There’s a version of this conversation that happens in almost every scaling business, usually about eighteen months later than it should.
The founder knows something isn’t working. The business is growing, more customers, more revenue, more people in the team but it’s getting harder to run, not easier. Decisions are slower. The same problems keep coming back, and a lot of them still end up on the founder’s desk, even the ones that clearly shouldn’t.
The instinct is usually to look at your people: Is this person strong enough? Is that hire working out? Do we need someone more senior? Sometimes those are the right questions. More often, they’re the wrong ones, because the problem isn’t the people. It’s that you’ve added people without adding the clarity that lets people really deliver. Clarity about who owns what, clarity about what ‘good’ looks like, and how you’re going to measure it.
That’s what our audit tends to surface. Not a weak team- a missing ‘operating system’.
The pattern underneath the symptoms
When I go into a business to look at the people and structure, the headline issue is rarely the actual problem. The founder describes the symptoms: too many meetings, work falling through gaps, everything routing back through them, and those issues are real. But they’re the result of something more specific.
In most scaling businesses, the same three things are missing, and they’re almost always missing together.
The first is role clarity. Not job descriptions – most businesses have something written down. What’s missing is a clear answer to a harder question: what is this role actually accountable for delivering? Not the activities, the outcome. When a growing business is still below ten people, everyone knows what everyone does because everyone can see it. It doesn’t take much growth for that to change. By fifteen or twenty people the shared understanding has quietly started to disappear, and nobody notices until work starts falling between roles that each assumed the other had or work gets duplicated. By thirty it’s the same gap, but now wider, more expensive and acting as a real brake on growth.
The second is ownership. There’s a difference between a function that’s just busy and one that’s consistently delivering outcomes that impact wider success. In many businesses, important outcomes are shared across people or functions, which sounds collaborative but is actually a problem. Shared ownership is no ownership. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t work collaboratively but that you need someone who is accountable for the deliverable. When something is everyone’s accountability, the person who ends up owning it is the founder, because they’re the only one who can’t hand it to someone else.
The third is the numbers. Ask a leadership team what each of them owns, and they’ll likely talk in terms of activities. Ask what number they’re accountable for, the two or three measures that tell them and everyone else whether and how well their part of the business is working, and it gets quiet. Not because they’re not working hard. Because it was never defined. This often leads to underperformance, because you can’t hold someone accountable for a result you never agreed. This also creates as many problems when things are going well- people no longer feel recognised for their work and you lose the engagement that got you here.
Why this is a scaling problem specifically
Because none of this matters much at ten people.
At ten people the founder is in every decision, sees everything, and holds the whole thing together just by being there. It works. It works so well that it becomes the operating model. And then the business adds five or ten more people and the model quietly stops working, usually well before anyone connects the strain to its cause.
The evidence backs this up. When you look at what actually blocks scaling businesses, talent and leadership sit right at the top of the list, not far behind market access, and well ahead of finance. The assumption most founders take from that is “we need better people”, I see it differently. It’s not that scaling businesses lack good people; it’s that they hit a point where good people aren’t enough on their own, because the business hasn’t been built to let them operate without the founder in the loop.
Gallup’s most recent numbers make the same point from the inside; fewer than half of employees strongly agree they actually know what’s expected of them at work. Sit with that for a second in the context of a business trying to scale. If half your people aren’t fully clear on what’s expected- what they own, what good looks like, which calls are theirs to make- then every decision that requires judgment routes back up the chain. In most cases, back to the founder. That’s no longer an engagement problem, it’s a structural bottleneck that grows with headcount.
The commercial impact
The reason to fix this isn’t that ambiguity feels bad. It’s that ambiguity is expensive, and the cost is mostly invisible until you look for it.
Coordination overhead is the quiet one. As functions (sales, operations, finance) emerge, people spend more and more time working out who decides what, who signs off, and what the standard is. That time doesn’t show up on any P&L as a line item, but it’s adds friction in the business. More meetings. More things done twice. More things not done at all. And behind it, a founder who keeps getting pulled back to bring it all together.
The sharper cost sits in the seats themselves. A role that’s carrying the wrong person, or more often, a capable person in a role that’s outgrown them, doesn’t fail loudly. It fails as lost momentum: decisions that don’t get made, a function that underperforms while the founder or a peer quietly covers, opportunities that slip because nobody owned them clearly enough to move.
What “Right People, Right Seats” actually means
This is where the language gets loose, so it’s worth being precise; “Right People, Right Seats” isn’t a judgment about whether someone’s good. It’s a question about the fit between a person and their role, and critically, the role as your business needs it to be over the next 1-2 years, not the role as it was defined when they took it.
In simple terms, this comes down to three things: is the person aligned with what the business needs, are they committed, and are they equipped for it. Aligned means that they’re clear about what they’re there to do, why it matters, and which decisions are genuinely theirs. Committed means they’re driven to deliver, tackling rather than avoiding the hard problems, and following through without being chased. Equipped means that they can actually deliver what’s needed, and at the scale and pace the business needs. In a growing business, this might look very different to two years ago…
What the audit gives a founder
Founders just can’t self-assess this accurately, they’re the most embedded person in the business, which makes them the worst-placed to see where the business depends on them. Every workaround they’ve built, every decision they’ve quietly absorbed, every gap they’ve filled without thinking – they’re all invisible to them precisely because they’re the person filling it.
What the audit produces isn’t a verdict on the team, rather, it’s a map of your organisation: where the accountability actually sits, where roles overlap or leave gaps, which outcomes have no clear owner, which numbers were never defined, and, the point that tends to land hardest, which decisions still can’t happen without the founder.
From there a plan to address the gaps emerges. It’s rarely quick, because you’re improving how the business operates. But it’s always fixable, and it’s a great deal cheaper than the alternative, which is discovering the gaps when things finally break during a growth push, or in due diligence before a sale or fundraise process.
Most important of all, what I see time and again when working with founders/CEO’s, is their desire for their business to amount to something. Whether that’s to leave a legacy, or to have that value recognised through a sale.
They recognise that allowing their business to depend on them risks all those years of hard work and commitment.
If any of this resonates with you, it’s worth a conversation.