The Three Pillars of Scale
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Eric Partaker's core coaching architecture treats a founder-led business as three linked systems that must be upgraded in parallel. The company is the hardware; the leader and the person are the software that runs it. Each pillar has an explicit A-to-B journey: the company goes from startup to scaleup, the leader goes from founder to CEO, and the self goes from current self to best self. The self pillar covers health, key relationships and the fundamentals of time management and weekly structure. Scaling the company is usually the tip of the spear that brings a CEO to coaching, but Partaker's claim is that the company pillar cannot move far unless leadership and self move with it. Plans break, so the operating layer is regular accountability rather than the plan itself.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name the company A-to-B
Define where the business is now and what scaleup looks like concretely: revenue target, product suites, org structure, entry points and lifetime value per portfolio.
Pro tip Partaker uses a scaleup assessment to pinpoint where an entrepreneur should focus before setting any targets.
- 2
Name the leadership A-to-B
Decide which activities you will stop doing yourself as you move from founder to CEO, and which world-class hires take them over.
Watch out A founder who keeps running onto the pitch caps the company at their own personal throughput.
- 3
Name the self A-to-B
Define your best self across health, key relationships and personal performance. This is the pillar most CEOs skip and the one that eventually takes the company down with it.
- 4
Fix the self-pillar fundamentals first
Inside the self pillar sit the timeless basics: sleep, training, presence at home, productivity and how you structure your week. These are the first things Partaker works on with a new client.
Pro tip Start with how the week is structured; everything else has to fit inside it.
- 5
Run the three pillars in parallel, not in sequence
Work all three at once rather than promising yourself you will fix health and home once the company is bigger. The company pillar is the visible one, the other two decide whether it holds.
Watch out Optimising on the field of play while neglecting off the field is the classic CEO failure mode.
- 6
Install accountability for what the plan does not cover
Meet on a regular cadence, open by naming what can be celebrated, and expect most of the value to come from new ideas and problems that were never in the plan.
Pro tip Treat the relationship as organically driven: the agenda follows reality, not the document.
In the wild
When they started working together, Ali described a business he had stumbled into: he did not know what operations meant, thought marketing was billboards, and had never used the word sales. Working the three pillars in parallel, the company pillar produced a content team, a commercial team, product suites and talk of matrix structure with cross-functional support in customer success, HR, finance and legal. The leadership pillar moved Ali out of doing everything himself and into visionary and creative work. The self pillar produced the weekly structure and goal-setting habits underneath it all.
→ Ali describes himself as building a company rather than a lucky YouTube channel, with a revenue target he did not previously want to name.
Common mistakes
Working only the company pillar
Founders arrive wanting to scale the business and treat leadership and self as soft extras. Partaker's whole point is that the hardware only runs correctly if the software is coded correctly, so a company pillar pushed alone eventually stalls or costs you your health and relationships.
Expecting the plan to survive contact
Both the athletic metaphor and the Mike Tyson line make the same point: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Treating the pillar plans as fixed documents rather than a frame for ongoing accountability makes them useless within a quarter.
From the transcript
“if you want to scale you know the company or the business you have to look at that as the hardware and if the hardware…”
“get the company from a startup to a scaleup um in the leadership pillar it's go from founder to CEO and then in that self…”
“if we're going to optimize performance on the field of play we have to optimize performance off the field of play as well”
From the episode
Confronting my CEO coach - Eric Partaker
Eric Partaker