The Scale-Up Gamble: Lessons from Sharmadean Reid on Leading High-Risk Growth
Sharmadean Reid shares how vision, trust, small teams, and hands-on leadership keep teams motivated in fast-growth, high-stakes ventures, turning risky bets into calculated opportunities for extraordinary success.
Building a fast-growth company is a highest-stakes game. Every day, founders and their teams place bets on an uncertain future, pouring energy and resources into ventures that could transform industries - or crash spectacularly. And in highly competitive and commoditised markets, the margin for error is even smaller, making team motivation critical for survival and for the best chance at the bet paying off.
Sharmadean Reid, the serial entrepreneur behind WAH Nails, Beauty Stack, and The Stack World, understands this gamble intimately. Her journey from nail art pioneer to fintech founder offers a masterclass in how leaders can keep their teams not just engaged, but genuinely invested in the high-risk, high-reward world of scale-up growth.
Sharmadean Reid in Wired 2021
The Art of the Bet: Vision - Your North Star
In the chaotic world of early-stage companies, vision isn't just inspiration - it's vital for navigation. Sharmadean Reid emphasises that the ability to "articulate a big vision and persuade people to join" is an "underrated founder skill." When she was developing Beauty Stack, she used what she calls her "persuasive skills" to get co-founders on board, recognising that great ideas mean nothing without great people willing to bet their careers on them.
This isn't about painting unrealistic pictures or making empty promises. It's about helping your team see the mountain you're all climbing together, even when the path ahead is shrouded in fog. In commoditised markets where differentiation is challenging, a compelling vision becomes your competitive moat - it's what keeps talented people choosing your risky venture over safer alternatives.
The gamble here is mutual: you're asking people to believe in something that doesn't yet exist, while they're risking their time, reputation, and financial security on your ability to make it real. The vision must be big enough to justify that risk.
Trust: The Currency of Pivots and Uncertainty
Perhaps nowhere is team loyalty tested more than during pivots - those unwanted but highly necessary course corrections that can feel like betrayal to those who bought into the original vision.
Reid's experience pivoting Beauty Stack into The Stack World during the pandemic demonstrates how trust, built over time, becomes your most valuable asset when everything else is changing.
Her team trusted her leadership through this fundamental shift partly because she had demonstrated "know-how" and had the necessary technology and team already in place. But trust isn't just about competence - it's about transparency. In high-stakes environments, teams need to understand not just what's changing, but why, and what role they play in the new direction.
The brutal reality is that in competitive markets, pivots aren't optional - they're inevitable. Market conditions shift, customer needs evolve, and competitive landscapes transform overnight.
Leaders who can maintain team cohesion through these changes have a significant advantage over those whose teams fragment at the first sign of uncertainty.
And pivots aren’t just invaluable when things aren’t going well. They’re also help ensure the business can take advantage of opportunities when things go well.
It’s a strategy (and a mindset) that paid off well for Reid: when she realised she was onto something with WAH Nails she and the team were ready to take advantage of the opportunities that came their way.
Her approach meant WAH Nails went from a nail bar in East London to a global brand and a bestselling book on Amazon (see Downtown Girls cover, below).
WAH Nails went from nail bar to global brand
The Five Pillars: Structure in the Storm
Sharmadean Reid's approach to CEO responsibilities provides a framework for leaders trying to maintain focus while everything moves at breakneck speed. She organises her role into five key areas:
Vision setting
Cash management
Culture building
Communications
Hiring
This isn't just personal organisation - it's a communication tool that helps her team understand what she's focused on and why, helping keep the team ‘on-side’ when things get choppy.
In the scale-up gamble, clarity becomes crucial.
Do what you’re good at:
Leaders must focus on their unique value-add while building systems that can function without them. This isn't just about efficiency but creating sustainability in an unsustainable pace of growth.
When resources are tight and the pressure is intense, teams need to understand what their leader is prioritising and how their work fits into the bigger picture. By being transparent about these five areas, Reid creates predictability in an unpredictable environment.
The delegation aspect is equally important. By hiring a chief of staff and delegating tasks she doesn't enjoy, Reid demonstrates a crucial scale-up principle: leaders must focus on their unique value-add while building systems that can function without them. This isn't just about efficiency but creating sustainability in an inherently unsustainable pace of growth.
OKRs: Making the Abstract Tangible
In fast-moving companies, it's easy for teams to lose sight of progress. Reid's use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) addresses this by constantly asking, "what are the things that's going to unlock the next milestone?" This approach transforms abstract vision into concrete, measurable targets.
