When a company changes scale, it isn't just headcount that grows. Managers change role, decisions have to be made differently, teams specialise, and new hires arrive without having lived the company's history. What worked at 30, 50 or 100 people won't necessarily work at 150 or 300. So the challenge isn't to keep the culture exactly as it is: it's to evolve the organisation while preserving what makes it distinctive and effective. At Archipel Connect, we support leaders and their teams through this scaling journey: identifying what should stay, what should evolve, and what needs to be built so the company's DNA keeps on living as it grows.
Growth can surface difficulties that didn't exist when the company was smaller:
These signals don't mean the organisation is doing badly. They often indicate that it's changing scale and that its ways of working need to evolve along with it.
"We're growing very fast… and the organisation doesn't always keep pace."
"Our managers are taking on more and more responsibility, but they don't always have the reference points to carry it."
"There are so many new hires. How do we pass on what makes us who we are?"
"I don't want us to become just another big company."
"I want to add more structure without losing our speed, our freedom and our entrepreneurial spirit."
"I feel I need to let go of some things, but I don't yet know which ones."
This is precisely the moment when we step in.
We don't try to freeze the company's culture. On the contrary — a living culture has to be able to evolve with the organisation. Our work is to help leaders and teams answer four questions:
Beyond the stated values, which behaviours, which ways of deciding, collaborating and taking initiative have really contributed to the company's success?
What are the strengths that growth must not be allowed to erase?
Which practices, habits or ways of working were suited to a smaller organisation but are becoming obstacles to growth?
How can new employees, new managers and new teams take ownership of what makes you distinctive, without needing to live through the company's first years?
When headcount grows quickly, many employees become managers before they've had time to prepare for this new role. We support them to:
The goal: making sure the growth of management doesn't create a break with the culture that made the company successful.
The more a company grows, the more its teams specialise. Cooperation that used to happen naturally then needs to be organised differently. We work on ways of cooperating, spaces for dialogue, interfaces between teams and decision-making modes.
The goal: keeping entrepreneurial speed and fluidity, even as the organisation becomes more complex.
Your culture can no longer rest solely on the founders, the first hires, or informal interactions. We help you identify what genuinely makes you distinctive and translate it into behaviours, managerial practices, rituals and reference points that new employees can understand and make their own.
The goal: keeping your DNA alive at 150, 500 or 1,500 people, without artificially trying to reproduce the company's early days.
Growing requires new reference points. But more rules don't necessarily mean more efficiency. We help leadership teams distinguish:
The goal: building just enough structure to support growth, without stifling initiative.
In short: a company capable of becoming much bigger without becoming a different company.
We're particularly useful when:
By not trying to keep yesterday's ways of doing things identical. As a company changes scale, some ways of working need to evolve. The challenge is to identify what genuinely makes up your DNA — the behaviours, principles and ways of working that make you distinctive — and then create the conditions for them to be passed on and lived out by new employees. We help you distinguish what should be preserved, what should evolve, and what should disappear.
There's no precise threshold. We step in when growth starts to disrupt managerial reference points, coordination, or company culture. That can happen from just a few dozen employees, especially when strong acceleration is expected.
Ideally, yes. The more people you hire, the harder it becomes to naturally pass on the company's history and ways of working. Anticipating this lets you identify what needs to be transmitted, clarify expected behaviours, and give managers the means to welcome and integrate new employees. The goal isn't to create an artificial culture before recruiting, but to make explicit what had until then been lived implicitly.
This is a very common situation in scale-ups. Becoming a manager means changing role: it's no longer just about succeeding yourself, but about enabling others to succeed. We work on their posture, their ability to empower others, give feedback, make decisions, manage tension and keep the company's principles alive day to day.
Yes, but not necessarily in the form of a values document. Formalising culture mainly means making explicit the behaviours and principles that make the organisation work: how we decide, how we collaborate, how we recruit, how we manage, and what we consider non-negotiable.
This is precisely one of the first things we work on with leaders and teams. We start from concrete situations, the company's history, what has driven its success, and the difficulties that come with growth. This helps distinguish what genuinely makes up your DNA from habits that were simply suited to a smaller organisation.
No. Management is an essential lever, but it can't carry growth on its own. We also work on ways of cooperating, decisions, rituals, collective reference points, and the conditions that allow the culture to live within the organisation. Our approach connects culture, leadership and how the organisation functions.
Both, though not necessarily at the same time. The founder and the leadership team first need clarity on the project, the challenges and the changes required. We can then work with managers and teams to bring these changes to life in practice. The goal is not to create a "culture carried by HR", but a culture carried by leadership and lived in everyday practice.
It depends on the level of transformation and the pace of growth. We can work over a few weeks to clarify your DNA and the challenges linked to scaling, or take a longer-term approach to work with managers and support the organisation's evolution. We favour arrangements adapted to your pace rather than a standardised programme.
A first conversation of 30 to 45 minutes helps us understand your context, your growth trajectory, and what's starting to change in your organisation. We then share an initial view of what we see as the priority challenges and check with you whether our approach can genuinely be useful. If so, we build the way forward together. This conversation carries no obligation.
A first conversation of 30 to 45 minutes helps us understand your context, your growth trajectory, and what's starting to change in your organisation.
We then share an initial view of what we see as the priority challenges and check with you whether our approach can genuinely be useful. If so, we build the way forward together. This conversation carries no obligation.