The week runs you.

There's a point, usually somewhere between twenty and thirty people, where a company stops being a group and starts being an organisation. Nothing announces it. The signal is in your calendar.

Your week fills with meetings that don't end in anything. People come to you with problems that have no owner. Two teams make opposite assumptions for a fortnight and nobody catches it until a launch date slips. You're working longer than you did at ten people and less is happening.

Founders usually read this as a people problem. Sometimes it is. Far more often the people are good and the week is broken.

What "the week is broken" actually means.

A company runs on decisions. At ten people, decisions happen in the room because everyone is in the room. At thirty, they don't, so they queue. They queue at your door because your door is the only place in the building where a decision is guaranteed to come out.

Every day that queue costs you twice. Once in your time, and once in the days your team spent waiting instead of moving.

The fix isn't more communication. It's a rhythm: a small number of standing sessions where specific decisions are guaranteed to get made, by named people, with the numbers in front of them.

What I mean by rhythm, concretely.

Weekly, each team walks its own numbers, names what's blocked, and leaves with what's starting and what's stopping. Thirty minutes, not ninety. The numbers are the same numbers every week, so nobody spends the night before building slides.

Monthly, the whole company against roadmap, forecast and budget, and exactly one course correction. One. A company that changes six things a month is a company where nothing has time to work.

Quarterly, reset the goals off the same numbers, and be honest about what you're stopping. Most growth-stage roadmaps are a list of everything anyone has ever agreed to, and the quiet cost of that is that nothing gets finished properly.

Two rules make the whole thing hold. Every session ends with a decision that has a name and a date on it, or it wasn't a session worth holding. And blockers have exactly one route upward, and get answered rather than parked.

That's it. It isn't sophisticated. Its power is entirely in the fact that it happens every week without you chasing it.

The line, and why founders resist it.

The other half is the line: where your team decides without you. Writing that line down is the part founders find genuinely hard, and the resistance is rarely about competence. It's about identity. You built this by being the person who cares most and decides fastest. Handing over decisions feels like caring less.

What I've watched, both at Sony and since, is that letting go stops feeling like losing control at the exact moment someone else can visibly hold it. Not before. So the sequence matters: put the rhythm in first, let people make real calls inside it where you can see the quality, then move the line. Doing it the other way round, announcing delegation before the structure exists, produces a month of chaos and a founder who concludes, wrongly, that the team can't handle it.

The cost of getting this wrong isn't just slow.

There's a ten-year study of more than a hundred and fifty Silicon Valley startups that found companies were around three times more likely to fail when the founder changed how they treated people while scaling. That's the failure mode I care most about. Under enough pressure, a founder who used to trust people starts checking everything, and the company keeps its revenue while losing the thing that made anyone want to work there.

I watched that happen to good people at Sony. The structure arrived, and it arrived as control rather than as clarity. The people who used to ship started hedging. Nobody said it out loud for about a year.

Structure done properly does the opposite. It tells people exactly what's theirs, which is the only condition under which anyone takes a real risk at work.

What I do about it.

I define the rhythm and I run it, sitting a day or two a week beside the founder. First month: the weekly, monthly and quarterly are defined and happening, and the leadership group has a shape. I chair the early sessions, then hand each one to whoever should own it, because a rhythm that depends on me is just a different bottleneck.

Alongside that, I'm the person you think out loud with. The calls with no obvious answer, the ones you can't run past the team, and the harder personal shift from being the person who does everything to the person who built something that runs without them.

I ran this inside the fastest-growing parts of Sony UK. Same shift, bigger building.

If your week has stopped producing decisions, thirty minutes will tell you where the leak is. Free, and you'll get a straight read whether or not we work together.