I finish most of my walks with a podcast still running in my ear, and this week two very different episodes of Diary of a CEO collided in my head in a way I haven't been able to shake. One was with Konstantin Kisin and economist Steve Keen, ranging across economics, immigration, debt, and social cohesion. The other was with David Friedberg, arguing that a healthy economy needs more people moving from earning a paycheque to actually owning something. Different guests, different politics, same question underneath both of them: does stagnation begin in the statistics, or does it begin much earlier, in all the small decisions people make not to hire, not to invest, not to expand?
I don't think it begins in the statistics. I think it begins as hesitation. I'll keep the one employee I have, but I won't add a second. I'll replace the machine next year instead of this one. I'll do the work myself rather than build a team. None of those decisions shows up as a layoff or a closure. There's no government statistic called "the job someone considered creating and didn't." But multiply that decision across a few thousand businesses and I think you're looking at the real, quiet shape of stagnation, long before anyone calls it that.
This is where my two side projects, the Forest City Insider newsletter and the London economic-development research I've been doing, keep colliding with each other. We have a genuinely broad set of assets in this city: universities, a college, hospitals and research, manufacturing, professional services, incubators, accelerators, and layers of provincial and federal programs on top of all of it. None of that is wrong, and a lot of it is very good. But I keep coming back to a question that's less comfortable than "what new program does London need": if you're a business rather than a government, do you experience all of that as one system, or as dozens of separate doors, each responsible for one small piece?
I've started calling the thing I actually want to understand the missing middle, and I don't mean company size. I mean the missing middle in the journey. Between "I started something" and "I built an employer." Between "I survived" and "I'm ready to invest." Between "there might be an opportunity" and "I'm confident enough to take the risk." Governments understandably concentrate resources where the outcomes are visible: twenty million dollars invested, five hundred jobs announced, a new plant choosing a city. Ribbon cuttings are easy to point to. The harder work, and maybe the more important work, is helping thousands of existing local firms each make one slightly more ambitious decision: hire one person, buy one machine, automate one process, sell into one new market.
So here's the question I want to actually answer for London, not just muse about on a walk: where exactly do businesses stop moving? At the first hire? At five employees? At accessing capital? At the point a founder has to stop doing everything themselves and start building an organization capable of running without them? And underneath all of that, the more provocative question: do we actually know, or have we just built a lot of programs and assumed the answer?
I don't have it fully worked out yet. I think it's worth figuring out together. If you run a business in London and you've felt your own version of "not yet," I'd genuinely like to hear where it shows up for you.