DAB Hands

For Growth-Stage Businesses

Growth creates complexity faster than capability.

I help fast-growing businesses build the structure to sustain what they’ve created.

Start a conversationSee what I learned

The growth is real.

Revenue is growing. The team is expanding. Customers are arriving. The opportunities keep coming.

The challenge isn’t finding the next opportunity. It’s building a business that can keep pace with the one you’ve already created.

It’s creating the capability to sustain the growth.

Growth doesn’t create the problem.
It reveals it.

It happens gradually. Another hire. Another product. Another priority.

Every stage changes how the business works. Decisions slow. Priorities collide. More rides on fewer people.

Eventually, it outgrows the way it was built to run.

Darren Brett, leaning by an arched stone doorway

I help businesses keep growing without losing grip of what made them good.

I’ve built and scaled my own business, so I know how quickly success creates complexity.

One of the biggest shifts isn’t operational. It’s strategic. The question is no longer what the business could do. It’s what it should do.

I help leadership teams get clear on where the business is trying to create value, then build the operating rhythms and structures that help the organisation move in that direction together.

The outcome isn’t more process.

It’s a business that becomes stronger as it grows.

Typical engagements

The situations where growth-stage businesses usually bring me in.

The founder can no longer be the operating system

The business has reached a point where too much depends on a handful of people. I help build the structure, rhythms and clarity that allow the organisation to scale beyond the founder.

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Growth has outpaced the operating model

The business is winning, but delivery, decision-making and coordination haven’t kept pace. I help untangle what’s grown too complicated and build operating models that support continued growth.

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Increasing ambition needs stronger foundations

Investment, expansion or new commercial ambitions demand stronger execution. I help build the operational foundations that let the business grow with confidence without adding bureaucracy.

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Operating Patterns

Building and growing a business taught me that the same patterns emerge at every stage of growth.

These aren’t startup stories.They’re lessons earned from building one.

Operating Pattern

Growth only scales when the operating system does.

Why it matters

Early growth can hide weak foundations. More clients, more people and more opportunity don’t automatically create a stronger business. They create more complexity. Sustainable growth comes from building the operating system alongside the business itself.

Where I learned it

As co-founder of Anchor Leg, I helped build the agency from the ground up. Working alongside my business partner, and with the guidance of former BBH Global CEO Neil Munn, we clarified our proposition and strategic direction. From there, I helped translate that thinking into the operating model, leadership rhythms, ways of working and delivery discipline that shaped how the business behaved every day. The result wasn’t simply growth. It was a business capable of partnering with, and staying in step with, the needs of one of the world’s biggest brands.

Growth will always create complexity.

The businesses that keep scaling aren’t the ones with fewer opportunities. They’re the ones that build the capability to turn growth into lasting advantage.