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Culture Change
Start-up culture • Culture change • Leadership alignment • Scaling well
Building the right culture to scale
a start-up
This tech start-up had ambitions to scale, which required a more commercial mindset and different way of working among the team. They wanted to design the new culture together.
The challenge
A tech start-up was moving from one version of itself into another.
The team had grown out of an established business and was developing a new product-led business with ambitious growth targets. That shift required a different kind of culture: more pace, more accountability, more commercial focus and different ways of working.
The challenge was delicate. The leadership team wanted to bring people with them, but they also knew that the future business would ask something different of the team.
They needed to honour what was good about the existing culture, while being honest about what needed to change.
What we did
We worked first with the leadership team to help them step out of the pressure of the day-to-day and into a more reflective, future-focused space.
Through a series of coaching-style leadership sessions, we helped them explore what the next stage of the business required, what kind of culture would support it, and how they needed to lead that shift.
The work created space to surface tensions around pace, accountability, wellbeing, performance and ambition — and to begin defining the expectations, behaviours and ways of working needed for the future.
The next stage of the work brings the wider team into the conversation, with leadership present, to shape and develop the future culture together. The aim is to co-create a shared operating system: a practical approach to how the team will work, decide, communicate and grow together.
What changed
For the leadership team, the work created greater clarity, confidence and alignment.
They moved from holding a broad sense that “the culture needs to change” to a clearer view of what needed to shift, why it mattered, and how they wanted to lead it.
The process also helped them prepare for an open conversation with the wider team which they could lead with confidence — one that could be honest about the realities of growth, while still inviting people into shaping the future culture.
Our 'special sauce' on this project
The value we brought was the ability to hold both the strategic and human sides of the transition.
This was a leadership conversation about identity, growth, expectation and change. The team was moving from an old version of the business into a new one, and that created real emotional and practical complexity.
We brought experience of working with senior leadership teams across different sectors, combined with a grounded, sensitive facilitation style that met this team where they were.
The work needed to feel reflective, honest and human — but also commercially useful. We helped the leadership team slow down, name what was really happening, and build the confidence to lead the next stage with more clarity and intention.
Culture change in this growing start-up was about helping people understand what the future requires — and creating the conditions for them to decide whether and how they want to be part of it.
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