By Christophe Delvaux
Marc founded his company at 34, in a flat in Lausanne, with three partners and a simple conviction: to do strategy consulting differently, without the cold brutality of the big firms, and without the culture of billable hours at any cost that had eventually turned him off. Ten years on, the company employs around 100 people, has offices in Geneva, Paris and Singapore, and has just raised €40 million from a pan-European fund. By every measure, it is a success. Except that Marc no longer really leads. He represents. He reassures. He arbitrates between teams he no longer knows, within a culture he no longer has time to nurture. “I have become the face of a company that no longer fully resembles me,” he admits with a candour that is striking from a man accustomed to controlling the narrative. His case is not exceptional. On the contrary, it is almost structural.
Growth is the stated goal of every ambitious business. It is proof that the market validates, that teams are performing, that the model holds. But it is also — and this is rarely said — a slow force of erosion, gradually wearing away what made the company distinctive in the first place, because to grow is necessarily to delegate. And to delegate is to accept that others will interpret what you meant, with all the inevitable distortions that interpretation implies.
In the early years, the founder is everywhere. He embodies the culture because he is the culture. His instincts, his refusals, his enthusiasms run through the organisation like a frequency. You hire people who resemble him, or who complement him. Decisions are made around the kitchen table, quickly, with common sense as the only compass. The company is still an extension of his personality. Then the critical threshold is reached, often somewhere between 50 and 150 employees, depending on the structure. Processes become formalised, layers of hierarchy multiply, and coordination meetings replace direct conversations. The founder can no longer be in every room. He delegates no longer by choice, but by arithmetical necessity. And it is precisely at that point that the company’s identity becomes a governance issue, rather than a matter of personality.
The arrival of outside investors accelerates this shift even further. A fund is not merely buying a stake in the capital: it is buying a promise of trajectory. And that promise implicitly assumes that the company will be optimised, standardised and scalable. The rough edges that once gave it charm become operational risks. Corporate culture, once organic, must now be documented, transferable and auditable. What was once a way of being becomes an HR document.
What makes this process so difficult to grasp is that it never appears as a rupture. No one asks the founder to renounce his values. He is simply asked to be pragmatic. To offer a commercial concession to a strategic client he would not have accepted three years earlier. To hire a CFO with abrasive methods but undeniable results. To let through a communication that is not quite in the company’s tone of voice, because the schedule is tight and the team has done its best. Each of these compromises, taken individually, is reasonable. Even defensible. It is their accumulation that is dangerous.
Organisational psychologists speak of the progressive drift of standards, the mechanism by which what was unacceptable yesterday becomes tolerable today because the distance from the starting point is never measured in a single stride, but in a hundred small steps. The founder does not notice it, precisely because each step has seemed reasonable. It is only when he looks back, often in the wake of a crisis, a sudden departure or a moment of personal rupture, that he realises how far he has travelled in the wrong direction.
“Growing is not the problem. Losing yourself along the way is.”
Sophie, the head of a family-owned retail group in Lausanne, says it took her two years to understand why her long-standing employees — those who had followed her from the beginning — were leaving one after another. Exit interviews spoke of management, overload and organisation. But the real reason, eventually exposed by one particularly painful departure, was simpler and sharper: “We no longer know what you really want. You are different depending on whom you are speaking to. We no longer recognise you.” That moment of truth, brutal in its simplicity, is one of the most reliable indicators of the soft betrayal. When those closest to you no longer recognise you, it means you have stopped being consistent, not out of malice, but through gradual accommodation to pressures you underestimated.
Some leaders do. They undertake what might be called a buyback of the self, a deliberate reconquest of their identity, with all the friction, sacrifices and sometimes real financial losses that entails.
Marc negotiated a change in governance with his investors that gives him back control over the firm’s cultural and editorial decisions. Along the way, he lost one partner and two major clients who felt the move was too ideological. But he says he sleeps again. Sophie took a different route: for the first time, she formalised what she calls her “leader’s constitution,” a short document — three pages — setting out what she accepts and what she refuses, whatever the circumstances. She now shares it with every new hire from the very first interview.
Sophie, the head of a family-owned retail group in Lausanne, says it took her two years to understand why her long-standing employees — those who had followed her from the beginning — were leaving one after another
These reversals come at a cost: in time, in relational energy and sometimes in valuation. They require a courage that the prevailing consensus — obsessed with growth, scalability and investor appeal — does little to reward. And they reveal a truth that contemporary management literature still struggles to articulate clearly: the identity coherence of a leader is not a romantic founder’s luxury. It is a strategic asset, and its erosion carries a real cost, in turnover, loss of purpose and internal mistrust. That said, it would be inaccurate to conclude that growth is the enemy of authenticity. The companies that grow best are often those whose leaders have, very early on, managed to distinguish between what is negotiable and what is not.
Building without betraying yourself is not a posture, it is a practice. It begins with a question that too few leaders ask early enough, and which growth makes progressively harder to hear: at what point do I still recognise what I am building? The answer is not to be found in a consultancy. It cannot be bought through leadership coaching. It simply requires stopping long enough to look at the road.
Find all our Parcours articles
