Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Most company cultures aren’t designed but rather accumulated over time, often leading to discrepancies in how founders and teams perceive them.
- The first-year decisions shape company culture, creating unspoken norms and success scripts that may no longer fit as the company scales.
- As companies grow, the inherited culture can cause issues, such as senior hires not sticking or team dynamics suffering without clear expectations.
- Founders should periodically examine their success scripts to determine what cultural elements still serve the business and which need to change for effective scaling.
- To effectively scale company culture, one must make existing assumptions visible and decide which aspects to retain or discard, ensuring alignment with current business needs.
Scaling company culture
Most founders, if you ask them to describe their company culture, will tell you what they aspire to. Collaborative. Fast-moving. High-trust.
Ask their team the same question and you’ll often get a different answer.
The gap between those two answers usually comes down to something more interesting than intention: most company cultures weren’t designed. They accumulated.
The first year writes the rules
When you’re building from scratch, you make decisions fast. Who to hire. How to communicate. What gets approved at what level. What counts as a good day. You’re moving quickly and you don’t have time to think about whether these calls will still make sense at 50 people – and honestly, they don’t feel like decisions at the time. They feel like common sense.
But they add up. The way you ran your first all-hands became the template for every all-hands. The fact that you were copied on every client email became the norm. The hours you kept became the signal of what commitment looks like here.
Nobody wrote any of this down. Nobody voted on it. It just became how things are done.
Scaling company culture starts with understanding what culture you’re actually scaling
There’s a name for this pattern. I call them success scripts – inherited, largely unconscious beliefs about what good looks like, what’s required, what success costs. In individuals, they form through early managers, the environments that rewarded certain behaviours, what worked before.
In organisations, they form the same way. Your company culture is, in large part, a reflection of the scripts you were running in year one: the beliefs you brought from your own career history, the companies you admired, what got you through the hard early stages.
Those scripts earned their place. The intensity, the direct involvement, the founder-as-centre-of-everything model – it was probably exactly what the business needed to survive. The script worked.
Scripts that form at 10 people don’t automatically update when you hit 80.
What it looks like when founder culture starts to fray
A founder who built the business by knowing every client personally now has a sales team that can’t close without running things past her first – because the unspoken rule is that relationships live at the top.
Or the CEO who got to where he is by having strong opinions and moving fast now has a team that’s stopped pushing back in meetings. Nobody said that was the expectation. But the script said it, clearly enough.
The cost isn’t always visible
Inherited culture is self-confirming for a long time. When the script is working, you don’t question it. When the business is growing, when people seem engaged, when results are coming in, the script gets the credit.
It only becomes visible when the context shifts. When the team gets bigger and the informal “we’re all in this together” feeling starts to fray. When a senior hire doesn’t stick and you can’t quite explain why. When the culture survey comes back and the gap between what you say you stand for and how people experience it is bigger than you expected.
That’s when founders start talking about culture as a problem to solve. But the culture conversation is almost always downstream of something earlier – the scripts that set the original tone, that never got examined.
The question worth asking
If you were to design your company culture from scratch today – for the company you’re building now, with what you know now – would it look like this?
Some of it probably would. The bits worth keeping are worth knowing about too.
The rest is worth examining. Which assumptions were chosen, and which just accumulated? That’s the starting point for rewriting a success script: not discarding what got you here, but looking at it clearly enough to decide.
Because the culture being scaled was rarely designed in the first place. It formed in year one from fast decisions, the founder’s working style, and what got the business through its early stages. By the time scaling becomes the focus, that culture is already baked in – and often invisible to the people running it.
Usually more than founders realise. The hours you kept, the decisions you stayed close to, the things you celebrated or ignored in early team meetings – all of it sends signals that get read as expectations. Over time those signals solidify into norms. The team learns what’s actually valued here by watching what happens, not by reading the values on the wall.
The most common ones: senior hires who look great on paper but don’t stick; a leadership team that functions well individually but not as a unit; a culture survey that reveals a gap between stated values and actual experience; decisions escalating upward that shouldn’t need to. These are usually symptoms of a culture that was set at an earlier stage and hasn’t been examined since.
A success script is an inherited, largely unconscious belief about what good leadership looks like, what high performance requires, what success costs. In a scaling company, the founder’s success scripts become the cultural operating system – the unwritten rules that shape how people behave, what they prioritise, and what they’re afraid to say out loud. Examining those scripts is the starting point for intentional culture work.
Start by making the existing culture visible – understanding what assumptions are actually running, where they came from, and whether they still fit where you are now. Some will. Some won’t. Which parts do you want to keep? Which have stopped serving the business? That distinction is usually more useful than a culture overhaul.
