Growth creates complexity, and complexity can quietly kill a scale-up. It is a predictable crisis: around a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, Dunbar's law and founder scale-up kick in, the org chart and how work actually gets done start to diverge, and the nimble speedboat becomes one overloaded boat that can't take a corner without losing half its cargo. Two thirds of scale-ups stall here and never fulfil their potential.
Rebecca Moore, drawing on Skyscanner and a string of Scottish scale-ups, gets honest about navigating that transition. The move is to codify the founding team's superpowers into an operating blueprint, get ruthlessly focused on strategy, and rebuild process, structure, team and culture around the customer, hunting down the "Gary logic" and orphaned spreadsheets that accumulate along the way. She closes with a deeply personal story about care to make the point that reconnecting people to the customer is what lets you scale with clarity, because scale amplifies everything, including dysfunction.
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Hi everyone. It's great to be back at Turing Fest after about, I think, six or seven years since I was last here. And we're going be talking about that transforming that startup mayhem into scale up power. And we're not going to be talking about channel crossings, I promise you.
And I will come on to why we've got this picture later on in the deck. We are going to talk about that predictable crisis that happens in a start up, when it stops being a start up and it starts being a scale up.
It is predictable because growth creates complexity, and it's really counterintuitive, but that complexity can be the silent killer of growth. Why do we care about this? Well, it's a really sad fact that actually sixty six percent of scale ups stall out and they don't fulfill their full potential.
It happens incredibly quickly, and in today's world with AI, the speed of that happening is going to be lightning fast. Complexity kills scale ups, and all these scale ups you see here will have been through this. They definitely have. They've had maybe early on in their journey, a point where they become overly complex.
The growth has been killing them, and they've had to do something different to get through that transition. And I know from first hand experience when it happened at Skyscanner, we actually had to stand our engineering teams down for about seven weeks whilst we figured it out.
Before I go on, I will just introduce myself to anyone who has not met me before. As Kat said, I'm a scale up COO consultant integrator. I've also had many other names, hurtled in my direction in my time, chief problem solver, head of getting **** done, VP of chaos taming, responsible adult, I've had that a couple of times in my long long distance past, my current CEO was in the audience, that was definitely a long time ago.
Organizational glue, business A and E, triage, air traffic controller, organizational ghostbuster, head of stuff that doesn't have a home, and one that we discussed last night, director of miscellaneous. I quite like that one. Also, I like to think of myself as a Yinta founder Yang, so founder amplifier, therapist sometimes, coach sometimes, always a cheerleader, and right hand.
And I've had the absolute privilege of working across four amazing scale ups in Scotland. Skyscanner was where I really made that transition and I had the incredible privilege of working directly for Mark Logan, who as you probably know, also has been Scotland's chief entrepreneur, as we were going through that incredible scaling journey.
And some of those amazing entrepreneurial operators who've also gone on to do amazing things are in this room today and have had the incredible privilege of working with them too. And they have inspired quite a lot of the content for today, so that's me just doing a little hat tip to them.
I've also worked at Travelnes. We we were a vacation rental, still are vacation rental business that I joined just before the pandemic, which was, yeah, pretty ********. But we came out the back of the pandemic with about five times growth. Simple online health care, I've been at for the last couple of years based in Glasgow, one of the biggest sellers of weight care medication.
All heard of Mounjaro? Wegovy? Yeah. So that's been an incredible, pretty brutal scaling journey, and we we were seeing overnight insane growth because that's been hitting the headlines repeatedly week after week. And we quadrupled our growth, went for about twelve million to over sixty million revenues in about a couple of years.
And now I'm on to my fourth scale up, an incredible scale up called Max Adventure based in Glasgow, but they've cracked the US office in Denver, and they've also got an office in Germany. About a hundred and ninety people, over fifty million revenues, and we're now plotting that course to a hundred.
