I've been building companies for most of my adult life. From a gaming startup in the early days of the internet, to early-stage venture capital, to joining Iversoft as CMO in 2016 and eventually stepping into the CEO role. Each of those chapters taught me something different about growth. The most important lesson, and the one that shapes almost every decision I make now: growth that isn't grounded in clarity is just chaos at a bigger scale.
When Laura joined us as Studio Director in 2016 and eventually became our COO, and when Matt and Vicki built the foundations of the company's technical and relationship capabilities from day one, we didn't have a master plan. We had values, we had craft, and we had clients we genuinely wanted to help. What we've built since then has been a direct product of staying true to those three things even as everything else changed around us.
Scaling from 10 to over 50 people requires you to unlearn as much as you learn. The habits that make a 10-person team work brilliantly — everyone knowing everything, decisions made in hallways, context shared organically — those exact habits become liabilities at 30 people. You have to build deliberate systems for communication, for knowledge transfer, for decision-making authority, and for culture preservation.
Non-Negotiables as We've Grown
People Are the Product
Our 4-day compressed work week and 15% time investment in ongoing development aren't incentives. They're statements of what we believe about how great work gets done.
Simplicity Scales, Complexity Doesn't
Some of our best growth years have come from cutting things, not adding them. Getting clearer on who we serve and what we're great at.
Relationships Are Infrastructure
The clients who stay with us for years aren't staying because we write good code. They're staying because they trust us and we care about their product.
Growing Without Losing
We're most proud of the fact that we've grown without losing the things that made us worth growing in the first place.
We're proud of what Iversoft has become, and we're genuinely excited about where it's going. But we're most proud of the fact that we've grown without losing the things that made us worth growing in the first place.
If you're in the middle of your own "10 to 50" journey, the most important question isn't how fast you can grow, it's what you're willing to protect while you do it. The same systems, habits, and relationships that helped us scale without losing our core are the ones we now help clients design inside their own organizations - so growth feels more like a stronger, clearer version of what's working today, not just a bigger, more chaotic one.
Ready to build that kind of intentional growth into your own team? Let's talk about where your organization is today and what it would take to scale without losing what makes you great.