The path to growing a company

Over more than two decades building, scaling, and advising companies across different markets and business cycles, I have arrived at one clear conclusion: companies grow in stages, but not all entrepreneurs grow with them. The difference between leaders who scale with clarity and those who scale through exhaustion is not intelligence, talent, or luck. It is the ability to understand and respect the natural stages of organizational growth.

The five stages into which I divide the process—Start Up, Grow Up, Speed Up, Scale Up, and Power Up—are not abstract theory. They represent a deeply practical path filled with technical decisions, leadership challenges, painful lessons, and profound transformations. I know this because I lived through each one of them while scaling my first company, FinanzasWeb, during the early days of the internet boom and I have coached over 10,000 entrepreneurs through each of the five stages. Everything I learned from the breakthroughs and the hard moments became the foundation of the work I do today helping CEOs and entrepreneurs scale with less drama and more discipline.

Today I know that growth is not something you improvise. It has structure, it has rhythm, it has logic. And once you understand these stages, you can move forward with far greater clarity.

Start Up: birth, validation, and vision

My personal journey began in 1999 when I launched FinanzasWeb in a world that barely understood what the internet was. The Start Up stage is the entrepreneur’s laboratory: a small, fast, uncertain, and deeply energetic environment typically involving one to five people who are fully committed to a vision that at the beginning only they can see clearly.

Start Up demands one thing above all else: validation of the business model.

The primary focus is product development and identifying a real product market fit. The top priority is to confirm that a real customer has a real problem they are willing to pay to solve and that you can fulfill it at a price and quality that the customer is willing to pay. Nothing else truly matters at this stage. The biggest barrier is the constantly shifting market dynamics, and the key competency is learning how to communicate value, test assumptions, and gather feedback rapidly.

I remember presenting to bank executives, trying to explain why online advertising would become a powerful channel for reaching consumers. Many looked at me with disbelief, yet I knew we were standing on the edge of something transformative. Conviction matters. Airbnb was born the same way with an idea so unconventional (renting an air mattress in the living room of an apartment) that only the founders could believe in it at first.

The Start Up stage is chaotic, intense, and deeply creative. Validation becomes an obsession. Every customer conversation gives you a clue. Every rejection is a signal. Every small success is a direction. Bit by bit, the idea becomes real.

This is the stage of the explorer: agile, curious, bold, and driven by purpose.

Grow Up: building a team, creating systems and stabilizing revenue

When FinanzasWeb began gaining traction, we entered the Grow Up stage, a phase where many businesses become stuck for years because they misunderstand what is truly required to advance.

Typically involving six to 15 collaborators, Grow Up is defined by one main focus: sales. What you validated in Start Up must now generate consistent revenue. The priority is stability creating predictable cash flow to support operations and growth.

Here, the primary barrier is no longer the market; it is leadership. This is the first major transition every entrepreneur must make. It is the stage where you learn to hire, delegate, communicate, and build foundational processes. The most important skill is creating basic systems: a simple sales process, a repeatable delivery flow, a weekly operational meeting.

I remember the pace at which we were growing. We were hiring almost every day. The energy inside the company was exhilarating. But it also revealed a fundamental truth: growth amplifies everything: both what’s working and what isn’t.

If you don’t have processes, disorder grows. If you don’t clarify roles, confusion grows. If you don’t communicate well, problems grow.

Grow Up taught me that every new person added to the team multiplies the need for clarity. It taught me the value of repetition, consistency, and operational rhythms. And it taught me that as the company grows, the entrepreneur must evolve just as quickly.

Grow Up is the stage of building trust, structure, and early discipline.

Speed Up: acceleration, differentiation and disciplined execution

When we surpassed 30 employees, we entered a completely different phase: Speed Up. This stage is a significant leap. It typically includes 16 to 80 people and is the moment when promising companies begin either consolidating or breaking apart.

In Speed Up, the main focus is differentiation. You are no longer the only one solving your customer’s problem. The market becomes more competitive. Your brand needs a clear identity and a unique strategic position.

