🧭 When misalignment causes confusion, how do you create clarity?

TL;DR

Summer special edition: Mugs ‘L’ Us parable (pt 2/3)

🧭 When misalignment causes confusion, how do you create clarity?

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Pt 2: When misalignment causes confusion, how do you create clarity?

Previously on Mugs ‘L’ Us…

Chen and Olga broke into the left-handed mug market, hustled through their first crisis and landed Series A funding. Now, with expansion into EMEA on the horizon, the next phase of scaling begins. All is well… or is it?

💥 END OF PHASE 2: Hitting the ‘Autonomy Crisis’

As headcount doubled, Mugs ‘L’ Us added a new management layer to keep pace. Matt stepped up as VP of Manufacturing, with local operations now led by newly appointed managers. Bhav, responsible for revenue growth, became Head of Commercial — with Country Sales Managers across EMEA reporting to him.

But soon, the cracks showed.

Truth be told, the new Country Sales Managers were a bit too opinionated for Bhav’s liking. They told him (the Head of Commercial!) he needed to delegate centralised decision making and his successful UK go-to-market strategy wasn’t working in their regional markets. They wanted the responsibility to make decisions in the area they were in charge of.

Bhav thought “What do they know? The founding team has already built a highly successful go-to-market strategy!” Not long after Bhav dug his heels in did Mugs ‘L’ Us had its first resignation. Country Sales Managers left, were replaced and left again - they were harder to keep than hot tea in a cracked mug! In exit interviews, the reason became clear: they were tired of not being trusted to make decisions.

Bhav came to recognise that something had to give before the EMEA expansion halted altogether. After some conversations with Chen and Olga, he realised that he needed to delegate and develop two-way trust with his team. He started working with an experienced mentor who had faced similar challenges in their own start-up and helped him unpick his behaviour and find ways to change his approach sustainably.

📈 PHASE 3: Growing through ‘Delegation’ 

Bhav changed tack. He stopped dictating strategy and started setting direction. Weekly reviews focused on outcomes, not inputs. He realised that although he wasn’t doing hands-on sales and marketing anymore, the natural evolution of his role was to empower others to do it well.

Country Sales Manager attrition dropped. Regional revenue grew 40% in 2 quarters. Similar change was happening across the business where department leaders were empowering their managers, including the EMEA Manufacturing Manager who successfully shortened production time and increased profit margins.

Mugs ‘L’ Us had proven they could scale. Another funding round followed, this time to open 2 new plants in the US and APAC. But success created a new problem.

💥 END OF PHASE 3: Hitting the ‘Control Crisis’

With 50% QoQ growth, things looked good…on the surface.

But under the hood, orders in the US and APAC were delayed, delivery partners misaligned and costs ballooned. Customers were frustrated. Team leads were confused.

Why was EMEA running smoothly — and the rest falling apart?

After visits to the plants, it became evident to Chen and Matt that the different plants weren’t communicating and there was a lack of coordinated effort, sharing of learnings and best practices. The business was diversifying into new markets, all with their own nuances but having taken a step back to enable growth, Chen and Matt had lost visibility of what was happening at a local level. Mistakes that the EMEA plants made in the early days hadn’t been shared with the US and APAC. Similarly, strides they’d made in production and delivery efficiencies hadn’t been conveyed, so not only were they falling into every pothole possible, they were also failing to get a leg up early. Something had to be done!

📈 PHASE 4: Growing through ‘Coordination’

Matt and the founding team acted quickly. Their first step was to introduce processes (and systems) to coordinate across the company to achieve efficiency. To get everyone aligned, they launched a weekly cross-country leadership meeting, where team leads shared their biggest learnings and wins. Key takeaways were also shared during the company-wide All Hands.

The team in HQ also had a spate of growth, including establishing a brand new Quality Assurance (QA) team, which implemented consistent processes across all plants and carried out regular compliance spot-checks. They worked with the HR team to create consistent people processes and foster a consistent global culture, so the company felt connected with a shared mission.

After implementing the new initiatives to bring isolated teams together, they saw global production become more frictionless and their people more motivated and connected. This increased efficiency led to higher profitability and Return on Investment (ROI) on shared centralised functions such as QA and HR, which they expanded to other functions such as Finance, Legal and Marketing.

Coming in the next newsletter…

Mugs ‘L’ Us have overcome the chaos of control. But scaling doesn’t stop — and neither do the crises. What happens when coordination hardens into bureaucracy?

Stay tuned for the final chapter. It’s about to test everything they’ve built.

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