Nicholas Mukhtar on Why Most Growth Strategies Fail Before They Start

9th Apr 2026
Eighty percent of business leaders believe their organizations are good at crafting strategy. Only 44% believe they're good at carrying it out. That divide, between the confidence applied to planning and the reality of outcomes, is where most growth plans lose. Not in execution. In the assumptions that never got examined before execution began. Nicholas Mukhtar, who advises business owners, family offices, and corporate executives through his firm Tera Strategies, has a specific diagnosis for why growth plans collapse. The failure, as he sees it, rarely originates in the operational phase. It originates in the planning room, in the questions that didn't get asked, and in the conviction that the ones that did get asked were the right ones. The Confidence Gap The data on how leaders actually approach planning is striking. Research cited by ClearPoint Strategy found that only 2% of leaders are confident they will achieve 80 to 100% of their stated objectives. That confidence collapse — from 80% believing the plan is sound to 2% believing they'll fully deliver on it — is not the fingerprint of an execution culture. It's the fingerprint of assumptions that overpromised from the start. Nicholas Mukhtar draws a distinction that gets at why framing this as an execution problem can mislead. A plan built on an inaccurate reading of a company's actual capabilities, market position, or internal culture isn't one that failed to execute. It was never viable. Execution exposes the gap, but the gap was already there. "Every entity and every person is unique, and you have to treat it that way," Mukhtar said. "There's no one-size-fits-all solution." For leaders who adopt pre-built growth frameworks, whether market expansion plays or product diversification models, without first stress-testing those frameworks against their specific context, the confidence in the planning phase becomes the problem rather than a safeguard. Research cited by ClearPoint Strategy found that 67% of well-formulated plans fail during execution, and that 61% of executives feel unprepared for the challenges they face when stepping into a new role. For Nicholas Mukhtar, both figures point to the same root: the planning process did not surface what was actually true about the organization, the people inside it, or the conditions it was operating in. Where the Assumptions Break Down Harvard Business Review research by Andrea Belk Olson identifies four patterns that recur when business plans collapse at the planning stage rather than the execution stage. Leaders misread the actual problem they're trying to solve. They overestimate what the organization can realistically deliver. Fixed constraints that no amount of effort can move go unexamined. And the question of how people inside the organization will actually respond rarely gets asked until it has to be.  Each of these is an assumption failure, not an execution failure. The plan looked complete because the right questions about each category were never asked, or were asked with optimism rather than rigor. Nicholas Mukhtar's systems-level background, developed through running a public health nonprofit, advising government agencies, and working with private sector clients through Tera Strategies, gives him a particular view of how these failures cluster. "I see a lot of growing pains in companies trying to transition from startup to fully functioning business," he said. For many of the business owners he works with, the growth plan was built for the company they wished they were, not the one that currently exists. That distance, between the idealized version of an organization and its actual state, is where most plans break. A business owner running a tight, founder-led operation may assume the team can execute a broader plan without the infrastructure to support it. A company moving from one market into several may assume that what worked in the first context will transfer cleanly into the next. These aren't careless errors. They're the natural result of planning from inside a system you've become too close to see clearly. "There's a lot of cynicism about companies using McKinsey and outside consultants," Mukhtar said, "but the rationale is sound: you bring in an outside voice that isn't ingrained in the day-to-day, and can actually think creatively." That creative distance isn't about credentials or frameworks. It's about the ability to question assumptions that feel obvious inside an organization — and that feel obvious precisely because everyone inside has stopped questioning them. Stress-Testing Before the First Dollar Moves The solution Nicholas Mukhtar describes isn't about adding more steps to a planning process. It's about changing the posture of the one that already exists: from building a case for a plan to actively trying to break it. Most planning sessions are, by design, constructive. Teams assemble evidence in favor of a direction, build financial models that validate it, and present it to leadership in a format that emphasizes upside. Assumptions underpinning the model sit in the background, rarely surfaced and rarely challenged. That's not a process failure. It's a cultural one — and Harvard Business School data cited in HBR found that 85% of executive leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy, while 50% spend no time at all. When little time goes toward honest scrutiny, the assumptions in the plan go unchallenged until a failed initiative surfaces them. When the people expected to carry a plan forward have had little hand in pressure-testing it, the organization commits to something it hasn't honestly evaluated. The answer, as Nicholas Mukhtar frames it, starts with simpler questions asked earlier. "People get pulled in so many different directions that they just need to simplify things and have a direct conversation: why isn't this working? What's bothering you? How do we make it better?" Mukhtar said. That instinct, to compress complexity into direct questions, maps cleanly onto how growth plans should be challenged before they launch. What can we not do that this plan assumes we can? What are we treating as moveable that won't move? What does this look like if the assumptions are 20% wrong? Nicholas Mukhtar's work with business owners tends to start exactly at this point: not with the growth plan itself, but with the operating reality behind it. A team's actual capacity, the client relationships that genuinely anchor revenue, the internal dynamics that will either absorb change or resist it. Plans come into focus after those questions have honest answers, not before. None of this requires elaborate methodology. It requires the willingness to challenge a plan before commitment, rather than after failure. For business owners who've experienced a growth initiative that stalled without obvious cause, the pattern is consistent: execution rarely was the problem. Untested assumptions were.