For most of my career, I worked behind the curtains.

Other people’s names went on the door. I sat in the room when the numbers came in and the founder turned around and asked, “So what do we do now?”

I’ve spent twenty-six years behind the scenes of companies that scaled, and I think it’s time I told you what it looks like back there. (All of it! Not just the good bits.)

In my early twenties, I was the one-woman marketing team at a Canadian startup. I was the youngest person on the leadership team and the only woman. We made Profit 100’s list of Canada’s fastest-growing companies, got through 9/11 and the first SARS outbreak, and eventually sold to Warburg Pincus.

Then I joined the Internet Marketing Center. If you were anywhere near online business in the early 2000s, you’d know the name. It was a multi-eight-figure company and one of the pioneers of the industry.

And when I walked in, the marketing department was a mess. I had a team of fewer than ten people, and they’d been through so many managers I lost count. There was a lot of turnover and disengagement.

I spent most of my first ninety days on the team itself. I worked on earning their trust back and getting everyone behind the same mission. People started staying, they cared more about the work, and we had a lot more success.

I’ve seen versions of that in almost every company I’ve worked with since. A business can be doing eight figures while the people inside it are exhausted, and you’d never know it from the revenue.

You know the slick pitch the scaling industry sells. Build the team, systemize everything, launch the group program, and by next year you’ll be running the business from a beach. (I have never once seen anyone do focused work on a beach. The glare on the screen alone! Never mind the sand that gets trapped in your keyboard.)

What actually happens is the business grows, and everything that was messy inside it grows too. If every decision went through you at $300K, every decision goes through you at $2M.

There are just more of them, and now there’s a payroll attached. If you think things are a mess now, just wait and see what a hot mess looks like at scale.

That’s how a successful founder ends up in a bigger cage.

So, from my side of the table, a few questions:

• Does your team still bring you the “printer is out of paper” kind of questions?
• Does every proposal sit in your inbox until you’ve signed off on it?
• When did you last take a full week off? (Checking email “just once a day” doesn’t count. I know. I’ve tried.)
• Does your own family have to book time in your calendar?

That last one is mine. My mom likes to say the only way to get me on a call is to make an appointment. She’s only half joking.

For years, I looked completely fine from the outside. I’m Italian, so the lipstick was on and I was never going to show up to a Zoom call in pajamas. Meanwhile, in the background, I was dying.

Another strategy on top doesn’t fix this.

When a founder tells me their team “just doesn’t get it,” I tell them their employees are not them, and they’re never going to be. Expecting that is an impossible standard. We can get them close, though.

We bottle up your genius. We build a process around how you actually do the work and show the team what good looks like, with real measures so nobody has to guess. Then they need two things most founders keep for themselves: the authority to make decisions, and a clear way to escalate when they can’t.

That’s the structural shift. It won’t hold unless you shift too, from the person who does everything to the person who leads, and unless the plan fits the business you have now and not the one you had at $300K.

Most founders skip straight to the structure. They hire an operations manager, nothing changes, and six months later they tell me the hire “didn’t work out.” Usually the hire was fine. That person just never got the authority to do the job.

I’ve seen this from inside other people’s companies, and I’ve lived it in my own. I built a company and lost it, along with my house, which is the most expensive way I know to learn any of this.

That’s why I’m done staying behind the curtain. Too many good founders are paying for a version of scaling that only looks good from the outside.

I share my story so that you can see your story inside of mine. So here’s a question to sit with, my friend:

If you disappeared for two weeks, what in your business would break?