Helping a high-growth B2B SaaS business build the structure, processes and leadership capability to scale — without the organisation fracturing under its own growth.
Illustrative engagement — reflects our approach and capability across this type of challenge
The operating model that gets a business to £5m ARR is almost always incompatible with the one required to reach £20m. What worked when everyone knew everyone and decisions were made in a room no longer works when the team is 80 people across three offices. The informal coordination mechanisms, the founder-as-decision-maker model, the processes that existed in people's heads rather than in systems — all of them become liabilities at scale. Most scale-ups feel this acutely but diagnose it as a people problem. It is almost always a structure problem.
We use McKinsey's 7-S Framework to assess the alignment between strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills — because the dysfunction in a scaling business is rarely in one dimension, and interventions that address only one dimension without considering the others rarely hold. Kotter's coalition-building principles guide how we work with founding leadership teams to create genuine buy-in for structural changes that feel like a loss of control rather than an enablement of growth. Our change work applies Lewin's Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model to help the organisation move through the discomfort of structure change rather than resisting it. We define operating model changes that can be implemented without disrupting the commercial momentum that is funding the growth.
"Scale-up failure is rarely a market problem or a product problem. It is almost always an operating model problem — a structure built for 20 people trying to run a 100-person business."
The outcomes we design for are not org chart changes — they are capability outcomes: decision quality at the management layer below the founders, velocity of execution across functions, and the leading indicator that tells us the change has genuinely taken hold — the founding team spending less time on operational decisions and more time on strategic ones.