You have an idea. You’ve figured out that there’s a product/market fit. You’ve started putting a team together and are building some traction. Things are starting to rev up and the potential that used to feel like a pipedream is becoming real right before your eyes. There’s so much excitement in this phase…but things are also starting to feel a bit chaotic.

As new people get added to the team, new challenges emerge. Bottlenecks, miscommunication, burnout, and breakdowns in decision-making happen all the time. The stress is starting to weigh on you. You’re doing your absolute best and can’t figure out what’s wrong.

Some signals that you’re in this state might include:

• You hired people to reduce your workload and stress only to find it’s gotten much worse
• Things keep falling through the cracks despite everyone’s best efforts
• Meetings feel like a waste of time, but skipping them leads to confusion
• You’re constantly putting out fires instead of making real progress
• You want better alignment and accountability without micromanaging

…there’s a framework (and free workbook) I designed with you in mind!

Before we get into the details, let me tell you a bit of backstory about how this all came to be.

Investing in Internal Communications Pays Off — Big Time

Early in my career, I worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, like The Smithsonian, the Centers of Disease Control, Capital One, and Verizon to implement communication systems that drive results. And wow! Did I see an impact.

One of the most memorable stories is with a Fortune 500 company that had recently restructured through bankruptcy after a long streak of losing several billions of dollars a year. The CEO determined one of their best paths to profitability was investing in people and effective communications.

Some of these investments were systemic — raises, profit-sharing, enhanced benefits, improved training, investment in customer service technology, and communicating cultural identity and expectations more explicitly. However, there was just as much of an investment in individual interactions as there was in capital investments, which is where I came in. I analyzed all of their customer email templates, revised them so they were more customer-centric and less bureaucratic, developed an communication framework for the company to use for any customer templates they wanted to write in the future. My partner then went in and trained their teams on how to use them.

It was a fun project and I didn’t think much of it until the media began began reporting how floored they were at the company’s fast customer service turnaround. Executives proudly proclaimed in interviews how their human-centered investments in customer service were adding to the bottom line. Within a year, the company’s stock price had more than doubled and they began to report significant profits quarter after quarter. Soon, they overtook their competition in terms of market share. Then, they started receiving coveted awards year after year. Today, they’re a common case study in top business schools. Their turnaround, effective, and long-lasting. Investing in effective communication strategies like the one I developed has made a difference on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Experiencing the “Valley of Death” Phase of Growth

Shortly after this experience, I started to scale my own company. I’d bootstrapped a software consultancy with a friend from high-school and we’d run it as a side-hustle for a few years. He was the CTO and I was the CEO. We experimented with lots of different product/market fits, pricing strategies, and positioning statements but suddenly things started taking off! An influencer at an industry conference really liked a keynote I gave and insisted that he interview me for his podcast as soon as I got off the stage. I felt a bit like a deer in the headlights but just tried to go with the flow.

Our success started to snowball and we started to get inundated with sales and media inquiries. Within a couple of years our revenue went from thousands of dollars in revenue per year to millions. We were suddenly playing a different game. The objective was no longer getting our idea to market. It was keeping up with market demand by building an efficient and profitable organization. I was SO glad I’d had my expertise in strategic communications, because that’s what I leaned on hard to make things work.

Let me tell you though — that growth stage was brutal! I remember the 18-hour days, the burnout, but most of all the loneliness of leadership. As we scaled, my partner and I had to drain our savings and personally guarantee loans so that we could hire staff to fulfill the contracts we were closing. If things didn’t work out, we were screwed. That pressure was intense and as a way to compensate for my fear of failure, I became a controlling micromanager. I did my best to show that I cared and be considerate, but at the end of the day I wasn’t showing up as the leader that my scaling company needed me to be.

Leading a scale-up is nothing like leading a startup or managing a team in a large organization. I had to completely unlearn everything I knew about management — including the best practices I’d learned in business school. It took a painful paradigm shift in the way I led to get through the Valley of Death phase of growth (yes, that’s an actual business term.) What made things worse was that when I looked for resources to help me — books, communities, anything — I found nothing. It really did feel like I was walking through a desert unprepared. There were loads of programs for pitch competitions, lots of classes for how to be a better manager at a stable company, and some good advice on the mechanics of scaling a business. But nothing addressed the complexity of being a founder in the middle of the chaos. The feelings. The fear. The frustration. The crazy roller coaster of big revenue followed by big investments.

Creating the SCALE Framework

Eventually, we made it through. Things stabilized and we found our groove. We became profitable and our team gelled. We were able to grow sustainably.

After 15 years, my co-founder and I decided it was time to move into the next phase of our careers, so we sold our business this past summer. When I took a survey to figure out the intersection between my experiences, expertise, and enthusiasm, I discovered that the place where I want to contribute the most is enabling leaders — especially founders — who are going through that scaling pain.

Thus, the Scale Without Chaos program was born.

At the core of it all is SCALE, a five-part framework I developed to help you increase your collaboration without chaos. There will always be challenges when you scale, but you don’t have to sacrifice your sanity, health, or joy to make things work. To do that, you need to get good at five different domains:

• SYSTEMS → Create structure without rigidity
• CAPACITY → Prevent burnout & sustain momentum
• ALIGNMENT → Clarify goals & prevent miscommunication
• LEADERSHIP → Improve systems instead of controlling people
• EMPATHY → Mobilize groups through human connection

I’m creating the program I wish I’d had when I was learning to lead a bigger team. I have plans for online courses, communities of practices, and a year-long advisory program where I guide a small cohort of growth-oriented leaders through their own journey.

Kicking things off is a 24-page workbook that walks through the SCALE framework. Each section includes practical exercises, real-world examples, and small experiments so you can implement what you learn immediately. There are clear explanations, self-assessments, and exercises to help you develop communication strategies that calm the chaos.

You don’t have to do everything at once—start small and build momentum.

Growing a team isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter.

Let’s get started!