The €5M wall

anthony@lopesadvisory.com (Anthony Lopes) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:31:02 GMT

I've got to say, after twenty years of doing this work, there's a pattern I've started seeing so consistently that I want to write it down — partly for my own benefit, partly because if you're running a solar business right now and you're stuck, I think you might recognise yourself in it.

Here's the pattern.

Almost every solar business I talk to that's stalled around the €5M mark tells me, in the first ten minutes of the conversation, that they have a marketing problem. The leads aren't great. The website isn't converting. The content isn't landing. They're thinking about hiring a new marketer, or briefing a new agency, or rebuilding the site, or all three.

And here's the thing — almost none of them actually have a marketing problem.

What they have is an ops problem, or a positioning problem, or a systems-integration problem, or a founder-bottleneck problem, or (most commonly) some combination of all four. And the marketing is just where those problems happen to show up. It's the fire alarm, not the fire. Because everyone is staring at the alarm, the instinct is to fix the alarm. Hire a marketer. Brief an agency. Launch a campaign. Three months later? Nothing has changed and the team is more frustrated than before.

I've watched this play out enough times now that I want to lay out what I'm actually seeing. There are four specific patterns that show up at the €5M wall, and once you know what to look for, you can't really un-see them. If one of them describes your business, this essay is for you.

Why the wall exists in the first place

Before I get into the four patterns, one thing worth saying. The €5M mark isn't arbitrary — it's the rough point where a solar installation business outgrows the structure that got it there.

Below €5M, most successful solar operators are running on a combination of founder instinct, a small tight team where everyone knows what "good" looks like because you've all talked about it informally over the years, and processes that live in your shared heads rather than in any documentation. And honestly? That works brilliantly, up to a point. The point is usually somewhere between twenty and forty employees — when the founder can no longer be in every important conversation, and the shared understanding that was holding the whole thing together starts to fragment, because there are simply too many people for shared understanding to scale.

At that moment, your business needs a different kind of structure. Not more people doing the same things harder. A different way of organising the same work. And here's the brutal part: most founders don't see it coming, because it doesn't look like a structural problem. It looks like a series of small tactical problems appearing everywhere at once. So you fight the fires one by one, and the fires keep relighting.

The four patterns below are what those fires actually look like.

Pattern one — the positioning collapse

Think back to when your business was at €2M. Everyone in your team knew exactly who you were for, right? It was obvious — partly because you said it ten times a day, partly because the team had it baked into their bones. Maybe it was commercial rooftops in Utrecht. Maybe it was mid-size agricultural installations in Gelderland. Whatever it was, it was clear.

Now fast-forward to where you are today. 25, 30, 40 people across sales, surveying, install teams, and admin. And somewhere along the way — quietly, without anyone noticing — that shared understanding started to fragment.

Here's what it looks like in practice. Sales starts saying yes to projects that don't really fit, because the quota is the quota and a signed contract is a signed contract. Ops is drowning, because the mix of projects has become unmanageable — too many variations, too many edge cases, too many ad-hoc decisions that used to be obvious. And marketing? Marketing can't produce sharp content, because nobody can give them a clear answer to "who are we actually targeting?" The brief has quietly become "solar customers", which isn't a brief at all.

This looks like a marketing problem because the symptoms appear in marketing. The content is vague. The website copy has drifted. The leads are all over the place.

But it's not a marketing problem. It's a positioning and alignment problem. And the fix isn't new content or a new website — the fix is for you and your leadership team to sit down and have the uncomfortable conversation about who the business is actually for now. Not who it was for at €2M. Not who it could be for if you stretched. Who it is for, today, based on the projects you're winning and the projects you're profitable on.

Then you need to enforce that answer ruthlessly across sales, ops, and marketing at the same time.

Do that, and the marketing "problem" starts to dissolve on its own. Don't do it, and you can hire the best marketer in Europe — nothing will move.

Pattern two — the CRM as filing cabinet

Here's an honest question I ask in nearly every first conversation: what does your CRM actually tell you, in real time, about what's happening in your business?

