For Founders

The instincts that built
the company at fifteen people
now produce the dysfunction at fifty.

Speed over process. Direct control. Technical depth. The specific instincts that made you successful at the early stage are the same ones routing every significant decision back through you now — and the bottleneck is structural, not personal. You don't need a different founder. You need a structure that doesn't require you to be in the room for every call.

The pattern

Three places the structure
traps the founder

Scaling yourself

You hire senior people but keep making the decisions. The org chart says delegation. The calendar says you. Nobody transferred real authority; you transferred the title.

Strategy vs. execution

The strategy is sound. The execution keeps drifting. The gap isn't talent or effort — it's the translation layer between strategic intent and operational work, and nobody built it.

The wrong diagnosis

You think it's a people problem. Your board thinks it's a leadership problem. It's almost always a structural problem wearing a people mask, which is why firing and replacing doesn't fix it.

Patterns

These are the patterns the
diagnostic investigates.

Each one is a specific structural mechanism — not a metaphor, not a personality type. If you recognise yourself in any of them, the diagnosis is already underway. The sprint maps which pattern is producing your specific dysfunction and redesigns around it.

The Founder Leadership Transition

At ten people, the founder IS the operating system. At fifty, the founder's bandwidth is the binding constraint. The organisation scaled the headcount without scaling the operating model.

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Scaling Breakpoints

Organisations hit predictable structural walls at 15, 30, 50, and 100 people. Each breakpoint invalidates the operating model that got you there. The symptoms look like people problems. They're physics.

Read →

Decision Architecture Failure

Nobody in your organisation knows who can say yes. The org chart says one thing. The actual decision flow says another. The result is high latency, low quality, and zero accountability — and the fix isn't 'empower people.'

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The Strategy-Execution Gap

Your strategy exists in a deck. Your team is executing something else entirely. Every advisor has told you it's a communication problem. It isn't — the decision infrastructure that translates strategic intent into daily choices doesn't exist.

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Structural vs. Personal

You're treating a structural problem as a people problem, and it's costing you talent, time, and money. The underperformer you're about to fire.

Read →

Pilot Purgatory

Your climate tech company has completed fourteen pilots and closed zero commercial contracts. The technology works in every pilot. The organisation was never built to convert pilots into revenue.

Read →
All diagnostic patterns →

What happens when you engage

A bounded diagnostic or
ongoing structural oversight.

Both follow the same method — Observe, Hypothesise, Test, Revise — and both start from the decision graph, not from the org chart. The sprint is a bounded engagement with a clear end and specific deliverables. The retainer is ongoing access to a structural diagnostician watching the decision stream as it happens.

Diagnostic Sprint €18,000 4–6 weeks

In four to six weeks you'll know what's structurally broken, which product lines to bet on, what your team configuration should look like, and what to tell your board — with the specific mechanism named, not a vague "culture problem."

What you walk away with

  • A structural map of how decisions actually move through your company — not the org chart, the real graph
  • The specific pattern diagnosed, with the mechanism named and the evidence shown
  • A redesign with specific interventions: which decision rights move, which roles change, what gets cut
  • A decision framework you keep after the engagement ends — so the next structural question doesn't require another sprint

What this prevents

A wrong senior hire costs €60–80k and six months of the wrong person in the wrong structure. A year spent building the wrong product line costs more than the salary. The sprint costs €18k and six weeks.

Advisory Retainer €6,000/month 3-month minimum

You give me visibility into the decisions as they happen — board prep, hiring decisions, product bets, team changes. I read the decision stream and flag the structural consequences before they compound, so the expensive mistakes that would become visible six months from now get caught while they're still reversible.

How it works

  • I initiate based on what I see in the decision stream — you're not bringing me problems, I'm watching for structural patterns as they form.
  • This is a forward-deployed diagnostic, not a sounding board or a coaching retainer. The value is in what gets flagged before you'd have seen it yourself.
  • Three-month minimum because structural patterns take time to surface. Anything shorter is a sprint, and should be scoped as one.

Conditions

The engagement produces
value under specific conditions.

Team willing to be in the room

The diagnosis requires real conversations with the people who experience the structure. If the team can't be part of the process, the diagnosis is based on one person's account of reality.

Founder willing to decide, not discuss

The sprint produces specific recommendations. If the engagement becomes an indefinite discussion about what to do rather than a structured path to doing it, the value doesn't compound.

Decisions actually happening

The retainer watches the decision stream. If the company isn't making decisions — if everything is deferred, delegated upward, or stuck in committee — there's nothing to watch. The sprint comes first.

Not for companies on fire

If you need someone to step in and operate — make the hires, run the board meeting, manage the crisis — that's an interim executive, not a diagnostician. I diagnose the structure. I don't run it.

I work with 3–4 companies at a time.

Method

Structural diagnosis +
leadership coaching

Strategy work fails without leadership change. Leadership coaching fails without structural change. The structure and the founder co-produce the outcomes, which is why the intervention has to touch both or it doesn't hold.

01

Map the system

Trace the actual decision graph. Not the org chart — the real path a significant decision takes, who has informal authority, where information gets filtered at the seams.

02

Redesign the structure

Redistribute decision rights, rebuild the translation layer between strategy and execution, remove the accumulated layers that the organisation stopped needing.

03

Operate differently

Work with you as the founder to operate inside the new structure. The instincts that built the company stay useful — they just stop being the bottleneck.

Background

I've been inside
the pattern.

PhD in atmospheric physics from TU Delft. Built €20M ARR in climate adaptation products at ICEYE — flood monitoring, insurance analytics, government contracts. Watched from the inside as the structural patterns I now diagnose played out in real time: the founder bottleneck, the scaling breakpoint, the decision architecture that worked at ten people and broke at fifty. The diagnostic method comes from atmospheric physics, where the gap between a climate model and a weather forecast is entirely a question of infrastructure. Same method, applied to organisations.

The instincts that built the company
are the same ones routing every
decision back through you.
The structure changes first.

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