Why work with us:
Scaling your Startup?
The Biggest Challenge
isn’t what you think.
Most founders expect product or market hurdles to slow them down. But the truth is, up to 70% of startup struggles come from team and organizational challenges — not the product or market.
As your startup grows, leadership bottlenecks, unclear roles, and internal friction can stall your progress. We help you navigate these sometimes invisible “growth crises” before they become roadblocks.
Some scale‒ups we work with
89%
of startups fail
in the first five years.
Will you be the ones beating the odds?
Up to 70 %
of startup failures are rooted in team and organizational issues.
Is collaboration and organization working in your favour?
2nd
deadliest killer of Startups is: "problems with teams"!
What are you doing to minimize the risk of failing due to internal issues?
Every growth phase
brings its own
invisible "Boss Level".
Scaling isn’t just about working harder or having a better product.
Each phase of growth presents a unique growth challenge — a crisis that demands new ways of thinking, leading, and collaborating.
Here are the most common growth crises startups face. They are not a coincidence, but actually predictable, and you can learn to shift them into new growth impulses:
🧭 Leadership Crisis:
When your startup grows, the hands-on founder can no longer do it all. Old leadership habits no longer work, clarity fades, and decision-making bottlenecks form.
The shift? From “heroic do-it-all” to empowering coach and enabler. You need new people to contribute quickly, but then they need to act without asking every morning what to do. They need direction and an organizational design helping them do their jobs!
🆓 Autonomy Crisis:
Talented team members want to step up but feel boxed in by unclear roles and fuzzy decision rights. Frustration grows and may even culminate in talented people thinking about leaving.
The shift? From “my team” to shared responsibility with clear delegation and mutual trust. Being in a sandwich position is tough and often new to people – they need to be trusted and they need to trust (themselves and others).
🛤️ Control Crisis:
Departments form and silos emerge. Coordination falters, and the once-shared mission gets lost in handoffs. It’s suddenly “us vs. them.” Frictions absorb a lot of focus internally.
The shift? From siloed heroics to synchronized collaboration, shared goals, and transparent feedback. Everyone must be clear about their contribution to fulfill the strategy.
🗄️ Bureaucracy Crisis:
In an effort to control complexity, rules and meetings multiply. Agility fades, innovation stalls, and the startup spark dims.
The shift? From rigid structures to adaptive rhythms and continuous experimentation. New thinking and new ideas need bravery and the freedom to fail. Leaders and staff need to be equipped to bring this to life.
The way out: growing your leadership, team and organisation intentionally.
Trying to solve tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s logic is the fastest way to get stuck. That is hard to change on your own!
With Scale‒Up Sherpas you, your team(s) and organisation become the version your next phase of growth needs.
Our approach:
The Three Levels of Growth Mastery
We believe that healthy growth is an inside job. And as your scale-up journey unfolds you move from self-leadership to team leadership to organisational leadership.
That’s why we work with founders, leaders, and teams on three interconnected levels to help you not just survive, but thrive through each phase and crisis:
ME: Evolve your leadership mindset and habits
Every founder faces the moment where their old beliefs no longer serve. And as a founder or leader, your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours set the tone for the whole system.
WE: Build team alignment, trust, and resilience
No founder is an island. Sustainable growth happens when your team grows with you. Teams can be your rocket fuel—or your biggest bottleneck.
ORG: Design adaptive structures and practices
Your organisation is a living system. As it grows, its structures, processes, and rituals need to evolve, too.
Our approach goes beyond quick fixes. We help you explore and evolve the underlying attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that have shaped your current way of working — including those that may have contributed to growth challenges or crises.
We will not carry you uphill, because inner work is essential to becoming fit for your startup’s next growth phase. But we will help you equip for and master the next phase of your ascend with more ease.
Discovering Hidden
Patterns
Patterns
We guide you and your leadership team to reflect honestly on questions like:
Experimenting with New Behaviors:
Growth requires trying new ways of working in a safe environment. For example:
Building New Shared Attitudes:
We facilitate open conversations and workshops where teams surface unspoken assumptions and co‒create new rituals and agreements — such as regular feedback loops, gratitude practices, or “no blame” project reviews — to cultivate trust and resilience.
Aligning Structures with Mindset:
Finally, we help design organizational roles, processes, and communication rhythms that reflect and reinforce these new attitudes and behaviors, so the startup operates as a living, adaptive system rather than a rigid machine.
Whether you’re facing a real crisis or want to avoid them, our tailored evolutionary journeys help you not only solve immediate problems but build the behaviours, culture, and structures to thrive through every growth phase.
How to proceed:
Our process offers, designed for initial assessment or immediate crisis interventions
Our process offers, designed for initial assessment or immediate crisis interventions
Quick Crisis Check
(online)
Book a focused, 2-hour Quick Crisis Check (online) – free of costs.
Format and Time frame: 2-hour online meeting with one or two Scaleup Sherpas (introduction, interview, discussion and summary).
Who's involved: Founders, Executive Leadership, possibly People function.
Outcome: First idea where your organization is on the Growth (Crisis) Scale. Clarity if there is a benefit/need to look deeper. Chemistry check (how would it feel working together). Recommendations on next steps and - if wanted - a concrete offer (in written form a few days after the meeting).
