What we do

Our methodology has been developed through years of experience, research, and iteration. We combine this with a restless fascination for organisations which have flourished as they’ve scaled, and what they have in common.

Nick Watling Scalewell co-founder London illustration

We keep things simple.

Our approach is underpinned by three key principles:

1. Contextualised

We build a deep understanding of your company’s internal and external context, including its market, funding stage, and maturity. 

2. Outcomes-driven

We agree your desired business outcomes and go from there. We are laser-focused on evolving your organisation to where it needs to be.

3. Empowering

We aim to work ourselves out of a job as soon as possible. We do this by encouraging dialogue, transferring our knowledge and tools and ensuring you fully understand our insights and recommendations.

Our experience and bespoke tools guide leaders and investors to targeted, profitable growth. We help reveal key insights and stories within large amounts of structured and unstructured data, often through a psychological or emotional lens. By understanding where to look, and gathering a balanced consensus from stakeholders, we can help you identify and navigate issues before they become obstructions.

— Phil Makinson, Scalewell co-founder

The Scalewell Approach

Projects with scaling companies typically follow a ‘Review, Plan, Develop’ sequence. Depending on your context we can focus on the “Review” stage or move straight to “Develop”.

Review

Asking the right questions of the right people in the right way is the foundation of an effective, robust process.

We often undertake a Discovery exercise before deploying our diagnostics, conducting interviews or focus groups to gather the views of stakeholders on company context, strategy and performance.

Scalewell then selects from four diagnostic tools to gather specific information on both the current and desired states of your company as well as your executive team, managers and board. These are shown below, together with the services we offer investors:

  • After agreeing the leadership capabilities required to be successful in role, we assess each leader rigorously using a variety of techniques and instruments. We then sensitively help each leader understand our analysis for their own development purposes as well as providing a valuable summary to their line manager.

  • Fitness to Scale is our flagship diagnostic for the whole company, examining its culture, leadership and organisation in an integrated way. It can be used as a stand alone development system or alongside other qualitative techniques. Its outputs are often inputs to individual and organisation development work.

  • We carry out in-depth analysis of the executive team, examining its composition, size, goals, roles, processes and behaviours and the way it monitors its own performance. We also examine its performance from the perspectives of key stakeholders the executive team is meant to serve.

  • We examine the Board’s composition, culture, processes, behaviours relationship with the executive team and individual Board member performance to make recommendations for improvement.

  • Scalewell works with leading Venture Capital firms and Private Equity firms to support their understanding of leaders, teams and businesses whether for current or future investments.

    We offer customised people diligence and portfolio analysis options, combining approaches from Individual Leader Assessment and Executive Team Performance with wider analysis (Fitness to Scale) and organisation reviews.

    Crucially, Scalewell’s approach to due diligence is shaped by a focus on capability development. This means any leaders or companies we assess gain valuable development insights, while investors gain deeper understanding of success levers and development opportunities.

Plan

Our review stages provide rich data, however we always focus on moving to the “so what?” and “what next?” which means shaping a prioritised and sequenced organisation plan with any specific constraints in mind.

Using the outputs from the Review stage together with any additional data the company may have, we work closely with your People leaders and the C-Suite to discuss all the options available to you and then secure agreement and buy in to the final plan. Once timelines, deliverables, roles and responsibilities for delivering the plan have been finalised, the project team can move to developing the organisation.

Develop

Our extensive experience in Organisation and People Development ensures your team’s current capabilities are augmented with best practices and experience from successful scaling organisations. Our development approaches include:

  • Company narratives create a simple, memorable and powerful foundation to provide direction, guide decision making and promote desired behaviours in your company

    Using structured sessions with your leaders and people, Scalewell captures your company’s foundational elements, including your purpose or mission, vision, desired culture, values, strategy and customer and employee value propositions. We then support your leaders communicate the narrative internally and externally in an inspirational and compelling way.

  • We support your leaders create an effective organisation design that delivers your vision, strategy and desired culture. We create design criteria to test structural options and help you identify and plug capability gaps that might exist.

  • Scalewell brings deep experience in designing the critical “people systems and processes” scaling companies need to scale effectively and create desired culture - these including talent attraction and sourcing, hiring and selection, onboarding, recognition, learning and development, reward, promotion, succession and exiting the business.

  • Scalewell offers highly personalised development programmes designed around an individual leader’s needs, combining discovery, reference feedback, development action planning, executive coaching and three-way development conversations with line managers.

  • Scalewell works with team leaders to create engaged teams with high levels of enthusiasm that go the extra mile and deliver exceptional performance - while also enjoying the work. Our work includes designing and facilitating customised off-sites and retreats.

  • We are experienced at creating tailored programmes which broaden and mature managers’ capabilities to scale teams and create environments where change can be achieved. These are often interactive masterclasses with cohorts of managers and leaders of up to 10 people per cohort.

Scalewell has provided us with valuable advice through Fitness to Scale. Their specific expertise in culture and leadership is deepening our own understanding of performance optimisation in early-stage, growth companies and we continue to benefit from their insight.

— Ed Lascelles, Partner, Albion VC