Coaching for Corporate Expansion and Scale

The patterns that built your company are not the patterns that will scale it.

Growth Is Where Patterns Break

Scaling is usually described as an operational challenge: new markets, new hires, new systems, new capital. But every leader who has actually lived a scale-up knows the harder truth. Growth is a pressure test — and pressure is precisely when schemas fire.

A schema is a deep, early-formed blueprint for how the world works and what you must do to succeed in it. Founders and executives carry them personally; organizations form them collectively, out of their own history — the scrappy early years, the near-death moment, the deal that saved the company. At fifty people, those patterns are often the company’s superpower: the founder’s hands-on control, the heroic all-nighters, the culture where everyone knows everything. At five hundred people, across three markets and two time zones, the same patterns become the constraint. Decisions bottleneck at the top. The heroics burn people out. The informal culture that once held everything together dilutes with every new office, every acquisition, every leadership layer.

Most scaling advice tells you to add structure: processes, OKRs, an operating rhythm. Necessary — but structure layered over an unexamined pattern gets quietly defeated by it. The founder who cannot delegate will route around the new decision rights. The team that avoids conflict will run the new meeting cadence and still resolve nothing. Durable scaling requires working at the layer underneath: naming the schemas that built the company, honoring what they achieved, and deliberately choosing the patterns the next stage requires.

That is the work this engagement does — grounded in the methodology of my book Schemas in Leadership and in twenty-five years of scaling organizations from the inside.

Three Levels, One Engagement

The executives. Scale changes every leader’s job faster than most leaders change. The founder must become a CEO; the first engineering lead must become a VP; the operator must become a strategist. One-to-one coaching gives each key leader a confidential space to see the personal schema under pressure — the over-control, the inability to let go of the old role, the fear of becoming “corporate” — and to build the leadership the new stage demands, without losing the drive that built the company.

The leadership team. Scaling forces the team that built the company to become the team that can run it — often with new senior hires whose own schemas arrive with them. We surface how the individual patterns interlock into a team-level pattern, name what is being felt but not said, and build the operating agreements a larger organization requires: how decisions are made, how disagreement is voiced, what gets escalated and what gets owned. This work draws on systemic team coaching practice and the HexHelix model I co-created.

The organization. Culture does not scale by memo. As you add markets, offices, and layers, the founding culture either becomes deliberate — translated into visible, repeatable patterns of behavior — or it dilutes into whatever each new location improvises. We make the culture explicit at the schema level: the real decision rules, the real rewards, the real undiscussables — so what you export to the new market is the pattern you chose, not the one you defaulted to.

What We Work On

Vision and strategic alignment — a shared answer to what the expansion is for, sharp enough to survive contact with the first hard trade-off, and owned by the whole top team rather than carried alone by the founder

Decision rights and the letting-go problem — redesigning who decides what as the company grows, and coaching the leaders whose schemas make delegation feel like danger

Building the leadership layer — developing the first-time managers and newly promoted executives on whom the scaled organization will actually run, before the gaps become attrition

Culture transfer across markets and geographies — making the culture deliberate and portable: what must stay identical everywhere, what must adapt locally, and how leaders in new markets carry the pattern

Communication under constant change — what to say, what to honestly admit is still unknown, and how to keep trust while the structure keeps moving under people’s feet

Integrating new senior talent — onboarding executive hires at the pattern level, so experienced leaders from larger companies strengthen the culture instead of colliding with it

Pressure, resilience, and sustainable pace — a confidential space for leaders to process the fear, fatigue, and isolation scaling creates; where the pressure shows up in the body, my book The Anatomy of Panic becomes a companion text

Execution and course-correction — an honest, ongoing review of what is working, what is stuck, and which pattern is causing the stuckness — so the plan adapts before the market forces it to

How an Engagement Unfolds

Discovery. We begin with conversations across the leadership team and key stakeholders, supported where useful by stakeholder-informed 360s, Hogan, CliftonStrengths, schema-based reflective inventories, and team diagnostics. Any data you already hold — engagement surveys, business results, board feedback — becomes part of the picture. The output is a clear diagnosis: the schemas that built the company, and the ones now constraining it.

Coaching. A tailored combination of one-to-one executive coaching, leadership team sessions, and organizational work, held in the flow of the real scaling agenda — the market entry, the reorganization, the funding round — because a pattern only changes in the moments when it fires. Cadence and duration are agreed to fit the pace of your growth.

Review. Every engagement closes with a written review: the patterns we named, what shifted, what remains, and what the organization must protect as it continues to grow. Lasting change needs an owner — and by the close, that owner is your leadership, not the coach.

Why Work With Me

I have scaled organizations from the inside, repeatedly. As Global Head of Talent at AmRest I supported growth across twenty countries and 19,000 employees and multiple brands. At Endava I led North American delivery for global financial institutions through rapid expansion; at Globant I ran an $80M, 500-person portfolio through aggressive growth; with IHG I opened entirely new markets where a business culture had to be built from the first hire. I know what expansion feels like at 11 p.m. in the new market’s first quarter — from the leadership chair, not the case study.

I bring that operating record together with the methodological depth this work requires: ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC), EMCC ESIA Supervisor, Chartered MCIPD, clinical training in Schema Therapy, and faculty and mentor coach roles at Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders. My clients have included leaders and teams at Amazon, Google, Walmart, Capital One, and Takeda — organizations that scale for a living.

Who This Is For

Founders and CEOs taking a company from founder-led to professionally managed — without losing what made it worth scaling

Executive teams entering new markets, geographies, or product lines, where the operating pattern must now work in rooms the founders are not in

Scale-ups after funding — when new capital compresses years of organizational growth into quarters, and the leadership must grow at the same speed

Established organizations expanding internationally — where culture, communication, and leadership patterns must travel across borders deliberately

Begin With a Conversation

The first step is a confidential conversation about your growth agenda — what is accelerating, what is straining, and which pattern keeps resurfacing — and an honest assessment of whether schema-level work is what this stage requires. No deck, no pitch. A diagnosis, and a recommendation.