👋 Hey there, I’m Rachel. Each week, I write about coaching founders, building leadership teams that actually function, and what to do when a scale-up grows past the people who built it. For more: The Founder’s Survival Guide | Work with me 1:1
I started my first business before I was 18.
I built a multi-million pound music empire, and then I drove it into the ground, because the thing I was brilliant at was starting things, and I had no idea how to scale one. That failure sent me to study psychology, and I have spent the 25 years since, and more than 20,000 hours, coaching venture-backed founders through the exact wall I hit.
Here are 13 things I believe about scaling those companies. Each one comes with what to actually do about it.
Your job as a founder is simple: drive performance. That’s it, end of. What makes it hard is that the way you drive it has to change as the company grows. Over the years I’ve found it clearest to think about three different modes of leadership.
The first is the “warrior:” fast, bold, hands-on, brilliant at selling and at solving the problem right in front of you. It’s what a startup runs on.
The second is the “architect:” the one who creates order out of chaos, sets up the systems, defines who does what, and writes the plan. It’s what a scaling company needs.
The third is the “monarch:” the one who sets the direction for the next few years, represents the company to the outside world, and inspires people to follow. It’s what a mature business needs from its CEO.
Most founders are brilliant at one of these and avoid the other two. The practical move is to ask yourself a question every morning before you walk into the room: which of these three does the business need from me today? Just asking it is most of the battle, because otherwise you fall back, without noticing, on the one you happen to enjoy.
The strength that makes you great in the early days becomes the thing that breaks your scale-up. Your speed starts to confuse people. Your stream of new ideas disrupts the systems your team is trying to build. Your comfort with not knowing means you never give them the clarity they need. The strength doesn’t fade. It turns against you.
So keep an eye on your best move, not your worst one. When the thing that has always worked suddenly stops working, that is the signal to lead a different way for a while, not to do more of the same. The instinct under pressure is to double down on what you’re good at. That instinct is usually wrong, and learning to catch it is the most useful habit you can build.
I had huge success at the startup stage, when it was me and one or two people who were my extra arms. The moment I had more people to manage than could fit around a dining room table, I had no idea what to do. I had hit my level of incompetence.
When you cross that line, around the point a forty-person company starts to feel like a grey, mushy cloud you can’t quite see into, stop trying to fix it by adding more people. That is the reflex, and it only thickens the cloud. What the company needs at that size is not more hands. It is structure: clear roles, a clear plan, and a regular rhythm for tracking both.
For years my view was, more or less, “what is wrong with you people, it’s obvious what to do.” Every time a company grew past that dining-table size, I decided everyone around me was an idiot, and I’d walk out. At 26 I finally saw it: I was the problem, not the people around me. I had assumed everyone needed what I needed, which is to be left alone. That is not what most people need.
So when you catch yourself thinking “why don’t they care as much as I do,” treat it as information about you first. The only thing you can actually change is your own behaviour. You can change a situation, accept it, or walk away from it. What you cannot do is sit in resentment hoping the other person changes, which is where most frustrated founders live.
When I look at what is going wrong in a scale-up, it nearly always comes back to clarity. Does everyone know the priorities? Does everyone share the same picture of what success looks like, and by when? Does everyone know who owns what, and who is accountable? If even one of those is missing, the whole business drags.
The fix is unglamorous: say it again, and again, and again. Give every member of your leadership team a second, unofficial job, chief reminding officer, and have them repeat the same few priorities until they are sick of hearing themselves. One CEO I coached told me he knew a message had finally landed only when he was so bored of telling the story he could barely say it one more time. That is the bar.
“Hire great people and get out of their way” is only about 80% true. It’s advice for a late-stage CEO with everything already out of their head. While you’re scaling, you still have to lead the people you hire, and the founders who do this badly either smother their team or disappear from it.
The move is to spell it out instead of leaving people to guess. When you bring in a senior hire, tell them plainly how and when you’ll get hands-on. One founder I admire announces it to the whole company: each quarter he picks one problem area, dives in deep with that team for three months, then steps back out. Because he said so in advance, nobody reads it as “he doesn’t trust us.” You can hand off almost anything. You can never hand off managing your own senior team. That one is always yours.
A lot of founders try to keep their team happy. That is not the job. The job is to give each person what they need to perform, which is often not the same as what they would like. Sometimes that’s more clarity, sometimes more stretch, sometimes a harder conversation than either of you would choose.
