Scaling People Practices: The Transition Question No One Prepares You For
Most founders know they need to build more deliberate people practices as the business scales. But where things stall is which ones to prioritise and how to decide.
There is a moment in every scaling business where the people practices that worked at fifteen or twenty people stop working. Nothing dramatic happens. The founder has not done anything wrong. The business is growing, which is what everyone wanted. But quietly, in the background, the way decisions get made about people (who gets hired, how performance gets discussed, what pay reflects, what culture actually means) starts to drift.
The founder notices it in small ways first. A new joiner describes the culture differently from how the founder would. A hiring decision gets made that the founder would not have made but did not weigh in on. A performance conversation does not happen because no one was quite sure whose job it was. By the time these become visible as a pattern, the practices have been drifting for months.
Most founders know, by the time they notice, that something has to change. But there is a harder question underneath. Not whether to build more deliberate people practices, but which ones first, in a phase when everything feels urgent and the founder is already stretched thin.
The question is not whether to build practices. It is which ones first.
The transition no one prepares founders for
In the founder-led phase, people practices are held together by the founder personally. Who gets hired, how they get onboarded, what the standards are for performance, how pay and promotion get decided, what the culture actually means in practice. All of it flows through the founder, usually carried in their head rather than written down. It works, because at fifteen or twenty people, it can.
The shift starts to matter when the business grows past the point where the founder can hold all of it. New joiners arrive who have not been walked through the culture by the founder personally. The team might make hiring decisions the founder is no longer in. Performance conversations happen in rooms the founder is not in. The practices that used to be held by the founder are now being made and remade, ad hoc, by people who do not have the same shared context.
The transition is from practices that are held implicitly by the founder to practices that are held explicitly by the business. That shift sounds obvious, but it rarely feels obvious in the moment. The signal that something needs to change gets easily lost amidst the noise of competing priorities.
The trap of trying to do everything at once
Faced with an expanding team, the instinct of many founders is to try to build in all of the people practices in parallel. The thinking is reasonable. Each one feels important and might feel urgent. The founder is already putting out fires in each; formalising them would put those out.
It almost never works. Building people practices across several areas all at once takes capacity the founder does not have, requires decisions the leadership team is not yet ready to make, and tends to produce half-built practices rather than one or two that actually have most impact. The result is often that the founder abandons the project altogether, concludes the business is not ready, and defers it another six months. By which point the drift has deepened.
The founders I see navigate this well do the opposite. They are alert to the signals that something needs to change, accept that they cannot build everything at once, and they are deliberate about what to tackle first. The question becomes a sequencing question. Which practice, if built now, would create the most leverage for the business and reduce the cost of deferring the others?
A sequencing principle
There is no formula for which practices to prioritise. The right answer depends on the business context, their growth stage, and the specific pressures the founder is navigating. But across the businesses I have worked with, three criteria seem to most often help founders make the call.
Founder Capacity – The first is where the founder’s time is actually going. If the founder becomes a bottleneck for decisions, it’s important to rethink what they are responsible for and what others are responsible for. The aim would be to ease any bottlenecks and the flow of information and decisions. The question to ask is: if the right structure was in place would this still be on the founder’s plate?
Compounding effect –The second is where decisions are starting to drift in ways that will compound. Pay and performance are the classic examples. Each ad hoc decision becomes a precedent. The earlier these are made against a framework, the easier it is to maintain consistency later. Deferring these is often the most expensive form of deferral.
Culture drift –The third is how new joiners experience the business. Where the team is scaling fast without an awareness of what holds the team together, the team shape drifts and the culture gets diluted with each new hire. Starting with the practices that shape new joiners is often the best move, because it has a compounding effect as the business grows.
Different businesses will weight these criteria differently. The point is not that there is one right answer and context is always key. But founders who navigate this well have a view on which criteria matter most for their business and start there. Founders who struggle usually start wherever the pressure happens to be highest that week.
What the real question is
The scaling of people practices is often framed as a question of what to build. Which frameworks, which processes, which policies. There is no shortage of templates and advice on this.
The more useful question is what to build first, and how to decide. That question is harder to answer in the abstract. It requires knowing the business, understanding where the founder’s capacity is going, seeing which decisions are starting to compound, and being honest about what new joiners will encounter. It also requires accepting that the answer will not be the same for every business and may not be the same six months from now.
The founders who navigate this well are the ones who treat sequencing as the first-order question, not the implementation detail. They know the answer to what to build will emerge once they have answered what to build first. And they know that starting imperfectly, in the right order, beats waiting to start perfectly.
If you had to build one people practice in the next ninety days, which would it be, and why that one first?
The answer tells you something about where the business is, where the founder is, and what the next phase will require. I would be interested to hear what founders are prioritising, and what they are deferring, as they navigate this transition.
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