They specialize in self guided tours for hiking and cycling, so think West Highland Way, Tour Mont Blanc, Camino. If you wanna do it yourself with a beautiful app that takes you along the way and someone organizes all your travel, all your accommodation, all your bags getting moved, and all you need to do is have the adventure of your life.
So an absolute privilege to work alongside the incredible founders that have founded these businesses to take them through this transition. And we're going to talk today I'd like to really get honest with you. What are the scaling secrets? And I've made a lot of mistakes, got a lot of things wrong along the journey, but we've also can spot quite a few patterns.
What are the causes of complexity? And then how do we get **** done with over fifty people in an organization that's scaling rapidly? And creating that organizational blueprint that embeds and amplifies those founding superpowers, which we'll we'll talk about as well, and some top tips along the way.
So I'm still not going to tell you why I've got a boatload of people, but we will start to dig into why does rapid growth kill growth. And so let's talk about stall out of scale ups. So ideally, we as a start up have found ourselves down here, We have maybe a huge incumbent that's already pretty slow, ripe for disruption.
Or maybe we're in a new market and we're establishing a new category. As a start up disruptor, we are really nimble, we're agile, we're fast, we've got really strong founder DNA, and we are going for it, we've found some traction, you'd think it's really easy.
We can just start scaling like mad, and we're going to take over the big guys. And it might look something like this. Yes, we'll get a little bit slower maybe, but as we do so, we're going to get so much bigger, we're going to eat all of their market share, and, you know, they're going to be dead in the water.
The reality is it quite often looks a bit more like this. In fact, over sixty percent of the time, it goes a bit more like this, and that that disruptor never fulfills their potential. And that's because there are pressures that hit that business as it starts to hit that transition from start up to scale up.
The pressures that had it down the way from being fast, nimble, agile, founder DNA are founder scale out, erosion of accountability, revenue growth faster than talent, and the ones that bring it down from scaling, hard, complexity, fragmented customer experience, and dilution of mission and culture.
And Bain have actually done a lot of research on this in their founder mentality, so you want to learn more about it. They've got some great great research to back all of this up. And you end up in this scale up scale up gunge.
It feels like you're literally wading through concrete whilst more concrete is piling in on top of you. And the output of all of that is that that growth accelerator pedal is less responsive than it used to be, and your output as a business slows.
And what the transition I'm talking about is this transition here. This is from Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling. He talks about these different phases of a business. Actually, what really matters in this, it's not the revenue that the business is making, it's the number of people.
I'll explain why. So when you get to around a hundred employees, somewhere probably north of ten million revenues, you're getting into that village stage. Up until then, you've been a really close knit team starting as a family and then maybe getting to, you know, in the tens of people, maybe a few specialists, but you're still within a a number of people that everybody can have a strong relationship with.
And we are going to come on to what that is. Dunbar's Law and Founder Scaleap. They are the two things that really kick in at this transition in a business that you need to be mindful of and you need to actively manage through.
So Dunbar's law is the theory that you can keep track of about a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships at any point in time. So one or two special friends, five close friends, twenty five good friends, fifty friends, a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships.
My husband would probably argue with me on this, he'd probably say it would be like six hundred meaningful relationships, but anyway. Beyond beyond about a hundred, human beings start to get a bit uncomfortable with being able to track them all. And what that means in a business is that there is more distance between the team and the founder, and the team and the rest of the team.
The founder will probably have close people or founding team will have close people that they are working with day in, day out. The team will have close people they are working with day in, day out, but the rest of the organization becomes more distant.
So you end up with this complexity of collective human behavior really starting to exponentially increase. And quite often what happens is your org structure, which typically in a young business is going to be more functionally structured, and your how **** gets done processes start to diverge, and that's where the chaos starts to really dig in.
And this is predictable, right, because it hits about that hundred and hundred and fifty people. And it doesn't mean that the founder can't scale, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. What I mean is the ways of working till this point won't scale, and we need to do something different.
So I will explain what I mean by this now. Up until this point, the founding team, the leaders of the business, have been in a tiny speedboat with everybody else in this speedboat. Everybody else is close to them. Here's what they've got to say every day.
