The Beauvais Problem: When Ambition Outpaces Your Foundation
- Sarah Edwards
- Feb 13
- 3 min read
Imagination and bleeding-edge ambition leading to catastrophic failure is more a feature than a bug in the realm of human endeavor. Built during the highly ambitious Gothic period, the Beauvais Cathedral has suffered multiple collapses throughout the centuries. The intent was to scale the height of the spires due to fierce competition with other cathedral builders of the era. These collapses are primarily due to pushing the known limits of design and less than ideal subsurface and foundational preparation. Like Beauvais Cathedral, if you aren't scaling with a reliable system, you're just getting bigger and more fragile. Something will eventually break.
A seemingly trivial event, at the time, occurred early in my career. I was having lunch with a business owner that had about 3,000 direct employees. We were talking about how the business started as a small family enterprise, but they had been experiencing parabolic growth for a few years. He asked me, "do you know what one of the main killers of a business is?" I think I responded with something narrow in scope like, "outrunning your cashflow." He just responded, "growth."
His reply is something I think a lot about today. While I wasn't totally wrong, I wasn't totally right either. Poorly managed growth can be the silent killer of your business. Especially when doing business in the public sector. Business in the private sector often comes with penalties like refunds or reputational damage. Public sector business risks include codified penalties like cure notice, show cause notice, termination, audit failure, negative ratings impacting future business, or being removed from competition for non-compliance with requirements.
State and Federal Governments aren't just buying your expertise; they're buying your reliability as a partner. Your reliability as a partner is due, at least in part, to having well-designed and repeatable processes that help avoid business debt as your foundation. Like Beauvais Cathedral, it's unwise to grow beyond the limits of your foundation.
Business debt doesn't always show up on a balance sheet. It accrues silently, in the gaps between what you commit to and what you can deliver to clients.
What if you've been successfully competing for Federal contracts for years, but now CMMC is mandated by law? Contracting Officers are increasingly requiring CMMC Level 2 C3PAO third-party certification just to compete, not just for prime contracts, but as a flow-down requirement for subcontractors. You realize your cybersecurity practices, while functional, exist as "things we do" rather than documented, auditable procedures that meet the 110 NIST SP 800-171 security requirements. Your team follows good practices, but there's no System Security Plan, no Plan of Action & Milestones process, no evidence trail that a C3PAO auditor can verify.
The certification you need to unlock millions of dollars in contract opportunities, or even maintain your position on existing bid teams, is staring you directly in the face. Meanwhile, prime contractors are already sending the message: "no certification, no contract opportunity." With approximately 80,000 DIB companies needing CMMC Level 2 certification and fewer than 100 accredited C3PAOs available, the assessment bottleneck is real. Companies without their foundation in place are finding themselves locked out of opportunities.
Or perhaps you won your largest contract yet. Your team knows how to deliver quality work, but that knowledge lives entirely in their heads. There are no documented processes for quality control, no standardized procedures for deliverable review. When your star project manager takes another job or you need to scale to three simultaneous projects, consistency crumbles. What worked with tribal knowledge at small scale becomes chaos at scale.
Maybe you've successfully onboarded contracts before, but each one feels like reinventing the wheel. Different team members interpret compliance requirements differently. Deliverable formats vary depending on who's managing the project. When an audit comes, and in government contracting, the next audit always comes, you're scrambling to reconstruct documentation and processes that should have already existed.
This is how business debt and related technical debt compounds. Each undocumented process, each "we'll figure it out as we go" decision, each reliance on individual knowledge rather than organizational systems adds weight to a foundation that wasn't built to bear it.
BWIT specializes in building the foundation that supports sustainable growth. Operationalized processes and documentation are central to certifications like CMMC and CMMI, but more importantly, they're the bedrock that prevents your cathedral from collapsing under its own ambition.
The difference between Beauvais Cathedral and structures that stand for centuries isn't ambition; its building on a solid foundation.
Ready to assess whether your foundation can support your next contract?
Visit us at www.gobwit.com or reach out to discuss how we can help you build for profitable growth.
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