Teaming · Scaleups
Scale the company without breaking the culture that built it.
Scaling Teams Without Breaking the Culture is an experiential programme for growth-stage companies between roughly 30 and 200 people, when the culture that attracted talent starts to strain. It builds the trust, communication and leadership habits a company needs to scale, grounded in Applied Improv and the EPIC Leadership framework. It is designed for scaleup leadership teams and for venture capital firms supporting their portfolio companies.
The challenge
Every scaleup hits the same wall. The product works, the funding is in place, the headcount is growing — and somewhere between 30 and 200 people, the thing that made the company special starts to break. The founding team could read each other's minds. New hires cannot. Decisions that used to happen over a coffee get stuck in long message threads. The culture that attracted talent becomes the thing talent complains about.
The patterns are consistent. Psychological safety erodes as hierarchy grows — in a team of eight, speaking up feels natural; in a company of eighty, people start calculating the risk of raising a concern. The founding story gets diluted. Communication breaks down across functions. Brilliant individual contributors struggle with the shift to leading others. And around 70% of organisational transformations fall short, McKinsey finds — and scaling is, at its heart, a transformation.
The evidence is clear about what's at stake: 60–70% of scaleups cite culture and people challenges as their biggest scaling risk, psychological safety is the single strongest predictor of team performance (BCG, 2024), and 70–90% of new behaviours from training fade within thirty days without structured reinforcement.
What we offer
A programme built for the specific challenges of rapid growth: teams that barely know each other, new leaders learning on the job, and a culture that needs to hold together as the organisation expands. It runs in four phases — discovery and onboarding, experiential training days anchored in our five guiding principles, a 30-day behavioural integration programme, and follow-up with impact measurement across four levels. The change is felt in the room, and the follow-up structure is what makes it last.
Who it's for
Leadership teams moving from founder-led to professionally managed. Teams where new hires now outnumber the original crew and the culture is thinning. Cross-functional teams formed quickly that need to build trust. And venture capital firms who want to offer their portfolio companies a programme that protects the growth they've invested in.
Format
Typical engagement: one to two training days or a six-month leadership programme, each followed by a 30-day programme and an impact measurement session. Group size 10–25 per facilitator. For VC portfolios, we can standardise the programme across multiple companies.
Scaling fast and feeling the strain? Let's talk.
FAQ
Questions, answered
- When in a company's growth is this most useful?
- Most often between roughly 30 and 200 people, when the founding culture starts to thin. But it's just as valuable earlier as prevention, or later when a scaleup is professionalising its leadership.
- Can you run this across a VC portfolio?
- Yes. We standardise the programme so a venture capital firm can offer it consistently across multiple portfolio companies, while still tailoring delivery to each company's stage and culture.
- How do you make the behaviour change actually stick?
- Every engagement is followed by a 30-day behavioural integration programme and an impact measurement session. That structure is what prevents the 70–90% behaviour decay that typically follows one-off training.