There is an inflection point in your business growth journey that calls for a shift in mindset. When your product is where it needs to be, your customer base is established and you’ve stayed on course consistently, you can start to think more meaningfully about the kind of business you want to run longer term. 

Adopting the right mindset for scale is about moving away from short termism and survival-based decision making to more of a long-term strategic view. Making the shift to a scaling mindset, in essence, is about giving yourself permission to believe that your business is going to run for the longer term and changing how you make decisions accordingly. 

Let’s imagine your start-up is a speed boat. You can fit a few people on board, change course at a moment’s notice and it’s fast, agile and probably feels a bit out of control at times if you’re not concentrating! 

When you’re scaling a business it can feel as though the need to think of yourself as a leader has crept up on you. After all, most people set out to make their business a success rather than out of an egoistic need to be at the helm.

It’s not uncommon, therefore, for people on the scale up journey to end up as accidental leaders, leading by default rather than design and experiencing myriad challenges as a result. This can be especially common in fast growth organisations where the scale or scope of the challenge combined with the pace of change means that getting things done often takes precedent over stopping to think about how you might do them.

When a team is growing fast a lot changes in a short time and high growth adds pressure that can be hard work for the team and the business as a whole. Your job as a leader is to anticipate these changes, get ahead of them when you can and mitigate for the effects by building the right foundations and setting yourself up to be responsive rather than reactive. 

So what's shifting and what do you need to be mindful of?

When you’re leading a fast growth business you need a team who can lift you up. They need to be fully empowered, invested and taking the initiative - they need to treat your business as if its their own.

Yet these things come up time and time again as key elements that leaders struggle to cultivate in their people, creating a barrier to growth that is like a silent blight. 

So it’s crucial that you know how to make your team truly accountable, instil genuine responsibility, and get them to buy in on all fronts.

When your business seems to outgrow certain members of your team, when they expect their loyalty to be valued above all else and when they start to exhibit distracting or disruptive behaviour you might find yourself asking “should they grow or should they go?”. Walking this new line is a juicy challenge that calls for a step up in leadership. 

Let’s start by looking at why team members can get inadvertently left behind and why that leads to inevitable friction.  

Growth is change – and change is hard. People respond differently to change depending on how they’re affected by it. 

Almost every single client I’ve spoken to in the last 2 weeks has said the same thing… it’s all a bit ‘heads on desks’!

If that’s you, you’ll no doubt be planning to take some time out to rest and recover.

If you’re like most of the high achievers I work with though, that’s sometimes easier said than done. Most of my clients are, at times, pretty bad at taking real time out.

When the buck stops with you it can feel difficult to contemplate taking proper time out. Even if you plan to, events can often seem to conspire against you.

There’s a rolling assumption that when you reach the dizzy heights of the CEO role you’re probably immune to the minutiae that drags down our inboxes and to-do lists. I think it’s probably a lesson you learn the hard way that, especially in your first time in this space, it’s actually anything but.

As a CEO it’s easy to become a dumping ground. This risk is especially acute when you haven’t done the work to fully empower your team. If you haven’t done this work effectively you become the de facto ‘most passionate person’ and (I’ve seen this a lot) you become the one that takes responsibility for the ‘things that matter’ because they only really actually matter to you!

How you behave has a significant impact on your people and your business. The decisions you make, the things you prioritise and what you’re motivated by are all reflections of who you are. The relationships you build and how they work is a reflection of your inner beliefs and values.

Ultimately, your business will be a reflection of you - so understanding who you are and why is hugely important.

Why? Because we can’t do anything about the things we don’t know about.

Before you read this post, I want you to take a second to think about how much you’ve changed in the last 5 years.

What have you learned? What have you overcome? How have you surprised yourself?

We are evolving all the time. But how often do you this actively?

Or to put it another way, how much of your growth is on purpose.

In busy roles, especially in fast growth businesses, it’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle of reactivity, rarely stopping to think about whether you’re growing into the kind of leader you need to be to run the kind of business you want to run.

This week is the official launch of Elevate and Evolve, my leadership development programme for CEO’s, MDs and founders of fast growth and scaling businesses.

It’s been a long time in the making. It started, as so many of these things do, when I spotted a gap that wasn’t being met elsewhere. There’s so much support out there for founders and start ups and some very old school help that exists for established CEOs but for my clients, the rule breakers and risk takers who so often start our coaching conversations with

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Louisa Clarke from the Caffeine Partnership about her new book Catalyst - using personal chemistry to turn contacts into contracts. It’s a business development masterclass for anyone who believes in the power of human connection.

I’ve long been frustrated with just how much awful business development advice there is out there. There’s myriad gurus selling every quick fix they can dream up… it ranges from the very basic - contact 100 people a day (which let’s face it, can’t fail, but is also a very quick route to unpopularity), to complicated funnels fed by webinars and endless content… anyone who’s been on the receiving end of one of the more aggressive incarnations of these can end up feeling like they’re being, at best spammed, at worst stalked.

Business development advice for growing or scaling businesses is actually pretty limited but tends to focus on annexing your efforts off into some sort of dark and murky, commission hungry shark tank.

Whether you’re the resolution type or not, the dawn of a new year can’t fail to offer a fresh perspective. A stretch of time, clean and unsullied, on which to make the kind of mark you want , is hard not to lean into.

When you’re someone who likes to challenge yourself, and those around you, a fresh new year gives you ample opportunity to think about how you’re going to better what’s gone before. It’s very easy to feel as though anything is possible as you set sail onto the wide blue ocean of the year to come.

So how do you make the most of this clean slate and ensure you’re as ready as you can be for what gets thrown at you.

Here’s my top 5 tips for starting the year strong:

I talk to clients so often about impostor syndrome that I can’t believe it’s something I’ve never written about here. Impostor syndrome is something that every single one of my clients suffers with. Sometimes all the time, sometimes now and again.

Sadly, generally this phenomenon is more commonly associated with women in leadership which is why, I think, sometimes the male clients I work with probably struggle to label it quickly enough.

As it happens to everyone, it’s definitely something worth taking a deeper look into.

You’ve strived and sacrificed, worked the hours, pushed the boundaries to grow your business and secure your role at the top of the tree, you should be feeling great right?

If you don’t, you’re probably feeling quite conflicted, and maybe even the slightest bit guilty. After all, plenty of people would love to be in your shoes.

Sometimes it’s the feelings that take you by surprise that are the most difficult to deal with. When you don’t feel like you ‘should’ feel it can really knock you off course.

Once you have the right team in place things should be easy, right? You set the vision, make sure everyone knows their part and how to play it and off you go.

In reality, things can change daily, and they do. Decisions need to be made, priorities need to be set and messages need to be communicated.

Something I hear a lot, and I used to see in my corporate career was frustration when messages didn't stick. Decisions, priorities, tasks, strategy, logical things that should be easy to understand and implement that then simply don't get done, or get done, but not in the way that was expected.

It causes friction and slows the business down and ultimately leaves you the leader, thinking that you might as well do things yourself.