Family-business instincts are invaluable \u2014 until they become limiting. They teach resilience, loyalty, pragmatism, and financial discipline. But they do not necessarily teach you how to scale leadership beyond yourself, build for global markets, or invest aggressively ahead of returns. This is further amplified in Switzerland, where there is a cultural bias to stay humble and focus on what\u2019s realistic. These are clear strengths. Yet global technology markets often reward \u2013 and require \u2013 a different posture: global ambition, rapid growth and the willingness to invest ahead of certain returns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I grew up in Switzerland surrounded by entrepreneurs: my grandfather in construction, my father in surveying, my uncles in packaging and construction. That heritage came with a distinctly Swiss mindset to stay humble, build practical solutions, and prove yourself locally before daring to look abroad. Those lessons shaped Scandit in our early days to bootstrap, experiment, and find initial product-market fit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But as Scandit grew, I realized that what had made us strong could also hold us back. To grow globally, I had to unlearn some of the traits essential in a small-to-medium family business \u2013 the instinct to improvise and solve problems yourself, to treat cash flow as the key measure of financial health, and to nurture a local community of stakeholders. Global growth required the ability to scale an organization, to invest ahead of revenue, and reach a global community you hadn\u2019t yet met.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve come to learn is that if you\u2019re leading a company beyond traditional business models ( that is, offering tangible products or in-person services that customers can directly experience), the mindset that can make a small-to-medium business entrepreneur successful can eventually hold you back. Not because that mindset is wrong, but because it\u2019s optimized for a world without venture-style economics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With that in mind, here are are four skills that I had to unlearn to scale our business to where we are today \u2013 with seven global offices and more than 2,100 customers, including seven of the top 10 retailers worldwide<\/p>\n
Resilience and improvisation: From superpower to bottleneck<\/p>\n
Growing up in a family of SMB entrepreneurs, problem-solving wasn\u2019t a task you clocked into. It was simply how life worked. At dinner, you\u2019d talk through challenges and solutions. On weekends, you\u2019d troubleshoot whatever popped up. As a result, you don\u2019t perceive challenges as interruptions \u2013 you see challenges as puzzles. You learn to stay calm, work with imperfect information, and keep moving.<\/p>\n
As our company scaled, though, I quickly realized I couldn\u2019t be the main person improvising and solving problems. In order to grow, you need to build a scalable organization, bringing in people you trust, giving them real ownership, and letting them solve problems autonomously. My role shifted from solving problems myself to building an organization where great problem-solving can happen without me.<\/p>\n
There was also something unexpected in that shift. Once we had kids, I was able to protect evenings for dinner and put my kids to bed most nights. And once the house is quiet, I\u2019ll sometimes go back to work \u2013 something I recognize from childhood: sitting nearby while my father worked through a tough issue late into the night. The difference now is I\u2019m choosing where my attention matters most, and I\u2019m building a team I can rely on for the rest.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve learned is that resilience helps you survive uncertainty. But it can also disguise organizational inefficiency. Growth requires organization and systems, not just resilience. If your team\u2019s success still depends on your ability to improvise, you\u2019re scaling effort, not impact.<\/p>\n
The Cash-Flow Prison: When discipline becomes an anchor<\/p>\n
Growing up, I absorbed a deep respect for building businesses on what you have, not on what you may have someday. My family\u2019s companies were mainly built on cash flow \u2013 growing by delivering value, collecting payment and investing back into the business. This instilled in me a strong sense of responsibility that every investment should be rooted in results, and progress should be tangible.<\/p>\n
That mindset served me well when starting Scandit. Coming straight from academia, my co\u2011founders and I bootstrapped the business during the early years. We ran lean, funded ourselves through early customers and competitive grants, and thought twice before spending extra. We\u2019d share hotel rooms on business trips because it felt sensible.<\/p>\n
But at some point, that instinct became an anchor. You raise capital, and the ground shifts \u2013 scaling requires deploying capital ahead of returns, not after. Learning to spend significant amounts of money proactively to unlock future growth was one of the essential mindset shifts in taking Scandit from a promising deep tech startup to a global company.<\/p>\n
