One of the hardest lessons for a successful founder is that the way you built your business may not be the way you scale it.
In the early years, founders are often at the centre of everything. They know the customers, make the important decisions and spot opportunities before anyone else. You are effectively building the plane while flying it. That instinct, speed and proximity to the business can be a tremendous advantage, until success changes the equation.
More customers, employees and markets bring more complexity. Entrepreneurial instinct and informal coordination increasingly give way to clearer strategy, stronger systems and greater leadership capacity. The challenge is to professionalize without losing the entrepreneurial qualities that made the business successful.
After 25 years working with growth companies in the UK and Canada, one thing I have learned is that businesses don’t grow continuously. They grow in episodes, typically lasting three to six years, and relatively few successfully repeat them.
The founder’s challenge isn’t simply to grow the business. It is to create the conditions for the business to keep growing.
From founder-led to team-led
This insight sits at the heart of Growth Catalyst (growthcatalyst.ca), the seven-month leadership and growth program we developed in Alberta.
Earlier in my career, many growth programs focused on developing the Founder-CEO. But founders would return inspired and face the same question: How do I bring everyone else with me?
Our answer was to work with founders and their leadership teams, making their company the case study and translating learning into a shared plan for growth.
Growth Catalyst participants are established innovation-driven businesses with proven traction; around 30% are family businesses. Their challenge is identifying what will catalyze the next significant growth episode—and building the leadership team capable of delivering it.
The questions they bring vary, but often reveal the same challenge: stepping back from the day-to-day to make more deliberate choices about the future.
For Kyle Pickering, Co-Founder and CTO of ONSITE3D, that meant asking bigger questions: “Who do we want to work for? What excites us? What are we passionate about?” For Operations Manager Lindsay Bil, the value was in “finding out what our blind spots were” and testing a good plan against new perspectives and experience.
Those perspectives don’t come only from founders. Growth Catalyst brings owners and leadership teams together across a peer community. Jennifer Magnus, CEO of MAGNA Engineering, recalled another participant asking, “You struggle with that too?” Her reaction: “I wouldn’t have thought our two businesses would share that.”
That shared learning matters for emerging leaders too. Jacob Goldstein, Sales Manager at JSI Manufacturing, described seeing how owners and other leaders “strategize, think through problems” as “hugely valuable.”
Growth Catalyst is designed not simply to accelerate growth, but to build the leadership capacity to sustain it. By Year 3, 100% of leaders surveyed reported becoming more effective business leaders, 93% were more confident in their ability to grow their business, and 80% had changed how they spent their time managing it.
Perhaps that last number matters most.
The founder’s next job isn’t to make every decision or pursue every opportunity. It is to build a team capable of deciding what matters, what doesn’t, and where the business goes next.
Catalyze what’s next.
- Meet the graduating companies
- Download the 2026 Growth Catalyst Impact Report
- Read “Strategy Is a Team Sport” in ScaleUP Drivers 2026
Simon Raby is the Founder and Executive Director of ScaleUP Week, the Founder & Director of Growth Compass, Founder & Academic Director, Growth Catalyst, Professor, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at MRU.
Simon is the Founder and Executive Director of ScaleUP Week, the Founder & Director of Growth Compass, Founder & Academic Director, Growth Catalyst, Professor, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at MRU
