Scaling Performance: What Fund WA’s Founders Revealed About Leadership at the Next Level

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of leading a high-performance leadership session for Fund WA and their portfolio of ambitious founders and senior executives.

Thank you to Glenn Butcher and Pia Turcinov for bringing together a room of leaders building companies where execution matters as much as vision.

Scaling Exposes Leadership Capacity, Not Just Strategy

We often talk about strategy, capital, product and markets, but in every scaling business there is a consistent truth:

Strategy cannot outperform the capacity of the leadership team.

When companies hit complexity, the friction points are rarely technical.

They show up in the way leaders:

• Prioritise

• Decide

• Communicate

• Allocate their time

• Hold their operating rhythm

• Structure ownership across the business

This session examined the recurring dynamics that show up consistently in mid-stage organisations.

The Leadership Realities That Emerge at Scale

1. Delegation friction and the real cost of holding too much

When founders or executives remain too close to operations, execution slows.

The cost is paid twice: in leadership bandwidth and in team performance.

2. Leaders operating at the wrong altitude

Scale requires a shift from personal involvement to structural ownership.

Teams cannot deliver at pace when all roads still lead back to the founder.

3. Taking teams on the strategic journey, not just the operational one

Alignment accelerates when teams understand why decisions matter, not just what needs to happen.

4. Reducing urgency-driven leadership

Operating at pace is not the same as leading from pressure.

Sustainable execution requires leaders who can hold their line without using urgency as the motivator.

5. Prioritisation and disciplined sequencing

Many executions issues stem from leaders spreading attention across too many directions.

Scale demands tight decision cadence and intentional sequencing.

6. Protecting capacity for high-value work

Strategic altitude is not a luxury; it is a requirement of scale.

Yet leaders often feel guilty stepping back to think.

7. The unseen impact of pace on decision quality

When tempo is always high, clarity weakens, rework increases and cross-functional alignment suffers.

A Leadership Audit, not a Motivational Session

Rather than theory, we conducted a performance-based leadership audit examining:

• decision cadence

• ownership and accountability

• cross-functional alignment

• strategic vs operational bandwidth

• execution friction points

• leadership posture under pace and pressure

  
  

The room was sharp, honest and focused.Founders and senior leaders examined how they lead through a performance lens, not preference.

One founder said afterwards:

“I’ve never had a better session.”

What This Work Actually Surfaces

This advisory/coaching support strengthens the leadership operating system behind the strategy.

It exposes:

• Where decision quality breaks under pace

• Where ownership becomes blurred

• Where founders unintentionally become bottlenecks

• Where execution slows through rework or unclear accountability

• Where cross-functional alignment is missing

• Where leadership bandwidth is absorbed by noise instead of strategy

• Where teams rely on founder intervention instead of leadership systems

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These insights allow leaders to recalibrate how they operate, increase decision quality and build the capacity required for sustained performance.

The Real Outcome

Scaling requires more than intelligent strategy, it requires leaders with the capability, discipline and operating rhythm to execute it.

This is the work that shifts companies from effort and momentum to performance at scale.

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