Startups Don’t Scale on Grit Alone — That’s Why We Built The Vesta Club

Nadine Blackie
Apr 16
4 min read

Updated: Apr 22

Grit gets you started. A brilliant product and a few great hires fuel early growth. But the real engine behind scale? PSA: it’s leadership.

At a certain point, founders realise that momentum has started stalling, not because the market changed, or the product isn’t hitting the mark, but because the leadership team is running on instinct instead of intention.

That’s the moment The Vesta Club was built for.

The Hidden Engine of Startup Scale: Leadership

Every high growth company hits a point where things feel heavier and harder to get things done. It’s usually before the company hits $10M ARR, and it’s not burnout or a wall; it’s the inflection point.

Your team has grown and the people problems are piling up. The decisions are hard, and the stakes are higher. The pressure to deliver is beyond what it’s ever been before, and you don’t understand how to spark that momentum that felt so much easier to do when you were smaller.

As a startup leader, you’re often running solo in your function, making big calls with little time to pause or uplevel. It can feel isolating, especially when everyone else is sprinting in their own lane, too.

Due to no fault, the leadership team that got you to this point in time likely needs some intentional investment to evolve and re-align to take you through the inflection point.

When there is an investment in leadership development, the impact on companies is remarkable. Posting a 25% increase in organisational outcomes in a study (Lacerenza, et. al 2017) which positively impact metrics like your revenue and churn. There are also dramatic increases in employee metrics like engagement, retention, and productivity.

What is harder to measure is the improvements in communication, a leadership team operating in alignment with clarity on ownership. But you feel it in practice when the decisions flow faster, the pace and speed return, and the business feels like it's unlocked and sprinting to meet the demands of scale and is ready for what’s around the corner.

Why We Built The Vesta Club

We’ve been inside high-growth startups and scaleups, walking side by side with founders and executive leadership teams from pre-seed to Series C.

Again and again, we saw the same thing:

They didn’t need another offsite. They needed leadership firepower — the kind that lives inside a high-trust, high-accountability, high-performing team.

So we built The Vesta Club: A leadership development company built for startups, not corporate dinosaurs. We are focused on highlighting the dysfunctions that plague teams to bring clarity, candor, and momentum, not fluff.

Alongside our core leadership development programs, we’ve also launched Vesta DD, a due diligence offering that evaluates the strength, cohesion, and scale-readiness of startup leadership teams.

As an investor assessing team risk before signing a subscription agreement, Vesta DD brings clarity to one of the most important, but in my DD experience the least measured, parts of the business: the leadership layer.

We assess trust, alignment, team health, and leadership effectiveness using the same frameworks we use in our workshops, but packaged as an external review.

This gives both investors and founders insight into where the team’s strong, where there’s risk, and what needs to be shored up to scale successfully.

All our programs are built on two powerhouse frameworks:

🔥 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – to help your leaders build trust, navigate tension, stay aligned under pressure, and drive accountability that fuels real results.

🔥 Radical Candor – to coach feedback that is deeply caring and lifts performance without killing morale.

Combined with 15+ years of real startup experience, practical facilitation, and sharp coaching, our programs give your leaders the tools to scale and the confidence to invest and back the team.

What Happens When You Train Your Leaders to Lead for Scale

When leadership becomes intentional, everything else starts working better.

Execution sharpens
Meetings get shorter
Ownership increases
Culture strengthens
Founders lead, not manage, and focus on what’s next.

We don’t just teach theory, because theory isn’t helpful when you are in the day to day rollercoaster of startup and scaleup life. We want less chaos and dysfunction and more impact to the bottom line.

What We Believe

Lead with Vision. Inspire with Authenticity.

The most respected leaders don’t just drive results — they energise people around a shared purpose. We help you lead with clarity and conviction, so your authentic leadership style becomes a catalyst for alignment, momentum, and trust.

Grow the Leader. Accelerate the Impact.

There’s no single playbook for leadership at scale. That’s why our programs focus on real-world, adaptive strategies tailored to your unique journey. We help you lead through complexity, pivot with confidence, and make decisions that drive performance.

Do the Work That Matters.

Leadership at this level isn’t about doing everything, but it is about doing the right things. We help you lead with purpose, make the hard calls, and model the standards you expect from your team. It’s about raising the bar, not just for others, but for yourself.