Your leadership team cannot scale you

Your senior leadership team was hired to keep things the same. Asking them to triple the agency’s value is a conflict of interest.

Think about how they arrived. You climbed a bit, then brought in a project manager to protect the projects. Climbed again, added an account director to protect the clients. Eventually a COO, to protect the systems. Each hire put a pin in the mountain below you. Safe, sensible, and entirely designed around preserving what already exists. Preservation is their job, and the good ones are excellent at it.

Growth is a different job. When I scale an agency I build what I call a Growth Lab team: four or five superstars drawn from every level of the business, not just the top. They write the three-year vision, then work backwards to what has to happen this year. They run the experiments, break things safely, and only roll changes out once they have proven them and the leadership team has agreed.

The pitch to the SLT is honest: you keep running the business you are brilliant at running, while this team does the risky work that will not touch you until it works. The result is a company that grows without every idea coming from the founder, which is precisely what buyers pay a premium for. The superstars become your succession team, grown from below rather than anointed from above.

I install this as a board advisor.