what we make sure gets done. Through Scaling Up, we create an operating system for growth.”
In his view, that operating system becomes important as the daily business begins consuming leadership attention. Pleijzier points to constantly shifting priorities as symptoms of a company that has outgrown its original way of working. Employees can be busy throughout the week while remaining uncertain about which outcomes actually matter.
The difference between working in the business and working on it therefore becomes an operational discipline rather than a management slogan.
The infrastructure underneath that discipline needs measurable signals. Pleijzier advocates leading KPIs and a sharper understanding of the customers actually driving revenue. He recalls working with companies generating millions in turnover where leadership could not identify the small group of customers responsible for the majority of revenue. Knowing how the company makes money, he posits, changes the quality of decisions that follow.
ScaleUp Company, based in the Netherlands, approaches this through offering a growth partnership and a coaching model built around entrepreneurs who have founded and scaled their own companies. Pleijzier underscores the difference between that experience and conventional training. “We know how it feels on your own, in bed at night, if you’re not sure if you can pay the wages,” he argues. That lived experience informs a model that begins with a five-session day setup, produces a one-page strategic plan which is the blueprint of the company, and then moves leadership teams into a quarterly “heartbeat” focused on working on the business.
The founder’s role changes as the organization moves through its growth stages. Pleijzier places companies with eight to 20 employees in the roller-coaster phase, followed by a management phase as the workforce expands toward 50.
At roughly 50 to 100 employees and beyond, the leadership question becomes more fundamental: whether the founder remains the right person to occupy the leading seat in the company. Delegation, in that context, determines whether the company can develop an institutional capability of its own.
Pleijzier’s solution is ultimately about controlling where growth goes. “Have laser focus,” he argues. “There’s always a shiny object next door. Make a very long not-to-do list, say no to a lot of things, and make sure you know what your real money driver is.” A company has truly scaled when its direction no longer exists solely inside the founder’s head, but in an operating structure capable of carrying the business forward.
