I recently had the opportunity to co-host Grow London’s Founders Dinner — a fantastic evening focused on one of the biggest challenges facing scaling businesses: bringing in the right leadership to fuel growth.
As someone who works closely with founders and leadership teams as they navigate these transitions, it was refreshing to hear such open, practical discussion on what it really takes to build a leadership layer that can scale a business.
Here are a few standout takeaways I took from the evening:
1. Hiring beyond the founder’s lens
Many founders instinctively look for leaders who feel like them — but hiring for scale requires looking beyond cultural fit and thinking about the skills, mindset, and structure the business will need 12–24 months ahead. The group shared some great examples of how to balance values alignment with bringing in diverse, experienced perspectives.
2. Managing the leadership transition
Moving from founder-led to leadership-driven is one of the hardest shifts for a scaling business. We discussed the importance of clarity — being explicit about roles, decision rights, and how founders and new leaders will work together.
Lack of clarity in this phase is where most breakdowns occur.
3. Fractional hiring — a growing lever
It was encouraging to see more founders embracing fractional models — especially at the CMO and CFO level — as a pragmatic way to bring in expertise without overcommitting early. But it needs to be done well: success hinges on scoping, onboarding, and managing fractional leaders as part of the leadership team, not as side projects.
4. Scaling culture deliberately
Finally, a strong thread through the discussion was how easy it is for culture to drift during rapid growth. Leaders need to actively scale culture — not just preserve it — as the organisation matures.
Why events like this matter
At Excelerator Partners, we’re seeing these questions come up again and again across our portfolio — and it’s great to see forums like Grow London creating space for founders to learn from each other and share hard-earned lessons.
A huge thank you to the Grow Talent team for curating such a valuable session.
