The Scale Code

You grew first and said you would fix the systems later. It is later

Eighteen months rebuilding the five systems underneath the business, in the order the diagnosis dictates rather than the order that feels urgent.

Three tiers · $175,000 to $375,000
Delivered by Hacia Atherton, Principal, MLE Advisory.

Certified Practising Accountant

Master of Applied Positive Psychology

Founder, Empowered Women in Trades

Former CEO

Three-time Amazon bestselling author

Growth hid it, and then growth exposed it

"I will be very honest. In fact, we are lacking on that. We have not focused. We have grown in a way that my objective is to grow first."

That is not a failure. It is the correct decision, made twice, and then a third time when it had stopped being correct. Every business that scales makes it.

The bill arrives later, and it never arrives labelled. It arrives as a service level slipping in the part of the business that used to be the reason people chose you. As two leaders describing the top priority differently and both being certain. As a project that ran over because the person who was the process went on leave.

Five systems, and they drifted together

Consultants who arrive to fix one of these find the other four holding it in place. That is why single-domain work stops working around the second year.

01

Alignment · The Strategy

What has gone wrong. Strategy lives in meetings rather than in daily behaviour. Leaders are solving for different priorities and each believes they are solving for the agreed one.

How it gets measured. Every executive states the top three priorities independently, in writing, without conferring. Then we score the variance. Almost every team is further apart than any member expects.

What proves it worked. Variance drops below one item, and a decision that used to escalate is held one level down.

02

Expansion · The People

What has gone wrong. Accountability exists on paper and not in behaviour. Leaders are over-functioning while teams under-own. The team has gone quiet because speaking up costs more than staying silent, and the best people have started to leave while the ones who stay run on empty.

How it gets measured. The Blind$pot instrument across the executive team, completed privately, read as a pattern rather than as individual opinion.

What proves it worked. One behaviour in the leadership team has visibly changed and somebody outside the team can name it without being prompted.

03

Architecture · The process

What has gone wrong. Processes built for the business you were. Critical knowledge living in people's heads rather than in the business. The same work done differently across teams and sites. Operations stalling around the same handful of people.

How it gets measured. Map the operating rhythm. Count the meetings, then count the decisions actually made in them. The gap between those two numbers is the finding.

What proves it worked. Month end reporting time halves, and every executive can state their own number without opening a file.

04

Compound · The Profit

What has gone wrong. Revenue grows and margin tightens. Leaders make commercial decisions without real time visibility on what drives profit. Finance, operations and leadership are working from different realities. Pricing has drifted below the value delivered.

How it gets measured. Find the leak. Rework, discounting, pricing drift, idle capital, duplicated external spend, tools bought and never adopted.

What proves it worked. Gross margin moves, or the leak is quantified and closed with a dated plan and a named owner.

05

Perception · The Brand

What has gone wrong. The brand is broadcasting a smaller version of the business you have built. You compete on price rather than perceived value. The wrong clients arrive while the right ones choose somebody else.

How it gets measured. Interviews with the market, customers and candidates. Not opinion gathered inside the building.

What proves it worked. Candidates and customers describe the business in the firm's own words, unprompted.

“Brand is the external signal of internal reality. Most businesses try to fix the signal.”

The order is the method

Nothing is rebuilt until it has been measured, and nothing is measured in the order a leadership team would choose.

Teams reliably choose the domain they are most confident about, because that is where progress feels fastest. The instrument chooses the one holding the other four in place, which is usually the one nobody nominated.

That single decision is the difference between eighteen months of improvement and eighteen months of activity.

Twenty minutes. I will tell you if a shorter engagement would do it.

Three tiers

Separated by depth of measurement and breadth of coverage, not by how many calls you get. That is a difference a chief financial officer can sign off.

Tier One

$75,000

18 MONTHS · TWO SYSTEMS REBUILT · MEASUREMENT INCLUDED AT LIST
VALUE $22,900

The kickoff onsite runs in person and the rebuild runs virtually. The two systems are chosen at diagnosis rather than at sale.

