FOR LEADERS OF GROWING COMPANIES READY FOR THEIR NEXT STAGE

What is bottlenecking your next level? 

Your business has grown. Now the way it operates may be limiting how far — and how fast — it can go.

 Take The Bottleneck Pulse

A short diagnostic to identify the constraint currently limiting your growth, your team and your capacity as a founder.


When the business starts depending on  you in ways it shouldn't

You built the business by making things happen. As it grows, decisions, exceptions, people and problems can keep finding their way back to you.

You have a capable team. You have good people around you. And yet too much still seems to require your attention.

That’s often a sign that the business has outgrown part of the system that got it here.

Every business has constraints

As companies grow, four patterns tend to show up again and again:

  • LOAD: Too much of the business still depends on the founder.
  • EXCEPTION: The business works until something requires judgment outside the usual rules.
  • AUTHORITY: People have responsibility, but still need permission to act.
  • ALIGNMENT: Good people are moving, but not always in the same direction.
 Find Your Bottleneck

Change the Game

When a business gets stuck, the answer is rarely found in one person.

The way people behave is shaped by the system around them — the decisions they can make, the incentives they respond to, the dependencies they carry and the patterns the business has learned over time.

Change those conditions, and different behaviour becomes possible.

The Success Trap

The strategies that make a founder successful can eventually become the strategies that keep the business dependent on them.

I wrote a short paper about what happens when a successful business reaches this point — and why changing the system can create a different kind of growth.

 Read the Success Trap

I'm Blanca Vergara

At the heart of my work is a question:

How do humans gain agency inside the systems they’re part of?

I’ve spent my career working with leaders and organizations navigating complexity, change and collaboration — from the European Space Agency, PwC, Nike and Roche to fast-moving technology environments. Across very different contexts, I kept coming back to the same insight: people’s behaviour makes sense in context.

When we understand the systems, incentives and relationships shaping that behaviour, we can move beyond blame, shame and guilt — and start creating the conditions for people to act differently.

Today, I bring that lens to entrepreneurs and the businesses they are building. I believe entrepreneurship is one of the forces with the greatest potential to shape a better future — and that successful businesses become far more powerful when the people inside them have the agency to think, decide and create together.

I'm particularly interested in what happens when a successful founder becomes the unintended system's bottleneck — and what it takes to redesign the conditions around them.

My work draws on systems thinking, game theory and Adlerian psychology to help leaders understand what is really happening beneath the surface — and change the conditions that make new possibilities possible.

Is this happening in your business? 

I'm currently working with a small number of founders whose businesses have reached the point where too much still depends on them.

Together, we'll identify the bottleneck, understand what's sustaining it and test what changes when we redesign part of the system.

If this sounds familiar, I'd love to hear what's happening in your business.

 Talk to me about your bottleneck