Growth Crisis Health Analysis
Conduct a deep dive Growth Crisis Health Analysis
Format and Time frame: quantitative questionnaire plus a defined number of in-depth interviews (online). Takes 2 weeks from kick-off to results.
Who's involved: representative sample of members of the organization.
Outcome: Clear view on where your organization is on the Growth (Crisis) Scale and which areas to focus on. Transparency on the significance of the challenges.
Road Map from Valley to Peak
Define your individual Road Map to reach the next peak or base camp.
Format and Time Frame: Full-day (usually in-person) workshop facilitated by one or two Scaleup Sherpas.
Who's involved: Founders, leadership teams, People function.
Outcome: We co-create your individual Road Map (incl. concrete formats, participants and time tables for (team) workshops, individual leadership coachings, hands-on organizational design work and (group) learning sprints and lifehacks) over the next 3-6 months. Desired role of Scaleup Sherpas as your companion on your way up is defined.
Ascent towards next Peak
Like good Sherpas, we will accompany you on your way up - if you wish.
Format and Time Frame: Team workshops, leadership coachings, org design work and learning-sprints over 3-6 months.
Who's involved: the whole organization with leadership literally leading the way.
Outcome: Identification of (dysfunctional) habits and beliefs (on all relevant levels (me, we, org). More awareness on weaknesses and utilization of strengths within the organization and people involved. Tangible change in how you work together with new consciousness, mindsets, hands-on tools and practices that stick. More resilience for challenges to come.
🤔 Still wondering what this means?
Here are some examples for each crisis point:
Crisis of Leadership
A founder realizes their need to control stems from a fear of failure. Through coaching, they practice delegating decisions and inviting input, which unlocks team initiative and speeds up execution.
Crisis of Control
Cross-departmental workshops reveal silos and handoff issues. The company experiments with shared dashboards and joint check-ins, improving collaboration and aligning efforts around common goals.
Crisis of Autonomy
The team maps out who decides what, clarifying boundaries and authority. This reduces frustration and empowers team leads to act confidently without waiting for “permission.”
Crisis of Bureaucracy
Teams identify unnecessary meetings and processes. They try removing or simplifying them, creating space for innovation and returning agility to the startup’s rhythm.
Talk to us for a tailored approach
At Scale-Up Sherpas we know that - whilst following similar patterns - each journey is different. If you’d like a tailored recommendation or want to learn more about what would fit your team best, just reach out.
We’re happy to help you take your next growth step—with clarity, energy, and a good dose of curiosity!
Jörg Schäffken
Co-Founder Scale-up Sherpas
Bastian Lindberg
Co-Founder Scale-up Sherpas
The Real Value of Growing Better 🌱
— For Your Team and Your Business
Our approach doesn’t just fix symptoms — it transforms your startup’s inner logic, enabling you to grow faster, safer, and with more joy. We help you and your team overcome crisis and adapt to each new growth phase, so your behaviours and decisions naturally align with what’s needed now—not what worked yesterday.
Organisational Benefits
- Faster, clearer decision-making with transparent roles and shared responsibility
- Increased team resilience and trust through open communication and alignment
- Agile, adaptive structures that maintain innovativeness and evolve with your startup’s needs
- Reduced conflict and smoother collaboration across teams and departments
Commercial Benefits
- Accelerated time-to-market by eliminating decision bottlenecks
- Higher ROI on leadership and talent investments through stronger engagement and lower turnover
- Reduced risk of costly scaling pitfalls by anticipating and resolving growth crises early
- Improved attractiveness to investors and acquirers with solid leadership and culture
Quick self-assessment
Take our free growth health assessment - and check for any crisis indicators
It only takes 10 Minutes to answer our 25 scaling questions on corresponding crisis categories. After you've taken the assessment we'll email you the results with your individual analysis table 📊
🧠 How to Use the Results
- Highest scoring category: This is likely the crisis currently being experienced or emerging and in need for resolving.
- Two or more high scores: The company might be in a transition between phases or facing compounded crises. Immediate interventions should be developed.
- All low scores: The company may be stable, but it's still valuable to monitor trends over time.
Here is what some of our clients say about the effects of collaborating with us:
Due to the methods used in the workshop, we as a team were able to recognize our own unconscious patterns in collaboration and see where these patterns were hindering us. This actually led to lasting new behaviors for us.
Bastian Günther, Founder, ProOcean
Jörg enabled me to identify my blind spots, my patterns, and their negative influences on the organization through sensible and targeted prompts and questions. Most importantly, however, I was able to use these perspectives as a key driver for conscious changes in my actions and behavior.
Cornelius Dammann, Founder and Owner, dammannworks
We gained a clarity in the allocation of tasks and responsibilities that we didn't have on our own. I found it particularly helpful that our attitudes and expectations were made conscious and were transparently discussed.
Kai Dornbusch, CMO, Cofresco
It's fascinating how I—also personally—repeatedly get what I need to improve collaboration, or what the organization needs from me in my role. Often, I'm not even aware beforehand of what my needs were or what the organization needs at that moment.
Björn Goerke, Founder/CEO CrossEngage (now CIO of Spotler Group)
Meet your Scale‒Up Sherpas
We're are experienced coaches, facilitators, consultants and entrepreneurs. Let’s talk about how we can help you, your team, and your organisation grow better, together.
Because every crisis is an invitation to evolve 🚀
