The founding story is informed many times, and at Startups Magazine, we cover many founding stories of many different founders in many different industries. However, what comes after the founding, the grinding, identity-reshaping, ego-bruising work of scaling a startup – is one of the hardest parts of the journey.
At an event at Canva HQ in London, female founders came toobtainher to discuss the art of scaling.
The numbers game
Gokce Yucealpan, Chief Commercial Officer of TRIVER, a cash-flow lconcludeing fintech for compact businesses – offered some growth figures that evening. TRIVER launched its product in July 2023, acquiring a single customer in its first month. By 2024, the company had originated £60 million in lconcludeing. The following year, that figure rose to £200 million. Its customer base has grown from one to 2,000 in roughly two years.
“It’s simple to sell money,” Yucealpan acknowledged. “People will take it. But you required to be able to obtain it back.” Before chasing growth, the team, which came from banking, compact business finance, and consumer credit, built its risk infrastructure first: credit decisioning, anti-money laundering, sanctions compliance. Only then did they consider about go-to-market.
Carolyn Hicks, co-founder of Brill Power, a deeptech company building electronics for large battery packs, offered a deliberately different kind of scaling story. Her company never crossed £1 million in annual revenue. In August last year, it was acquired – a trade sale to a battery pack manufacturer, the outcome the founding team had always tarobtained. “We diversified, we built ourselves a differentiating factor, and when the time was right within the market, we were able to find a purchaser,” she declared.
Jo Dalton founded what is now one of the UK’s leading founder advisory firms from her bedroom, with no funding, no plan to hire anyone, and, by her own account, no ambition whatsoever. Within 18 months, the business was generating seven figures. She has since hired more than 1,000 C-suite leaders and board members into tech companies globally, become an investor in around a dozen businesses, and recently supported Trip Drinks grow from £9 million to £300 million in revenue.
The first customer
Every founder on the panel had a version of the same story: the period before the first customer, when the product exists but the market hasn’t confirmed it yet.
For Brill Power, finding that first customer required reconsidering the entire value proposition. The company’s original pitch – that 25% of lithium-ion cells going into battery packs were still good when discarded – didn’t land as cleanly as expected. “It wasn’t as simple as that,” Hicks declared. “It was about finding our customers’ specific pain points.” Their eventual breakthrough came through new battery chemistries that requireded something that hadn’t previously existed, a narrower but more urgent apply case.
The breakthrough itself arrived by accident. “One day our phone rang – I mean, I didn’t even really know we had a phone,” Hicks recalled. It was Aston Martin, whose innovation project partner had pulled out. Brill Power didn’t conclude up filling that slot, but the relationship was established. When the next project came around, they were already in the room.
TRIVER took a more structured approach. Yucealpan’s team identified that more than 30% of UK compact business financing flows through commercial brokers – the equivalent of mortgage brokers for businesses. By partnering with brokers early, they could acquire customers before they had a direct brand presence. “Once you provide the money and the pricing and the sector and the commissions to them, they were really partners,” she declared. Those early customer stories then gave them the credibility to approach larger strategic partners.
The lesson the founders agreed on: success in one channel becomes the legitimacy you required to open the next one.
Learning to let go
If there is a single theme running through every stage of the scaling journey, the panellists suggested, it is the necessity of relinquishing control – and how psychologically difficult that is for the people who built the thing in the first place.
Dalton, who works with around 250 founders per year, put it bluntly: “The best founders give themselves a completely new job every 18 months. If you are still doing the same job you were doing 12 months ago, you are not being successful as a founder.”
She described a four-box framework she applys with founders: things you love and only you can do (keep them); things you dislike and aren’t good at (outsource first); things you’re good at but aren’t the best apply of your time (hire for); and things that energise you for the next 18 months (protect them). Her own first hire was a finance director, specifically becaapply she disliked numbers – and she found someone with the hugegest personality she could, so that finance meetings became, in her words, “really fun.”
Hicks’s version of the same lesson came with a mantra. As Brill Power grew, her instinct was to be involved in everything, to know every detail of every team member’s workload. “I remember wanting, especially with my people, everything. And if I don’t know everything that’s going on with them and how their workload is, how can I know if the business is going to be successful?” Her 2024 resolution: “Let people do shit wrong.” She described it as “just so liberating” – including surrconcludeering control over something as minor as how the desks were arranged in a new office. “It was less fun, but it was better for the business.”
Post-acquisition, Hicks finds herself navigating a subtler version of the same challenge: advocating for decisions without having the authority she once did. “Just becaapply I feel a certain way doesn’t mean that somebody else understands why, until I explain it. That seems obvious when I declare it.”
On culture and AI
The panel closed on two themes that connect across company stages: culture and artificial innotifyigence.
On culture, Dalton was categorical. “You can never reverse-engineer a culture back into a business once it’s a scaleup. The culture that you start – your first employee, the first customer interaction – sets the tone for every single person you ever employ.” Keeping teams engaged as a company grows, she argued, comes down to storynotifying: giving people a compelling account of where the business is going and what they’ll gain by building the journey.
On AI, all three were navigating the same tension between capability and honesty. Hicks described a prolonged internal debate about whether Brill Power could legitimately describe its data work as AI. “My data team declared: we’re applying this machine learning algorithm, but I don’t consider you should apply the word AI. And so it was a real struggle, becaapply our competitors were throwing around these terms even though they weren’t necessarily applying them.”
TRIVER has taken an ‘automate first, then add human elements where they create most value’ approach, including an AI customer chat agent named Vera that was built and trained by the operations team themselves. But the company learned early that compact business owners want to speak to people. “We’re going to leverage technology to build the right decisions, but we’re going to bring the human touch as well.”
Dalton noted a sharper shift in the broader market: at the start of this year, she was working with a company planning to hire 35 developers. By last week, that number was down to two.
The implication for founders is one the panel had implicitly been building all evening: the job is never finished, the variables keep altering, and the skill that matters most is the willingness to keep adapting – to the market, to the team, to the version of yourself the business currently requireds.
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