Here's their thoughts on things. And they are in control. Right? The the leaders are in control. They're steering that boat wherever they want to. If they want to go over there quickly, they can. If want to do a U-turn, they can because everyone is on the boat with them.
As you start to get to Dunbar's Law, you end up with a boat a bit more like this. That boat has not just got tons of people on it, it's got baggage all over the place. That baggage is debt. It's sometimes tech debt, it's process debt, sometimes it's team debt, organizational debt.
You take a corner fast in that thing, half your bags and your people are probably going to end up in the water. You might even capsize the boat. You can't nip around quite as fast as you used to, and that can be incredibly frustrating.
But there is a way you can regain that speed, and we'll come on to that. The first thing we need to understand here is what got that speedboat to where it is today as those founding team superpowers. And that's why startups become scale ups in the first place.
And usually, somewhere between that founding team having a really deep understanding and passion for their problem, that customer obsession, a really unique disruptive way of solving that problem, they're usually product visionaries or they've got some sort of really unique experience or expertise that they can bring to that problem.
And then they've maybe learned along the way or one of their co founders has some amazing growth skills, growth wizardry, and they can hit it with e commerce or founder led sales, whatever is relevant for the business, and they find that sweet spot between those superpowers.
And that is where the traction is, and that is where that business really starts to get growth traction and start to scale. And what's interesting actually going into these businesses, sometimes those those founding teams aren't even aware of what those superpowers are, and quite often, they they also very humble individuals, they they have this, I guess, impostor syndrome about, well, if someone else has been doing marketing for, you know, twenty years, surely they're going to be better than me at it?
When actually, quite often, the experience and expertise of the founding team is absolutely phenomenal, and because they haven't been weighed down with conventional ways of doing things and conventional wisdom, They're they're as good as anyone on the open market. And then they also have this, which is incredible and shouldn't be overlooked, founder DNA.
And this is why supporting our founders and helping our founders through this transition and helping these businesses to scale with their founders at the helm is so important. Founder led listed companies deliver three point one shareholder returns, and the high growth scale ups in the UK, couldn't believe this number when I saw it, contribute one point four trillion to our economy, over half of SME turnover and employer around three point two million people.
We're actually struggling a bit with our scale up pipeline in Scotland, and it's something we are actively trying to do something about. In Scotland, the average scale up gets to around sixty four people and around fourteen million revenue. If you compare that to our UK peers, get up to about twenty million revenue and about a hundred people.
If you extrapolate that out, that means twenty billion to our economy and over a hundred and thirty thousand jobs for Scotland. And for people that are from much bigger countries like the US and whenever they are here, we are only a country of about six million people.
So these are actually quite big numbers for us. And what the founder brings to a business like that all the way through its life cycle, right up to listed companies and beyond, It's that relentless disruption, that big, bold, hairy mission, those superpowers we talked about, and that boundless, limitless vision of where the business can go.
A founder's grip on the business, you know, Chesky from Airbnb is really famous for this, that customer obsession, but also that obsession with the front line, ground level focus about what's going on. A really strong cash focus, a bias for action, and also a slight allergy to anything that remotely wafts of being corporate.
Some stuff like corporate stuff is okay, but most of it can be really bureaucratic. And so we should really celebrate this and really enable our founders to scale. And the really mature founders, the ones that can take that step back and that moment of reflection in this, they can actually understand where they bring that value to the business.
And I'm leaning here on Jean Wickman and Mark Winters who wrote Traction, and they've they've worked with their entrepreneurial operating system with hundreds of founders, visionary founders. And they see these themes time and again. The founder sees the future, has those big ideas and breakthroughs, is a vision creator, the customer champion has the learning mindset and they drive, drive, drive, drive that business constantly.
I honestly don't know how they have that much drive. On the other side of things, they can bring some drag at this moment in time in business evolution. With the Cambium consistency follow through, some organizational whiplash that we talked about, that dash and about in the speedboat, a reluctance to let go of some of the detail.
