You've outgrown the playbook that built this.
You built something real. The early chaos was productive; the instincts that got you here were right. But the company is bigger now, the decisions are harder, and some of what made you effective at twenty people is becoming a liability at a hundred. This is the bit nobody warns you about.
The instincts that built v1 are now working against v2
The founding team's superpower in year one is speed, proximity, and a shared understanding of the problem so deep it barely needed saying out loud. You moved fast because you were all building the same thing in your heads, without ever having to compare notes.
By year three, that shared picture has come apart. The company is bigger, the distance between the people doing the work and the people deciding what the work is has grown, and the instincts that made the early calls feel obvious are now producing answers built for the company you were, not the one you are.
Nobody failed here. Growth does this mechanically, to good leaders and bad ones alike. The founder who spots it early and adapts keeps building. The one who doesn't finds out at a board meeting.
The instinct to move fast and fix it yourself
At fifteen people it works brilliantly. At sixty it creates a shadow hierarchy, because everyone waits for you to weigh in before committing to anything. You think you're unblocking things. You're actually becoming the bottleneck with the best intentions in the room.
The belief that culture is self-replicating
The culture in year one was whoever you happened to hire and how you all survived together. It cannot copy itself into people who weren't there for that. Left unmanaged, the culture in year three is the culture of the last batch of hires. Yours is a story they have heard about.
The conviction that you know the customer better than anyone
You knew the original customer. The one who said yes when no one else would. But product-market fit at fifty customers and product-market fit at five thousand are different things, and the distance between you and the actual user has been growing, quietly, for eighteen months.
The habit of making every hard call personally
It was the right call when you had ten people and full context. At a hundred people, making every hard call yourself means decisions queue up outside your door, what reaches you has already been chewed over by three other people, and your team never learns to make the call themselves. You're solving for confidence when you should be solving for capability.
Not a hire, not a consultant: a thinking partner with operational nerve.
Another hire is a nine-month process that changes the organisational chemistry before you know whether the person is right. A consultant delivers a deck and flies home. Neither of those is what this moment requires.
What this moment requires is someone who has been here before, who can read your company well enough to know where the actual problem lives, and who is prepared to sit in the uncomfortable conversation rather than write it up afterwards. Someone whose usefulness is measured in decisions made and clarity produced.
The value is not the knowledge in isolation. Anyone can read McKinsey research. The value is the application of that knowledge to your specific situation, at the moment when the decision is actually on the table, with someone who has skin in the outcome.
Experienced enough to have made the expensive mistakes already, so you don't have to. Present enough to actually be useful. A quarterly call is the least of it.
Three ways to work together
The shape of the engagement depends on the problem. Some founders need an ongoing relationship; some need someone embedded for a season; some need a specific intervention at a specific moment. All three options are structured to produce thinking. There are cheaper places to buy output.
Standing relationship
A standing relationship, typically fortnightly or monthly, focused on the decisions that don't fit neatly into a team meeting. Fundraise sequencing. Organisational design. Whether the COO hire fixes the actual problem or the one you've diagnosed. The work that sits between the board and the exec team and tends to fall through the gap.
Right for you if
Founders running a company of 20 to 200 people who have built something real and are now living with the complexity that came with it.
Product Direction
Senior product thinking embedded directly into your team for a defined period. Not writing product specs; sitting in the room when the roadmap gets shaped, when the engineering priorities get set, when the customer research gets interpreted. Useful when the founding team's product instinct is strong but the translation into process, prioritisation, and team capability has stalled.
Right for you if
Founders who built the v1 product themselves and are now trying to build a product function around something that already exists.
Intervention
A single focused engagement for a specific decision, transition, or inflection point. Entering a new market. Renegotiating the relationship between product and commercial. Restructuring after a funding round. The intervention is time-boxed, specific, and designed to produce a clear output: a decision made, a structure agreed, a path forward with someone behind it.
Right for you if
Founders who know what the problem is, have a clear moment of decision approaching, and want someone senior in the room who has made this call before.
If any of this felt uncomfortably accurate, that's probably worth a conversation.
The first conversation is free, takes about thirty minutes, and is focused on whether there is a genuine fit. We will tell you clearly if there isn't. No pitch, no deck, no sales process.