Picture 5,000 people connecting to the same event, some walking into the building, most of them watching from wherever they are in the world. Registration is open, speakers are backstage, the stream is about to go live, and someone has just noticed that the stage plan and the online run of show don’t match.

Nobody in that moment is asking about your vision. They want to know who decides.

I’ve run events at that scale, in person and online together, with teams of 40 to 60 people, and I now think almost everything I learned there applies to growing a business. An international business is really an event that never ends. If yours feels like a room that gets louder every month, this is for you.

1. If it lives in your head, it doesn’t exist

We had a run of show: minute by minute, who does what, who they hand over to, what happens if it slips. Nobody would dream of running an event that size from memory.

Yet most growing businesses run exactly that way. Onboarding, pricing exceptions, how an unhappy client gets handled. It’s all in one person’s head, usually the founder’s. And once you work across time zones, it stops being an inconvenience and becomes a real limit, because what’s obvious in one office isn’t obvious in another. 

Write the run of show for your business. It doesn’t need to be beautiful. It needs to exist.

2. Every job needs one name against it

With a team that size, “the team will sort it” is a warning sign. Shared ownership usually means nobody owns it. On event days every task had one person’s name on it. If two people are responsible, you get two people assuming the other one did it.

In a business with more than one market, that means one owner per market or region, not a committee. Look at your own business. How many things belong to “the team”, “sales” or “whoever’s free”?

3. Your briefing is your management

I could never be in every corridor, so the quality of the briefing decided the quality of the event. What good looks like, what people can decide alone, when to come to me. Fifteen minutes done properly saved hours of radio chatter.

It matters even more when people speak different languages and work in different cultures. A brief has to be shorter, plainer and checked for understanding, not just delivered. Founders often skip this because it feels slow. Then they wonder why their team keeps checking in. 

4. Decide the bad day in advance

Things go wrong at events. A speaker is stuck at an airport, a room floods, the wifi dies. The good teams weren’t the ones with nothing going wrong. They had already decided what they’d do. 

At an event in Paris, the internet went down just as we opened the doors, taking our payment and registration systems with it. We had planned for exactly this. Backup 5G devices were ready and the team had been briefed on the contingency plan the week before. Within ten minutes, we were back online.

In the meantime, we spoke to people in the queue, explained what was happening and reassured them that the wait would be short. We brought out coffee and pastries and made sure people knew we appreciated their patience. The problem was technical. The experience didn’t have to be.

Do the same for your business. What happens if your best person leaves, your biggest client pauses, a supplier fails in another country, or you’re ill for two weeks? Decide now, calmly, not halfway through it.

5. The founder’s job on the day

On the day, I wasn’t carrying chairs. My job was to stay calm, decide quickly and keep the whole room in view. The moment you get pulled into a single task, nobody is watching the whole.

This is the shift many founders find hardest, and it’s a personal one as much as an operational one. You built the thing by doing everything. To grow it, you have to become the person who sees the whole room.

6. Debrief every time

After every event we sat down while it was still fresh and went through what worked and what didn’t. No blame, just fixes, and those fixes went straight into the next plan. Most businesses skip this and repeat the same mistakes for years.

7. The room and the stream need two different plans

Running an audience in the room and an audience online is not one job, it’s two. The people in the building can read the energy, follow a gesture, catch a joke from three seats away. The people watching a stream get none of that. They need their own pacing, their own camera plan, their own person keeping an eye on them, or they quietly disengage and you won’t know until it’s too late to fix.

Growing businesses make the same mistake with the parts of their operation nobody’s physically standing in front of. A remote team, a customer base in a different market, a supplier you only ever email. Treat it as an afterthought to the part you can see, and it starts to drift. Give it the same deliberate plan you’d give anything in the room, and it holds.

Where this leaves you

Scaling is less mysterious than it looks. It is clear ownership, written plans, good briefings, some thinking about what could go wrong, a plan for the parts you can’t see as well as the parts you can, and one calm person watching the whole room. If your business feels like that building at 8am with everyone asking who decides, start there.

If any of this sounded like your business, the quickest way to see what is really going on is a Growth and Operations Review. Thirty minutes, one to one. We look at where decisions are getting stuck, what is costing you time, and what I would fix first. You leave with a clear next step, whether or not we work together.