At the same time, the priority becomes operational efficiency. Mistakes cost more. The speed of the business increases. Coordination becomes more complex. The main barrier is operational capacity: what worked with ten people no longer works with 50.

The key skill is coordination, especially through capable middle managers. And the critical decision in this stage is to adopt disciplined execution, quarterly priorities, measurable metrics, meeting rhythms, and replicable systems.

During this phase, I learned one of the lessons that shaped the rest of my career: without a system of execution, the company depends on heroics, and heroics don’t scale.

Speed Up was the stage where I understood that organizational clarity is an extraordinary growth accelerator. When your team knows what matters, which metrics matter, and the rhythm at which they operate, performance increases exponentially. Shopify faced the same moment, transitioning from “we’re selling” to “we’re scaling.”

Speed Up is the stage where you don’t just run faster, you run better.

Scale Up: infrastructure, focus and strategic expansion

Scale Up arrived in my career in a dramatic way. FinanzasWeb was acquired by Patagon.com, and shortly after, Patagon was acquired by Banco Santander. Almost overnight, I went from leading a fast-growing start-up to becoming part of an international operation with offices in New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid.

Scale Up typically involves organizations with more than 80 employees and requires significant infrastructure to sustain growth. The main focus is defining your industry; you are no longer just playing the game, you are shaping it. The priority is scaling with clarity, because the volume of decisions, processes and interdependencies increases exponentially.

The greatest barrier at this stage is infrastructure: robust technology, advanced processes, disciplined culture, governance and well-defined organizational structures. The key skill is alignment, ensuring everyone understands the direction, priorities and long-term goals.

This was when I learned how large companies truly operate: how they make global decisions, manage entire markets, build high-performance teams and maintain consistency across geographies. Scale Up demands strategic maturity, leadership simplicity and long-term vision.

Scale Up is the stage where you stop building a business… and begin building an institution.

Power Up: market dominance, reinvention, and long-term vision

Power Up is the most demanding stage, not because of growth, but because of relevance. It typically involves companies with more than 250 employees. The main focus here is industry dominance, the priority is continuous reinvention, and the biggest risk is the comfort zone. The essential skill is adaptability, and the critical decisions involve people, strategy, execution and effective capital allocation.

For me, this stage took an unexpected turn with the collapse of the dot-com bubble. I watched from the inside as major companies struggled to adapt. It was a moment of deep professional and personal reflection. I realized that scaling isn’t enough; what matters is building companies capable of transforming themselves repeatedly over time.

Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix: these companies didn’t survive because they were first, they survived because they reinvented themselves better than anyone else.

Power Up is the stage where legacy is built.

From the rise, the fall and the clarity: the creation of growth

Experiencing the full journey—conception of an idea, explosive growth, international integration and a global crisis—gave me the deepest clarity of my life.

It showed me that the true challenge for entrepreneurs is not a lack of motivation, but a lack of structure. Not a lack of effort, but a lack of systems. Not a lack of vision, but a lack of frameworks and practical tools to scale with discipline.

And it was in that realization that my mission emerged: to help one million entrepreneurs achieve freedom.

Freedom of time. Financial freedom. Freedom from operational chaos. Freedom to build companies that don’t depend solely on them. Freedom to grow with clarity—and with far less drama.

With that mission, I founded Growth Institute, it was created to give entrepreneurs the map I arrived at only after experiencing every stage firsthand. It brings together proven methodologies, practical tools, world-class thought leaders, and a global community focused on scaling. It transforms growth from a heroic effort into a structured, predictable, and disciplined process.

My personal experience across the five stages—Start Up, Grow Up, Speed Up, Scale Up, and Power Up, now fuels every program and system we design.

Conclusion: growth is a path, not an accident

After living every stage, here is what I now know with absolute clarity:

Start Up requires validation.
Grow Up requires leadership evolution.
Speed Up requires operational discipline.
Scale Up requires infrastructure.
Power Up requires reinvention.

Those who understand this map scale with clarity, and those who don’t scale with unnecessary pain.

I have walked both paths and my mission now is to help you choose the right one.