Tear Up the Old Playbook to Grow: Lessons From a CEO Who Rebuilt Twice

Scaling a company means changing the rules you once swore by, and leaders who cling to earlier tactics risk stalling, industry veterans warn. At BambooHR, CEO Brad Rencher says the company discovered that relying solely on incoming website interest no longer found most potential customers — roughly nine in ten prospects weren’t actively shopping at any given moment. That realization forced a pivot from a nearly perfect inbound funnel to a blended approach: proactive outreach, brand advertising, launching in new countries and content-led campaigns designed to create demand rather than wait for it.

Early-stage success can mask a looming problem. BambooHR’s original model was fast: a website form, a near-immediate call and high conversion. But over time the engine produced diminishing returns. The company expanded into multiple channels not because the old tactics were bad, but because they stopped reaching a huge portion of the market. Growth consultants say this is a common inflection. Companies that treat established methods as permanent solutions often cede ground to rivals who broaden how they find buyers and build awareness long before a purchase is imminent.

People, not just processes, need to change as you scale. Rencher and peers report that leadership teams rarely survive intact through rapid growth; one software founder told me his board now works with the fifth iteration of the C-suite. BambooHR has recruited six senior leaders in recent years across revenue, finance, marketing, engineering and product. Bringing in new executives is draining and disruptive, but it also refreshes strategic thinking and brings capabilities the business must have to operate at a larger size. Firms that plan for repeated leadership renewal — rather than treating hiring as a one-time fix — tend to adapt more readily.

But new leaders won’t help if the organization doesn’t understand why the shift is happening. Executives and rank-and-file employees carry short attention spans for strategic change. Rencher said he spent hours walking teams through the need to find a fresh growth curve, yet confusion persisted weeks later. The remedy is repetition delivered in varied formats: town halls, one-on-ones, market briefs and simple scorecards that show the logic behind decisions. Communicate relentlessly, and don’t assume a single summit or memo will be enough to align the company.

Act quickly when you’re unsure, and treat initiatives as experiments. The advantage goes to organizations that shorten their learning loops: launch a small product change, test a sales motion, measure results, and iterate. Rencher argues that speed and willingness to rebuild processes or teams faster than competitors is how companies escape plateaus. That doesn’t mean reckless spending; it means running disciplined, low-cost tests that produce clear data and let leaders prune what doesn’t work sooner.

The arithmetic of scale is unforgiving. Taking a business from zero to about $25 million in recurring revenue is achievable for many founders. Growing from roughly $50 million to $200 million is markedly tougher. And advancing from the hundreds of millions into the billion-dollar range is rare; of the roughly 225,000 companies created over the past two decades, fewer than one in 15,000 have reached annual revenue of $1 billion. Rencher’s track record — helping Omniture reach an acquisition by Adobe, expanding Adobe’s digital business to several billion in revenue and now steering BambooHR through its next phase — underlines a single point: lasting scale usually requires tearing up yesterday’s playbook, rebuilding teams repeatedly, widening how you reach customers and communicating the reasons for change until they stick.