Growth Pulls the Seams Apart

I never set out to become the person founders call when things stop working.

But I kept ending up inside companies the moment they were changing shape.

A healthtech going from $16M to $115M.

A consumer business scaling 2.3X.

A marketplace flipping from loss (and on the verge of shutting down) to profit in under a year.

Each time, I was there because growth was pulling the seams apart.

What I learned is that growth breaks companies in ways that look like an execution problem, a hiring problem, or a founder bandwidth problem.

But when you are inside, you start to see patterns: the company has outgrown the way it used to make decisions, hire people, prioritise work, involve the founder.

The instinct that worked like a charm with a 10 person team becomes noise at 50.

The founder who used to close every deal now cannot be in every room.

The team structure that felt informal and fast now feels chaotic and unorganised.

After a few of these, you stop seeing isolated problems.

You start seeing the fault lines where scale pulls a business apart.

I did not brand myself as the person who fixes this.

It just kept happening. And I unknowingly became an expert at it.