Stage brief · Structure · £2M to £5M

You hired a leadership team. So why are you still carrying them?

Almost certainly not because you hired badly. Nobody ever defined who decides what, so every decision that crosses two functions routes to you by default. That confusion is invisible from your seat and obvious from every other seat in the building.

Start with the Diagnostic Book a scoping call
What it sounds like

Founders at this stage say the same things.

“I hired a leadership team and I am still carrying them.”

“We agreed it in the meeting. Then nothing happened.”

“I know we can do £10M. I am less sure this version of the company can.”

The work at this stage

  • Decision rights, written down and defended. The Decision Rights Map run with your exec team: which calls are yours, which are theirs, and the protocol that stops them drifting back.
  • A cadence where agreed things happen. A weekly operating rhythm with named owners and dates, so execution stops depending on you chasing.
  • A leadership team that brings decisions, not problems. The standard reset: what arrives at your desk arrives with a recommendation attached, or it does not arrive.
  • Escalation rules in writing. The small set of triggers that genuinely should come to you, defined, so everything else genuinely does not.
What is actually happening

The diagnosis, plainly.

Your people are almost certainly not the problem, whatever you have privately concluded about your hires. The problem is that decision rights were never written down, so the company runs on an unwritten rule: when in doubt, ask the founder. Everyone is following that rule diligently, including the senior people you hired precisely so they would not have to.

The second symptom is the meeting that agrees things which then do not happen. That is not a discipline failure; it is a design failure. Agreement without a named owner, a date, and a cadence that checks is just a pleasant conversation.

This is the cheapest stage to fix, and the most expensive to leave. Every quarter the routing stays in place, your best people learn to wait, and the ones who will not wait leave. It is fixable in weeks, not years, and the fix is mostly writing.

What changes when it is fixed

Decision rights written down and defended. A cadence where agreed things happen without chasing. A leadership team that brings decisions, not problems.

The Decision Rights Map is one of the free tools: the one hour exercise this stage is usually missing.
Where it starts

Two weeks inside your real numbers. £2,500 fixed.

The Diagnostic ends with a written findings report ranked by what each finding is costing, and a decision. Around half the founders who take it need nothing further.

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Adjacent reading
Previous stage

Traction · £1M to £2M

When the constraint is the founder.

 Next stage

Scale · £5M to £7.5M

When the operating machine becomes the constraint.

 Start here

The Diagnostic

Two weeks inside your real numbers. £2,500 fixed.