Sometimes because they've been burnt, they've tried to let go of it, and then it's fallen flat on its face. Eyes bigger than stomach, shiny toys all over the place and trying to take too much on. And some of this can become a complexity amplifier.
At this point in the journey, you really want to be trying to reduce your complexity, not increase it. So what we really want to be starting to get towards is rather than one big boat with everyone on it, with people about to fall off, if we think about how we actually get that founder DNA and try and set ourselves up with a flotilla of speedboats so that those speedboats within some guardrails can go uber fast, and everyone on that speedboat knows the mission.
Everyone on that speedboat has the skills collectively to get the job done. You don't have a marketing speedboat, you have a growth speedboat. You don't have a customer service speedboat, you have a customer experience speedboat. However, if you have all those those speedboats, and you don't give them a navigation system, you don't give them a process, you don't give them an operating rhythm, those speedboats will go all over the place.
So you you want a common navigation system that's going to keep everybody in the same general direction. But they've got the space to move about within that and to go fast. Strategy comes first. You need an operating rhythm, you need to be checking in with the captain and the lead boat with how their performance is going, whether they're on track, behind, ahead, if there's any obstacles in the way.
Process, where process is needed, not for the sake of process. Organizational structure, so as I said, the right skills in each of those boats, right team, the right culture. It's quite an elephant to eat at this point in the journey, so where do we start?
Well, I would always start with strategy. Scaling up amplifies everything, and without strategy, it will just amplify chaos for you. I'm not going to talk a lot about strategy. There's people way more qualified than me to talk about it, and we could do an entire talk on it.
But the one thing I will point out here is what's really important, and I have made the mistakes here on this, is to get hyper focused at this point. Do less, not more. Start with that founder superpower intersection, try and put some words to what it actually is, and also, does any of it need to change?
If a business has been built off the back of SEO, that's not going to see us forwards into the next five years, we're going to have to get deep into gen AI instead. And strategies about making decisions and choices, not declaring ambitions. Try and really narrow down and think about in sequence what do we need to do, not in parallel, so we can keep the whole organization really focused.
And this can mean some really, really tough decisions at this point. You know, a lot of my job in the past has actually been shutting stuff down because it's diluting our focus, not going hard at at the stuff we need to go hard at first.
So for example, you know, very sadly in simple online healthcare, we had to close down our NHS business. In theory, we felt, you know, that was going to really help support our private doctor business. There's going to be lots of synergy there. What it actually did was cause a lot of distraction and a lot of dilution, and it was, for us, the right choice to go after the private market where the growth traction was absolutely insane.
So what we're trying to think about next once we've got that strategy is how we codify those founding superpowers that sparked the success of the business in the first place. And then we can scale with ruthless clarity. So we need to look to that across our process, our organizational structure, our team, and our culture.
And we're looking to get right people in right seats doing the right thing, having the right impact. And I would always start with process here. Are we actually doing the right thing? Do we know what the right thing Map out the customer experience in really big chunks for your organization.
What does that look like? I've chosen here a typical e commerce one. And then how do we get **** done across that internally? How do we do the steps that the customer needs us to do? What you'll quite often find here, and top tip by the way, speak to customers.
It's amazing how many people do not do that. And it's amazing actually even founding teams who've built the business on such a deep understanding of customers have stopped speaking to customers. That's where the gold is. Right? That's where the insight is. And get a real sense for how we're doing on that journey and where we could really add value to the customer.
And what you usually find is the house it gets done along the way, those two things do not line up. And that's where your customer journey fragmentation sits. Next step, I would always then take that and go into the next level of detail.
Now I promise this is the last process mapping slide I'm going to show you before you all glaze over and go to sleep. But this is where people like me get really excited to geek out on this stuff. When you get to that next level of detail, next level of granularity, so we're not going down to detailed procedures and policies, but we are getting again, some people are allergic to this, but we are getting people in your room together, frontline people, and we are extracting out of them,
how do you do your job today, and how should you do your job? What in an ideal world, how would we do that, and what steps do we go through? Now, I'm going to I'm going to introduce you to an employee here at this point who you've probably all worked with if you've been in a start up.
