You can do everything right on sales and still get caught out. When you’re growing fast, the first thing that breaks is delivery. It goes out of sight, and by the time it shows up in the numbers it’s been broken a while. The attention’s on sales, the next round, the push into a …

There’s a moment most service businesses hit somewhere between 5 and 30 people. Delivery is heavier than it should be, every operational question routes through the founder, and somebody says the sensible-sounding sentence: “we need to hire an ops person.” It’s not a bad …