Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

Why teams brake as businesses grow

29 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief segment, the speaker explains that early‑stage companies (from $0 to $1 million in revenue) should staff with task‑oriented employees who can execute specific milestones. Once the business surpasses $1 million, the hiring strategy must shift to recruiting outcome‑oriented people who are accountable for moving key performance metrics from their current value (X) to a target value (Y). The speaker notes that leaders often avoid the uncomfortable conversation of clarifying what success looks like, which can cause underperformance. By explicitly defining success as a measurable outcome rather than task completion, companies can identify and retain employees capable of driving results.

Chapters

From 0 to 1 million, you need a bunch of task-based people. After 1 million, you gotta make the shift to hiring outcome-based people, and that may mean that you lose some good task-based people. Are people ever hesitant to have that conversation? People are always hesitant to have that conversation. They're not willing to admit that the reason this person is failing might just be because they haven't told them what success looks like. So just clarifying, success equals achieving this metrics-based outcome, not merely completing these tasks. And say, this one metric here is currently X, we need to get it to Y. What would you do to take it from X to Y? That one shift, if they know how to do that, that's somebody who can manage to an outcome versus somebody who can merely complete a task.