Let's give this we'll give this one a fictional name, although I am basing it on a real human being. We'll call this employee Gary. Right? Gary is usually employee number one or two. He's usually a bit of a character, and Gary has learned to be incredibly resourceful.
And so Gary, what Gary can do with a spreadsheet, a Zapier account, and some really dodgy SQL, is quite frankly mind blowing and would outfox the smartest data scientist. And I have had a data scientist coming to me saying, Becks, I found some more Gary logic.
And quite frankly, I don't know whether to be impressed or terrified. Gary will have worked in almost every process in the business as it's been scaling, so that Gary logic is going to be everywhere. Gary can't even tell you where his Gary logic is because he's been there for so long, he's forgotten half of it.
So as you get through this, you will start to uncover Gary Logic and a whole load of other reality that is going on. Another really common conversation that I have at this point is, Oh, so what do you do next? Oh, then we put it in a spreadsheet log.
Anyone got a spreadsheet log in their business? Yep. Okay. Why did you put it in the spreadsheet log? Oh, actually, I'm not quite sure. Have to speak to that person because they've been here longer. Do you know why it's in the spreadsheet log?
Oh, that manager that left eight months ago? He wanted us to put this stuff in the log because we had that problem that time? I said, Oh, okay. Have you had that problem again? No, no, I don't think so. Is anyone looking at the spreadsheet?
Or you have to ask management, Management, are you looking at the spreadsheet? What spreadsheet? Oh, we didn't know there was a spreadsheet. It's like, Is this spreadsheet delivering any value? No. Okay. Could we get rid of the spreadsheet? Oh, I would love to get rid of the spreadsheet.
It takes me so much time to fill it in. I have that conversation every time I go into a business, not once, usually several times in several different teams. Quite often you find really, really valuable parts of the business being run that way.
You need to understand where is it okay to live with a spreadsheet for a little bit longer? I'm saying spreadsheet. These could be other tools that people are using, but it's not robust. Right? It's not scalable at all. And we're the things that are really fragile for us, we have to get them fixed.
And you will end up with the longest list of stuff. I should say as well, when I was when I was thinking about Gary, our fictional person, in this scenario, I was thinking, God, how is Gary getting on with AI? The mind absolutely boggles.
And then I went down a really dark path, it's like, it's not AI that's going to run the world, It's Gary. And that's really dark. Anyway, the reasons why your customer journey ends up really fragmented are we we we're typically organized around Harry and Harry, Gary.
A hierarchy of hippos are not what serves the customer. The front line end up silent heroes patching stuff up all over the place with manual workarounds and key steps because we've been focused on growth. Right? All our energy has been going into growth.
We've MVP'd the core product because we were always going to come back and fix that bit later on, but we never did. And the front line had been told, Oh, don't we we can't fix that thing for you today because we're focused on growth.
So they've learned to become really resourceful, not even ask for anything, they just figure out a way to fix it. So we have manual workarounds and key steps happening off the side of desks all over the place, unknown steps. We're not measuring the right things.
This process will tell you not only that you're measuring the right things, but probably that you're not even collecting the data for it. No standards, tribal knowledge. I mean, the stuff, it absolutely blows my mind what people can hold in their heads. It's incredible.
The work isn't visible. Loads of hidden work. Busy work. We've always done it this way. Underinvested in our core strengths as a business, our core engine. And also quite often you find loads of edge cases. So why are we doing this? Well, because two of our customers need it to be sent to them in paper, so we scan it here, and then we print it here, and then we put it in the post.
Do we really need these customers? Do we maybe just cut our customers down to our core customers? And then also you might find that eighty percent of your effort is actually going on something that you thought was an edge case, it's actually quite a sizable chunk of work and something needs to be done about that.