What is included:

  • Blind$pot Team Assessment across eight executives

  • Individual Blind$pot Assessment for the chief executive

  • The Scale Code Deep Dive, two hours reading what the data says

  • One 1.5 day kickoff Discovery onsite

  • Stakeholder survey to fifteen people

  • A customised Scale Code Blueprint, with a 90 minute debrief

  • Two systems rebuilt, delivered virtually

  • Eighteen monthly group training calls

  • Blind$pot Pulse at months six and twelve, and a closing Pulse at eighteen

  • Private community, training library, unlimited email support

Where most engagements sit

Tier Two

$250,000

EVERYTHING IN TIER ONE, PLUS THE FOLLOWING · MEASUREMENT INCLUDED
AT LIST VALUE $40,500

Added at this tier

  • Three systems rebuilt in place of two

  • Three 1.5 day onsites for the system work, in person

  • Team Assessment across ten executives, individual assessments for the CEO and two others

  • Survey to twenty five people, plus interviews with twenty

  • The Ladder of Inference installed into the meeting rhythm

  • Monthly 30 minute private session with the chief executive

  • A closing full Team Assessment at month eighteen rather than a Pulse

  • Unlimited phone and email support

Tier Three

$375,000

EVERYTHING IN TIER TWO, PLUS THE FOLLOWING · MEASUREMENT INCLUDED
AT LIST VALUE $64,500

The complete operating system. For a business going through something that cannot be allowed to fail. A sale, a succession, a merger, or a market that has turned.

Added at this tier

  • All five systems rebuilt, one onsite each, five in total

  • Team Assessment across fifteen executives, individual assessments for six

  • Survey to forty people, plus virtual and in person interviews with thirty

  • Monthly 30 minute private session with each of six executives

  • Monthly 15 minute accountability session for each of the six

  • Quarterly 90 minute executive roundtable

  • Benchmark comparison inside the closing report

Interim and fractional executives where a rebuilt system has nobody to run it. Selected on what the instrument found rather than on a curriculum vitae. $15,000 to $25,000 per month, priced alongside the engagement rather than inside it.

Travel billed at cost in all tiers.

Team Transformation, or the Scale Code

These are not two sizes of the same thing. They answer different questions, and the answer is diagnostic rather than budgetary.

FIXES

The Leadership Team

SCOPE

Behaviour, decision quality and how the team operates

The Business

All five systems. Strategy, people, process, profit and brand

TIERS SEPARATE ON

How many of your leaders are worked with individually

How many of the five systems get rebuilt

PEOPLE MEASURED

BUY IT WHEN

Up to 6 leaders

8 to 15 executives, plus 15 to 40 in the wider business

The strategy is sound and the team is not executing it together

The business outgrew the systems it was built on

INVESTMENT

$75,000 to $225,000

$175,000 to $375,000

Most businesses that need the Scale Code also need the team work, and the reverse is not true. Where both apply, the team work runs first, because a leadership team that cannot say the difficult thing will not survive eighteen months of having its systems rebuilt.

The opening assessment tells you which one you are. Nobody is talked up a ladder on a first conversation.

Who this is not for

  • A business that wants one system fixed. Take the single domain to a specialist. They will be cheaper and faster and they will be right.

  • A chief executive who will not be measured. The instrument runs across the executive team including the person who commissioned it. There is no version where the leader is the observer.

  • A business that needs the result this year. Eighteen months is not packaging. Take Team Transformation and come back when there is runway.

  • A business looking for a restructure. The Big Four will do that properly. Nobody there will tell a chief executive what his own team said about him.

Eighteen months later

Held for a Scale Code client describing what the business looks like at the close against the opening baseline. Nothing shorter belongs on this page.

Request a conversation

Twenty minutes. What the last two years have actually looked like, and what has already been tried. If a smaller piece of work would do it, that is what you will be told.

Read by Hacia directly. A reply inside two business days.