With early investments and subsequent Series B, C, and D rounds that brought our total funding to $273 million, we were suddenly operating at a scale my family\u2019s businesses never had to contemplate. Investment was strategy \u2013 a key obligation to deliver on the business plan that would rationalize our valuation. In the earlier days, spending ahead of revenue sometimes still felt like malpractice: spending $20,000 on a marketing campaign could feel reckless. It felt even more risky not to spend.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve learned is that maturity in business means learning the difference between an expense and an investment. Both draw cash, but only one compounds. In the early days, I had to train myself to think beyond the monthly P&L, and remember that some costs buy future advantage \u2013 not necessarily an immediate return.<\/p>\n
This shift isn\u2019t about abandoning discipline but refining it. The same scrutiny that once questioned every line item needs to evaluate whether spending is protecting equity or creating it. What\u2019s frugal at\u00a0 $10 million can become shortsighted at $100 million. As scale changes, so do the levers that create real value.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From Local Community Thinking to Global Stakeholder Strategy<\/p>\n
In a traditional business, your local community is often everything. Your customers might live next door. Your suppliers know your kids. Success feels local, personal, reciprocal. Your company and your community rise together.<\/p>\n
Scaling globally breaks that intimacy. When your reach becomes global, that local community instinct can start to fracture your focus. You can\u2019t personally connect with everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At scale, you need to be clear about who truly matters to your mission: your highest-impact customers, your top partners and internal stakeholders. When your business broadens beyond the familiar faces and places where trust was once built naturally, that systematic clarity becomes your new compass. You can\u2019t nurture every relationship in the same way. But you can design for consistency in how you \u2013 and your team \u2013 listen, learn and deliver value.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve learned is that the challenge of scale isn\u2019t losing connection \u2013 it\u2019s institutionalizing it. You shift from personal proximity to establishing deliberate systems and processes that help you and your teams stay close to key customer needs, reinforce credibility, and ensure the organization continues to earn and expand trust at every level.<\/p>\n
In doing so, you protect the intimacy that built your company in the first place, while creating the foundation to grow it far beyond where it began. The leaders who struggle most in this transition keep trying to replicate the intimacy of a small circle at global scale. That\u2019s not loyalty \u2013 it\u2019s exhaustion disguised as purpose.<\/p>\n
The Skill of Strategic Unlearning<\/p>\n
Many traditional family businesses are built around cashflow, not scale. This creates a ceiling to the size and reach of the businesses and the speed in which they scale resulting in a stronger need for the business owner to remain at the centre. These factors reduce the applicability and appeal to venture-style funding.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scaling Scandit required unlearning some of the specific instincts that helped make my family\u2019s businesses successful.\u00a0 It\u2019s not about abandoning what shaped you \u2014 it\u2019s about re\u2011evaluating its applicability and purpose in your current context. The same logic applies to the influence of AI we see today and how that is evolving the way businesses, teams and roles operate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When you remove the constraints of operating like a traditional family business, or re-imagining how your business may operate in an AI-led era, you need to regularly ask: \u201cWhat instinct or habit served us before that no longer serves us now?\u201d That question keeps the organization elastic\u2014building mechanisms for reflection, outside perspectives, and empowering people who think differently from the founding team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve learned is that the process of unlearning, when institutionalized, keeps a growing company from becoming a prisoner of its past success and norms. Just as you design systems for hiring or forecasting, you must design one for unlearning. Because the hardest step in a company\u2019s evolution isn\u2019t learning something new but deciding what to stop or reimagine.<\/p>\n
That is, ultimately, the real challenge of leading a company through a growth journey. The most expensive mistake isn\u2019t necessarily doing the wrong thing. Sometimes it might be doing the right thing for too long.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Family-business instincts are invaluable \u2014 until they become limiting. They teach resilience, loyalty, pragmatism, and financial discipline. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[114,293,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-388742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}