So it can be a really illuminating thing to go through. And how we start to turn this around is walking through those processes, you need to have an owner, someone that is responsible for that process and that is going to set the standard and improve it.
If you can't easily identify an owner, it's unclear, it's not obvious, or it's causing dysfunction, you know you need to reorg. And then you need a continuous improvement cycle. And the tools for this are lean theory of constraints. You need someone skilled at identifying and removing bottlenecks, variability, and waste.
And that's where things like lean agile coaches, theory of constraints come in. And then you need to give that team KPIs an operating rhythm and hold them to account on all of this. So moving on, organizational structure, we touched on that. When the org chart and how **** done diverges or when the scale of the business outpaces the scale of the output, that's when you need reorganize.
How I normally go about that? Well, you've got your end to end customer journey. Start with that. What are the big problems to a diagnosis on your business that you need to solve? And cluster those always on activities. What are your missions that you need to do to achieve this?
Usually something around growth, something about product, something about delivery, maybe something about customer experience. You'll have your lagging metrics, and from that you can get your leading metrics. Start with a clean sheet, not with the team you've got and the structure you've got.
You've got to take your functional hats off, zoom right out, look at the business from helicopter view, define the tasks, skills, capabilities under each mission, get clear on what you're optimizing for. Is it and this is all about where you are going get competitive advantage.
So is it centralized? Is it market oriented? Is it expertise focused on a task by task level? And do the bottoms up as well on the head count? How much work do we have and how many people do we need? And doing this is time and motion, right?
It's sat watching people, understanding what they are doing. Try and break those functional files down, map your to be and then map your as is to that. At that point, that's when you start looking at your current org. And then you can understand where you've got gaps you need to fill.
So lastly, just talk about the team and the culture. And I always think about culture as it is an amplification in a business usually of what's going on at the top, first and foremost. So even you've pretty words on the wall, what's happening at the top of the business is usually the culture will tell you a lot about that.
If there's a lot of misalignment at the top, then you'll see a lot of politics going on further down the business because people have to fight bloody battles with each other to get **** done. The other thing I I love Patrick Lencioni's model for this, which I've stolen here from The Advantage.
So he talks about you have your core values, values that make you different as an organization. You have your accidental values, and it's it's really important that you identify these. As you grow and scale, you will be bringing in culture and value to your business that you haven't intended to and you're unaware of.
So for example, in Travel Nest, we had a value called oh gosh, what was it called now? Fast, not perfect. That was it, a bit like the Zuckerberg move fast and break things. That actually became an excuse over time for quick and sloppy, and our quality was down.
And people, that's not perfect. So we had to completely change it, and we put a new value in which was executional excellence to really try and address that. And then and that's when you get into aspirational values, is what do we need to move to, and how do we articulate that.
And you need be really, really concentrated in managing that into an org. Putting it on the wall is not going to make people change. And I love Liz Wiseman's book Impact Players where she's researched the individual contributor that delivers twice the impact and output of a standard contributor.
And she talks about the characteristics of that person that will find the real job to be done, they'll step up and lead, they'll get it over the finish line, they'll learn and adapt, and they'll make the hard stuff light. And what she's done in the end of her book is she's actually given a table of what is the least coachable and most coachable attributes, researched with, I think, fifty plus executive coaches.
So when you're looking to hire, you need to be looking for least coachable as absolutely inherent to the person because you've not got much chance of coaching that into them. When you're looking for senior leaders, senior leaders generally are just not as coachable as junior people as well.
So you want them to have all of this so that they are going to live the culture for you. As I said before, don't underestimate how hard it is to find people that are capable of operating at founder level superpower in a discipline.
Get the bar clear, get a scorecard, but articulate the bar at the start of the hiring process. Be really crisp on what do you need that person to have demonstrated doing? Is it that they've taken revenue and growth from x million to y million across x channels in a business of a hundred people?