The psychological impact of this cannot be overstated. In high-risk environments, people need to see progress to maintain motivation. OKRs provide regular proof that the gamble is paying off, that the mountain is being climbed one measurable step at a time.
They also ensure that teams "are organised and fully understand the mission" and why their specific work matters.
For leaders in competitive markets, OKRs serve another crucial function: they force difficult prioritisation decisions. When everything seems urgent and important, OKRs help identify what will actually move the needle, preventing teams from burning out on busy work while competitors advance on meaningful metrics.
Product Obsession: Lead from the Front
Reid's "obsessively hands-on" approach to product development - she talks about how she dives into database structures and tag appropriateness in the early stages - might seem like micromanagement, but it serves a deeper purpose. In competitive markets where product differentiation can make or break a company, leaders who deeply understand their offering can make faster, better decisions.
More importantly, this hands-on approach signals to teams that the leader is genuinely invested in the quality of what they're building together. When founders are disconnected from the product, teams can sense it, and motivation suffers. When leaders are diving into the details alongside their teams, it creates a sense of shared ownership and purpose.
Motivation Through Impact: Connect with Users
Reid says her motivation comes from "seeing women earn more money than they did yesterday through something that I did."
This connection between daily work and real-world impact is crucial for maintaining team motivation through difficult periods. In the scale-up journey, there will be moments when the work feels abstract, when the connection between today's code or today's meeting and tomorrow's success feels tenuous.
Leaders who can consistently connect team efforts to user impact create a powerful motivational framework that transcends typical startup perks or compensation packages. This is especially important in competitive markets where the differentiation often comes down to execution quality and execution quality depends on people who genuinely care about the outcome.
Small Teams, Big Accountability
Reid's preference for "really small teams to get things done" reflects a crucial insight about scale-up dynamics.
While small teams can move faster, communicate better, and maintain higher standards they also face higher pressure - there's nowhere to hide when everyone's contribution is visible and critical.
Small Teams Please!
Small teams can move faster, communicate better, and maintain higher standards they also face higher pressure - there's nowhere to hide when everyone's contribution is visible and critical.
Reid emphasises "hitting deadlines on time and on budget" isn't just about project management it's about building a culture of reliability that can withstand the chaos of rapid growth.
In competitive environments, missed deadlines can mean missed opportunities, and missed opportunities can be fatal.
The Weekly Reality Check
Reid's practice of tracking progress "week by week" addresses one of the biggest challenges in fast-growth companies: maintaining momentum without losing direction. Weekly check-ins create regular opportunities to celebrate progress, address obstacles, and recalibrate if necessary.
This cadence is particularly important in the scale-up gamble because the distance between success and failure can be measured in weeks, not months. Regular tracking ensures that small problems don't become existential crises and that the team maintains a realistic understanding of their position in the race.
The Leadership Gamble: All In or All Out
What’s particularly inspiring about Reid’s approach - and indeed her humility - is that leading a scale-up is about more than the founder.
Leading a fast-growing company requires total commitment not just from the founder, but from the entire team. The strategies she employs aren't just management techniques; they're ways of ensuring that everyone understands the stakes and chooses to be fully invested in the outcome.
In highly competitive and commoditised markets, this level of commitment isn't optional. Teams that are half-hearted or hedging their bets will be outworked and out-executed by those who are all in.
The Leader’s Job:
Create an environment where talented people want to make that commitment - where the vision is compelling, the progress is visible, the culture is supportive, and the potential impact is meaningful.
The leader's job is to create an environment where talented people want to make that commitment - where the vision is compelling, the progress is visible, the culture is supportive, and the potential impact is meaningful.
The gamble that leaders and teams make together in building new businesses is profound: they're betting their most valuable asset - time - on an uncertain outcome. But when that gamble is supported by clear vision, strong trust, systematic execution, and genuine care for impact, it transforms from being perceived as a reckless bet into a calculated risk worth taking.
The question isn't whether building a fast-growth company is risky - of course it is. It’s whether you can create an environment where exceptional people choose to take that risk with you, and whether you can execute with enough skill and speed to justify their faith.Reid's approach suggests that with the right strategies, that gamble can become the foundation for extraordinary achievement: less casino, more cash.
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Simon Hardie is an author and founder of findexable - the digital analytics and insight platform. He co-hosts the Born to Disrupt podcast with Mingzulu and Disrupts
