What actually breaks when businesses scale (and what doesn’t)

Most advice about scaling a business focuses on structure such as the org chart or the next hire. What tends to get missed is that scaling is really a stress test of a handful of decisions made early on, when nothing looks urgent yet. By the time they matter, they’re expensive to fix.


We recently sat down with Alex Ayin, who spent years scaling Social Chain alongside Steven Bartlett and Dominic McGregor before joining the leadership team at THG following its £5.4bn IPO, the UK’s largest tech listing to date. He’s now a member of our Leaders Circle and runs Tomorrow’s Potential, a collective for founders and CEOs built on a simple idea, a business only grows as fast as the person running it. Fix the business without fixing the operator, and all you get is more profitable burnout.

Your first 50 hires set the direction of the whole company

Alex is clear that this isn’t really about filling roles. Those first 50 people define the culture, because they make up such a high percentage of the business that they end up changing it just by being there. 


His starting point is always the same, work out what you actually need to win in your industry. For Social Chain in the early days, that meant people who lived and breathed social media, not people with ten years of traditional marketing experience who “didn’t get it.” Once you know the skill set, the harder question is what kind of person can operate in a small team with no runway and no safety net. Alex looks for a strong bias for action, adaptability when things inevitably change, coachability, and integrity, because a smart, high-energy person without the right moral code can spread negativity through an organisation in a way that’s hard to undo. 


The way he tests for these traits is deliberately uncomfortable. He doesn’t like interviews that are “too nice.” In person, he’ll ask a candidate what they’d do if something went wrong, then take that option away and ask what they’d do next, watching how quickly they can think on their feet rather than how polished their first answer sounds. He also insists on speaking to three references by phone, not email, from a peer, a boss, and someone who just knows them well. His go-to question is simple, out of ten, would you rehire this person? If it’s an eight, what’s missing to make it a ten? People tend to be generous when someone’s already left. The real answer is usually in that gap.

Culture is something
people copy, not something you tell them

One of the more memorable points in the conversation was about how culture actually spreads. Alex’s view is that people, especially those without much experience of work, don’t pick up culture from what they’re told. They pick it up from what they see the people around them doing, in the same way his own kids, he says, will end up more shaped by the households of their closest friends than by him directly. If a leader talks about high standards but doesn’t visibly live them, day in, day out, that’s the version people copy. 


He also talked about what he calls “critical non-essentials,” a term he took from Clive Woodward’s book about England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup win. Woodward put blackout blinds in hotel rooms on tour so players would actually sleep, and gave them laptops to watch game footage, things that don’t win you any single match but matter over the course of a season. At Social Chain, that showed up as hiring a “head of happiness” back when nobody else was doing it, someone whose whole job was noticing the small things that make people’s day-to-day better.

Setting a direction people can actually see themselves in

Alex’s approach to direction starts a long way out. He likes a ten-year view, because in his experience people overestimate what they can do in a year and badly underestimate what’s possible in ten. From there he works backwards into three or four core goals, then three-year milestones, then twelve-month targets, then quarterly ones, so people get regular proof that they’re on the right track rather than one big goal that feels miles away.

He used Work.Life as a live example while we talked. If the long-term vision is to be the workplace of choice for small businesses in the UK, a marketing goal might be a newsletter or social following of 100,000 relevant businesses in a quarter, a sales goal might be a set number of new people through the doors each week, and a growth goal might be a set number of new sites a year. Different roles, same destination. He compared it to the NASA janitor who told JFK he was helping put a 
man on the moon. Everyone’s day-to-day work should tie back to that 
same story.

Incentives are what actually hold that together, in his experience. He splits bonuses roughly fifty-fifty between company performance and individual performance, so people are genuinely motivated to help a colleague on a different team, because the company hitting its numbers affects their own bonus too. Leave it entirely individual, he said, and people will always find five other things on their own list to prioritise first.

The leader has to hold up too

The part of the conversation that stayed with us longest wasn’t really about business at all. Alex was sixteen, playing rugby with his dad, when his dad was hit late in a tackle and had a heart attack on the pitch. He’d spent a couple of years travelling constantly for a sales role, eating on the go, and two of his arteries were already blocked before the tackle ruptured the third. He survived, but Alex has never forgotten how little the people around his dad’s career actually helped once the immediate shock wore off, and how the fallout reached into his parents’ marriage. 


That’s shaped how Alex treats his own health now. Training like an athlete, and using a simple green, amber, red check on himself most days rather than an all-or-nothing standard, so a bad day means a short walk rather than nothing at all. His point wasn’t really about fitness. It was that your health is the foundation everything else sits on, and no amount of business success is worth much if you’re not around, or not well enough, to enjoy it.

The common thread

Alex would probably be the first to say none of this is a formula. But it’s a useful list of the things that are easiest to put off while a business is growing fast, and the most expensive to have ignored once it has.