What separates scale-ups that break through from those that stall? According to three seasoned people leaders, it’s not funding, strategy or product timing. It’s talent density, and whether you dare to act when it starts slipping.

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That insight hit early during the latest Scaleup Flanders Deep Dive, where Véronique Vingerhoets (itsme, Collibra, iBanFirst), ClaudiaColvin (Roamless, Allez Startups) and Jonathan Schockaert (Ring Twice) dissected the people side of scaling with rare candour. Their message was uncomfortable but liberating: growing from 10 to 100 employees isn’t a hiring challenge, it’s a transformation challenge. One that reshapes every part of a company.

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The hiring gap that slows Europe down

Early in the conversation, one of the speakers highlighted a striking difference between continents: “In the US, a Head of Talent is hired around the seventh to tenth employee. In Europe, it’s usually around thirty.”

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That gap reveals a broader truth: many European founders wait far too long before thinking structurally about hiring, culture and performance. By the time cracks appear (misalignment, inconsistent execution, low output), the damage is already done.

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To assess talent quality early, Claudia Colvin turns to a deceptively simple question, a variation of what’s widely known as the KeeperTest: “If this person told me they were leaving tomorrow, would I fight to keep them?” It’s a mirror few teams dare to hold up to themselves. But Vingerhoets explained what happens when you don’t. In a previous scale-up role, rapid hiring led to a painful realisation: “You suddenly see how many people are just… there. Not harmful, but not adding anything either.” The correction that followed was drastic and avoidable.

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The hidden, expensive cost of a mis-hire

Recruitment budgets show only the surface. The real costs live underneath: stalled projects, teams compensating for weak performers, a culture that slowly lowers the bar.

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One founder in the audience described contacting hundreds of candidates to fill a handful of engineering roles, only to see someone leave within weeks. The panel nodded. Scaling, done properly, is slow. Scaling without discipline becomes extremely expensive.

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Three transformations every scale-up must survive

Although every growth story is unique, the speakers recognised three turning points that define whether a company scales or snaps:

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1. When informality stops working(10–20 people)

Early hiring feels effortless:friends, former colleagues, people who ‘get it’. But the intimacy that fuels the first ten hires collapses around twenty.

“When I joined Collibra, at 35people, almost everyone had been hired through the network,” Vingerhoets said.“At that size, informality becomes a bottleneck.”

Schockaert felt it too: “In the beginning it really felt like a group of friends. Every Friday we had a party together.” That closeness inevitably fades and resisting that change only slows you down.

This is the phase where companies must start documenting culture, defining roles and building real hiring processes.

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2. The middle-management squeeze(20–50 people)

This is where most growing companies wobble. New managers join before understanding the context; early employees begin stretching beyond their natural limits.

“That Swiss Army knife profile works beautifully at the start,” Vingerhoets said. “But not forever.”

Suddenly, hard conversations become part of the job: who grows with you, who doesn’t, and which leadership experience you need to bring in from outside.

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3. The founder’s identity shift(50+ people)

Beyond fifty employees, the company begins to outgrow the founder’s memory and instincts.

New hires don’t share the history; they don’t intuitively know what “good” used to look like. As one participant put it: “They don’t have your context, and you have to live with that.”

Colvin offered a mindset shift that resonated: expect 80% and accept 20% imperfection. Trying to preserve perfect control is the fastest path to bottlenecking growth.

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Remote work:two cultures under one roof

Hybrid teams add another layer of complexity. Our participants described a recurring pattern: office-based staff feel more connected to decisions and context, while remote colleagues operate in a parallel reality. Someone in the room called it ‘the remote bubble’.

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Fully remote organisations can thrive, but only if everyone is remote. Hybrid teams require far more intentionality than most founders anticipate. And distributed hubs, while attractive on paper, rarely solve cultural drift on their own.

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Schockaert summarised the consensus: “Don’t hire remotely because it’s cheaper. Hire remotely because it gives you access to better talent.”

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Your original culture won’t survive, and that’s part of scaling

Founders often cling to the early spirit of the company: the all-in energy, the shared jokes, the sense of family. But every speaker agreed that expecting culture to remain frozen is a recipe for frustration.

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“I wanted to keep the culture we had in the beginning,”Schockaert said. “But at some point I had to accept it was going to evolve.”

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Evolution sometimes even means contraction. Ring Twice went through a downsizing phase and emerged stronger. “We execute better today witha smaller team,” Schockaert said. Talent density increased, focus returned.

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What actually works: tools with real-life impact

The panel wasn’t interested in glossy HR theory. They shared only what repeatedly works in practice:

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• The “HR restaurant”: a quarterly ritual where colleagues exchange one positive point and one improvement point in short, direct conversations. Surprisingly simple, surprisingly powerful.

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• The three-month rule:define success in month one, assess in month two, make a clear call in month three. No more lingering doubts or drifting performers.

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• Documentation spring cleaning: quarterly reviews to keep knowledge bases relevant. A small habitthat prevents large-scale confusion.

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• Values interviews: based on real past behaviour, not hypotheticals. Because “how would you react?”reveals nothing, “tell me about a time when…” reveals everything.

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“If you doublet he business, you can’t just do the same thing better”

The session closed with a sentence that tied the discussion together. “If you double the business, you can’t just do the same thing more efficiently,” Schockaert said. Growth forces reinvention of processes, leadership and culture. And it forces founders to let go of the illusion that the team and culture of the first 20 people will carry them to 100.

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Vingerhoets captured the spirit of the afternoon perfectly: “There is no perfect answer. But the moment you start asking these questions, you’re already further than most.”

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Key Numbers: A Brief Reality Check

• Many successful scale-ups appoint a Head of Talent before 30 employees.
• First-year turnover above 30% is rarely an accident.
• The sprint from Series A to IPO now takes 3–5 years, not ten.
• If too many people fail the Keeper Test, your bar is slipping fast.

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