The answer I usually get is some version of "well, it stores everything." Customer names. Notes from calls. Tags and labels. Attached quotes. It's a place where information lives. But it doesn't really do anything with that information. And — here's the kicker — it almost never connects to the install calendar, the quoting system, or the accounting software, which are all running in different tools that don't talk to each other.

So the CRM has half the picture. The install calendar has another quarter. The accounting software has the last quarter. And no single person in your business — not you, not your ops manager, not your sales lead — can sit down and answer the most important question in real time: what's actually in our pipeline right now, what's profitable, and what's at risk?

You can't, because the answer lives across four tools that have never had a proper conversation with each other.

So decisions get made from gut feel, from last month's numbers, from whoever shouts loudest in the Monday meeting. Which was fine when you could hold the whole business in your head. It is genuinely catastrophic at €5M with forty people working on dozens of live projects.

This looks like a reporting problem, or a dashboards problem. So the instinct is to buy a fancy dashboard tool and bolt it onto whatever's already there. But here's what I'd push back on — a new dashboard built on top of disconnected data just gives you a prettier version of the same confusion. The actual fix is systems integration. Sitting down, designing how the tools should fit together, and then doing the unglamorous work of connecting them.

This is usually cheaper than people expect. And it has a bigger impact than people believe — until they've lived with the result.

I'll say this plainly: of all the work I see solar businesses needing at this stage, this is the single highest-leverage piece. I don't say that lightly.

Pattern three — the founder as bottleneck

OK, this one is going to sting a little. Stay with me.

At €2M, you (the founder) were doing most of the strategic thinking and a big chunk of the sales. That was completely appropriate — you were the person with the most context, the most judgement, and the closest relationships. The business wasn't yet large enough to justify delegating any of that.

Now at €5M? It's not working anymore. There's too much strategic thinking required. Too many decisions to make. Too many calls to be in. You're permanently overwhelmed, the team feels like everything is waiting on you, and decisions that should take a day are taking two weeks because you genuinely can't get to them. The business feels stuck in a way that's hard to describe but impossible to ignore.

The instinct at this point is to hire a senior operator. A general manager. A head of sales. A second-in-command. And honestly? That's the right instinct. You do need to hire someone. But here's the part most founders miss: hiring alone doesn't fix it.

The reason it doesn't fix it is that whoever you hire can't actually do the work until they understand the decisions you've been making by instinct for the past five years. And those decisions have never been written down. So your new hire walks in, asks "how do we handle X?", and you say "well, it depends" and spend an hour explaining. They ask "what's our approach to Y?", and you say "let me think about it" and never quite get back to them. Two months in, your new senior hire concludes — privately, but they conclude it — that the business has no real system. Just a founder making everything up as they go.

Which is what it looks like from the outside, even when it's not what's happening inside your head.

This is not a hiring problem. It is a knowledge-extraction problem. Before — or ideally alongside — the senior hire, someone (usually me, or someone like me) needs to sit down with you and translate the implicit decisions into explicit ones. How do we qualify a project? How do we price the edge cases? How do we decide when to walk away from a deal? Who won't we work with, and why? What is our quality bar, actually?

The writing-it-down is the work. It's not glamorous. It feels slow. But until it's done, no amount of hiring relieves the bottleneck — because the bottleneck isn't your time. It's the fact that you're the only person who knows how the business actually runs.

I know how that sounds. I'm not blaming you. Honestly, I'd say it's the single most common pattern I see in successful founder-led businesses, and it's a sign of how good you've been at running things on instinct up to now. The same instinct just stops being enough at this scale.

Pattern four — marketing without a question

Last one, and this one is more strategic than the others.

Here's the thing about marketing that I don't think gets said enough: at every growth stage of a business, the correct question for marketing is different. Completely different. And most businesses don't notice when the question changes.

At €500K, the marketing question is "do enough people know we exist?"

At €2M, it shifts to "how do we get in front of more of the people who could hire us?"

At €5M, it changes fundamentally. The new question is something like: "how do we consistently attract the right kind of project, at the right margin, from the right kind of client — and how do we actively repel the wrong kind?"

That last bit is the part that catches people out. Repel.

