When people talk about scaling a business, they usually talk about revenue, markets, or strategy. They almost never talk about leadership. And I don’t mean mindset in a vague, motivational way. I mean the real, day-to-day decisions about people: how work gets done, how expectations are set, how accountability shows up, and who owns what. In other words, do we actually have the leadership required to grow this business. There was a point in building my company where things looked good from the outside. We were growing. Demand was strong. Clients wanted what we offered. But internally, everything felt harder than it should have. Decisions took longer. Problems kept repeating. I was more involved than I wanted to be, and more involved than a scalable business allows. At the time, I would have said we needed better systems or more capacity. And to some degree that was true. But the real issue was that the way I was leading no longer matched the size or complexity of the business we were becoming. Early on, I believed a few things that I think a lot of founders believe. I believed that if I hired smart, capable people, things would mostly take care of themselves. I believed that culture would stay strong as long as intentions were good. And I believed that structure could wait, that it was something you added later once things felt more real. That worked for a while, but it doesn’t scale. As the business grew, the margin for ambiguity disappeared. What used to work through informal conversations and shared context started to break down. People were doing their best, but their best wasn’t always aligned in the same direction. And that’s when I realized the business hadn’t outgrown its strategy, it had outgrown its leadership operating model. One of the first things I had to confront was how much of the business depended on institutional memory, and by people I mostly mean me. How decisions were made, how certain situations were handled, what good actually looked like. That works when you’re small. It breaks when you’re growing. Because the moment someone is out, overwhelmed, or leaves, momentum stalls. And the more we grew, the more I became the glue. If something didn’t work, it came to me. If someone wasn’t sure, it came to me. If context was missing, it came to me. That’s not leadership. That’s being a bottleneck. So I changed how we operated and started getting that knowledge out of my head and into documentation. It took time, years honestly. We built onboarding videos, our SEED program, and the Acacia Way documents that outline how we work with clients. We still customize our solutions for each client, but now we start from a shared foundation. That means we’re not solving the same problems five different ways for five different clients when we don’t need to. The result is that new hires ramp faster. What used to take nearly a year now happens in a fraction of the time. And when your team ramps faster, your business scales faster. Another hard lesson was this: being good at your job does not automatically translate into being good at leading others. I had talented, committed people and yet execution was inconsistent. Not because they didn’t care, but because expectations were fuzzy. Different leaders handled things differently. Feedback was uneven. Accountability depended on who you talked to. At scale, inconsistency is expensive. It slows decisions. It confuses teams. And it quietly erodes trust. So I got very clear about what leadership actually meant in this business, not aspirationally, practically. What does it look like to set expectations, give feedback early, make decisions without escalation, and hold the line when things get uncomfortable. Once leadership became defined instead of assumed, execution improved almost immediately. We spent nearly a year in intensive leadership coaching around communication, feedback, and collaboration, and it changed everything. And I will never be convinced that focusing on leadership development early and often in small businesses is not the biggest competitive advantage. The next shift was building structure before it felt urgent. This is the one most leaders delay. Structure often gets framed as something you add when things are broken, but by the time things are broken, you’re reacting, not designing. I learned to build structure before it felt necessary. Clear roles. Clear ownership. Clear expectations. Not because anyone was failing, but because growth was coming. Structure isn’t about control, it’s about predictability. When structure exists, people make better decisions, leaders spend less time firefighting, growth doesn’t rely on heroics, and the business becomes less fragile. You can scale something intentional. You can’t scale something accidental. Our mantra became structure over rigidity. The structure exists, and when we need to pivot, we do. Designing how people work, lead, and operate is ongoing work. If it’s not owned intentionally, it becomes fragmented. A little here, a reaction there, a scramble when something goes wrong. That’s when growth starts to feel chaotic instead of exciting. The business didn’t scale because we worked harder. It scaled because we worked more deliberately, especially when it came to people. And if you’re listening to this and thinking things feel harder than they should, look beyond the sales and marketing plan and look at the people plan. Ask yourself where you are relying on assumptions instead of clarity, where execution depends on specific people instead of design, and where you are still the glue holding things together. Because growth can break a business when the people infrastructure can’t handle it. And if this resonates, you can book time with me directly using the link below.