So for each of your direct reports, ask a sharper question than “are they okay?” Ask: what does this person need to be at their best, and am I giving it to them? And manage your emotions rather than leading from them. If your team can’t predict what mood they’ll get from you, they spend their energy reading you instead of doing the work. Being steady is a performance tool, not a personality trait.
Scaling is not a smooth climb. It happens in sudden jumps, and there are two big ones. The first comes once you’ve proven people actually want what you’ve built, and you have to go from doing the work yourself to building a team that does it. The second comes once you have a real company, and you have to stop running it day-to-day and start leading it from above.
Treat each new round of funding as the trigger for one of those jumps, not just a milestone to celebrate. The moment right after you raise is exactly when the company demands you step up, so that is when to bring in help, not a year later when the cracks show. And make the jump yourself first. You set the ceiling for everyone below you, so if you don’t grow into more room at the top, your most ambitious people keep reaching for responsibility and bumping into you.
Most founders love the idea of rising above the day-to-day: setting the long-term vision, representing the company, thinking years ahead. The problem is you cannot lead from up there until you have a team that can run the business without you in the engine room. Pull up too early, while things are still breaking underneath you, and you make everything worse.
So check before you climb. Look hard at your leadership team and ask whether they can really hold the floor: is the work actually getting done, are the teams talking to each other, is the culture sound? If the honest answer is no, you haven’t earned the big-picture seat yet, and your job is still down in the machine, building the team that will one day let you leave it. The vision role is a reward for having a team that can cope without you, not an escape from not having one.
There is no version of scaling where you get to dodge the operational work: the systems, the plan, the managing of your senior team. It’s the part founders like me find boring, and skipping it is the most expensive thing you can do.
Here is the maths that changed how I run my month. Spend about three days a month, on purpose, on this planning work, and you head off roughly 90% of the problems you’d otherwise hit. Skip it, and you’ll spend something like 15 days a month firefighting the people problems that the planning would have prevented. Put the three days in the calendar as real, protected time. It is the best trade in the business.
Scaling founders break their own companies by saying yes too much. You cannot keep loading the roadmap and the client list and expect nothing to snap. Growth is not the same as taking on everything on offer.
So build two habits. Before any yes, to a client, a product, a hire, ask the question out loud: what will we let go of in order to do this well? If the answer is “nothing,” it isn’t a real yes. And decide in advance how you’ll know a bet has failed, before you’re too attached to it to see straight. I like one founder’s rule: miss the plan once, change the plan; miss it twice, change the team. The discipline is naming the moment you’ll stop, while you can still think clearly.
Founders tend to hire people like themselves and listen to people who think like them. It feels good and it is a trap. If you are a fast, bold, hands-on type, a whole team of fast, bold, hands-on types will charge confidently off the same cliff together.
So go the other way on purpose. If your strength is starting things and selling, your most important early hire is the careful builder who creates the structure you avoid, not a second version of you. The same goes for whoever challenges you: choose a mentor, a coach or a chair who is wired differently from you, because their whole value is seeing what you can’t. The strength is in the combination, not the echo.
People hear “leadership development” and picture something soft, a way to make everyone feel better. It isn’t. At scale, this is performance management that serves the business, not the people in it. You are building something that works, not a commune.
That has two practical edges. First, when someone doesn’t want to come on the journey, let them go cleanly and quickly, rather than carrying underperformance and dragging everyone down with it. Done well, that is a relief for the whole team, not a cruelty. Second, accept that none of this holds by itself. People drift back to their old habits within about a month of any big away-day, so the change has to live in a regular rhythm, a weekly leadership meeting with real ownership and follow-through, rather than a once-a-year event you hope will stick.
One last thing. The founders who make it through are almost never the ones on the cover of Forbes. They’re the ones who did this work, built something that could run without them, and earned the rarest thing of all: the chance to choose the time and manner of their own exit, instead of having it chosen for them.
That’s the whole job. Become the leader your company needs at each stage, so that one day it doesn’t need you in the same way.
If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking I need to actually do this with my team… that’s what I do for a living.
At VC Talent Lab, we run three programs for venture-backed leadership teams:
The Founder Performance Lab. You get the tools. You deploy them.
The Team Performance Lab. We come in and do the work with your team directly.
Bespoke programs. Built for a specific leadership cohort in your org.
Our work is built around two things: performance and fortitude. Driving the first. Building the second.
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