Like, get really, really, really clear on what you need from them. Seek builders, not runners. There's a lot of people that are used to steady state out there who will come and wow you interview, but they can't build the airplane mid flight. So how do you how do you identify those people that have done the scaling journey before?
So I'll just leave you on my last thing I wanted to just share with you was something I've heard every single time at this stage in a business is we've lost our focus on customer. And we really need to get that back. How do we get that back?
How do we get people thinking about our customer again? And that's because at a hundred and fifty people, you're starting to look inward all the time, and you forget about the customer and why you're there in the first place. So always find this is my personal way of doing it.
The best way to do that is to make it really real on an individual and personal basis. And this is this is what I did at Simple. So Simple, we wanted to really get people ignited around patient care. We were an online doctor, online pharmacy, and we wanted people to be obsessing about our patients.
And I told them this story, this personal story of mine, when we launched our new value. Our new value around us was called Care Fit for Our Kin. When I was fourteen, I lost my dad to cancer, and my mom, ever since that, my mom was a nurse for NHS for many years, she has celebrated the organizations that helped us every year since my dad died.
And I sat my mom down and said, Why is it that you honor these organizations? Like, what did they do that was so special to you that thirty years later, you are still celebrating them? And she explained to me that the day that my dad died, he went into a coma.
The first thing she was worried about, because she's a nurse and she gets care, was that he's going to be in pain. And she said McMillan nurses were there within twenty minutes. They were the first people that she phoned. They turned up with a syringe driver so that he could have pain relief, and she knew that he wasn't going to be in pain.
And when my brother and I came home, we were taken home from school, my mom was washing my dad to make him comfortable, so we had to kind of amuse ourselves. I didn't really know what to do with myself, so I picked some daffodils because it's daffodil season and put them in his room.
And, you know, my mom's washing him to care for him. I'm bringing daffodils. That's what you do for your loved ones. That's the level of care. You will do anything for them. And so it just so happens that Marie Curie's Emblem, who is another cancer charity that helps us with daffodil, so I got every single person in our company a daffodil pin, made donations to charity.
And I know that every person has a patient in their life. Okay? Everyone has got a loved one that's going through something or has been through something. And I asked them all to put that daffodil somewhere really visible, where they work. And whenever you are dealing with something for a patient, whenever you are moving Zendesk tickets around, or you are shipping boxes, or you are on the phone to someone that is angry, or you are quoting away on something that is going to help our customers,
I want you to look at that daffodil and think about the patient in your life and think, is it good enough for my patient, what I'm doing? That's the bar. And I was amazed at the cut through that that had. You have to keep it alive, you have to keep it valid for people, you have to be always, always, always on with it, and you have to find your own way of getting that message across for your customer, make it really personal and really relatable.
And you want people walking through walls for your customers. So I'll just finalize with my top tips. This transition is not going to fix itself. It needs investment, it needs time, needs effort, it needs team, which can be really hard. Think of this as a refactoring exercise for your company.
It's a Madonna moment, the queen of reinvention. You have to reinvent yourself or you die. Get a systems thinker in to help you if you don't have those skills in your organization. Don't put off the pain the faster you eat it, the faster you can get back to scaling.
Take care of the team through this, it'd be hard for them too. And confront those hard conversations at the same time, this might be the time that you have to make some changes. And remember, this is normal and not normal. It's actually not normal to scale.
More businesses don't scale than do scale, but if you are scaling, it is normal to go through this. Consistency, follow through, over communication triumphs, back to those drive and drag characteristics I mentioned earlier, and be prepared to tweak and adjust. You won't get it right first time.
And if you do that, I do hope you find yourself a flotilla of speedboats sailing off into the sunset, and just remember that scale amplifies everything including dysfunction. Recognize the messy transition as soon as you can, lean into it hard, codify those founding superpowers and DNA into your operating blueprint, and you will be able to scale with ruthless clarity.
Thank you. Thank you. That was amazing, Rebecca. Thanks for telling such a personal story as well. That was wonderful.