Mature marketing doesn't just attract. It also pushes the wrong people away — politely, but firmly. And a €5M solar business that's winning the wrong kind of work is not failing at marketing. It's succeeding at the marketing strategy that was correct for a €2M business, which is no longer the business it actually is.

Most businesses at this stage haven't noticed the shift. So they're still running the €2M playbook. More leads. More traffic. More activity. More visibility. More noise. And they get more leads alright — more of the wrong leads, because the playbook was built for a different business than the one they're now running. Ops gets more stressed. Sales works harder for a lower close rate. Marketing gets pressure to "do better" — which is unfair, because they're doing exactly what was asked of them at the last strategy meeting.

This looks like a lead generation problem. It's not. It's a strategy problem dressed up as a tactical one. And the fix is for leadership to sit down and answer the new version of the marketing question — what kind of work do we want to win, from what kind of client, at what margin, and how will we design our marketing and sales process to repel everything else? — and then update the brief to marketing to match.

The new brief will almost always mean fewer leads, not more. Better leads, but fewer. And a leadership team that can't hold its nerve through that transition (because it will look like the marketing is "underperforming" for a quarter) will not get through the €5M wall, no matter how many agencies they hire afterwards.

The common thread

So, four patterns. Different on the surface. But here's what they all have in common, and this is the bit I want you to take away from this essay even if you forget everything else.

Each one looks like something tactical, and is actually about how the pieces of the business fit together.

Positioning collapse is about how sales, ops, and marketing have stopped talking to each other about who the business is for. The CRM problem is about how four tools are pretending to be one tool and failing. The founder bottleneck is about how implicit knowledge hasn't been made explicit. Marketing-without-a-question is about how the strategy hasn't been updated to match the business the company has actually become.

None of these have a marketing fix. All of them show up in marketing, which is why marketing gets blamed and marketers get hired and agencies get briefed, and nothing improves. The marketing is just the reporting layer on top of the real dysfunction. Fixing the dashboard doesn't fix the data.

This is what I mean when I say most businesses that think they have a marketing problem actually have a systems problem. Not "systems" as in software (although software is often part of it). Systems as in the way the parts of the business fit together — the hand-offs, the definitions, the shared understanding, the design of the whole. At €5M, the thing that got you here is the thing that's now in your way. You can't marketing your way out of that. You have to see it.

What to do about it

If any of the four patterns felt uncomfortably familiar — and I mean really uncomfortable, the kind where you're thinking "OK that's a bit close to home" — the first step is not to hire anyone or buy anything.

The first step is to sit down. Ideally with your leadership team, at minimum on your own. And answer four questions. Honestly.

Who, specifically, is this business for now? Not aspirationally. In reality, based on the projects you've actually said yes to in the last six months.

Can any single person in this business tell me — right now, in real time — what's in the pipeline, what's profitable, and what's at risk? If the answer is no, the problem is systems integration, not reporting.

What decisions am I currently making that only I know how to make? If the list is long, the bottleneck is knowledge, not capacity.

What kind of work do I want to attract more of, and what kind do I want to actively repel? If the answer is "more of everything", the marketing brief is broken.

Writing down honest answers to those four questions is the first two hours of real strategic work in a process that takes a few months to complete properly. It will not solve your business's problems. What it will do is show you, probably for the first time, what the actual problems are — which is an entirely different thing from what the symptoms have been telling you.

That's the work. It's harder than it sounds. It's also the difference between being stuck and being unstuck.

A small invitation

This is the kind of work I do at Lopes Advisory. One principal, a small number of clients at a time, and a particular focus on helping leadership teams of solar businesses see the whole system and make sharper decisions about where to go next.

If you run a solar business in the Netherlands or the UK, and one of those four patterns landed too close to home, the next step is a conversation. Thirty minutes, no pitch deck, no obligation. I'll tell you what I'm seeing and you can decide whether you want my help working through it.

And if you're reading this and you're not my target audience, but you know someone who is — forwarding this to them is the highest compliment a first Field Note can receive. I'd be grateful.

Go beyond.

— Anthony Lopes, April 2026

Field Notes