CEOs who treat their current team, product, and business model as fixed variables — not as things that must change in response to what the market is actually telling them — are the primary cause of their own growth ceiling. That is the core argument Mark Bluvshtein, CEO of Collage HR, makes in this conversation with Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast.
Mark is a chess grandmaster who has represented Canada internationally and was named Canada’s chess player of the year four times. Before leading Collage HR, he scaled Wave from 90 to over 300 people before its $500 million acquisition by H&R Block, then helped scale Humi through its Series B and another acquisition. Collage HR builds HR and payroll software for Canadian businesses.
The conversation covers the blind spots that slow CEOs down, the people management mistake nearly every founder makes, and a practical take on AI that skips the hype.
This episode is for CEOs in growth mode who are tempted to promote their best people, stay involved in every decision, and say yes to every opportunity — and are wondering why the company isn’t moving faster.
Key Takeaways
- Saying no to most ideas is not a failure of ambition. At Collage HR, Mark Bluvshtein’s quarterly focus framework makes saying no the operational default — each department owns defined focus areas, and every new idea must displace something already in motion to get through.
- Mark Bluvshtein’s rule: CEOs who stay involved in too many decisions become the bottleneck. The cost is not just their own time — it slows down their leaders and steals focus from what only the CEO can do.
- Promoting your best individual contributor to head of engineering is one of the most common and costly mistakes in early-stage scaling. The skills that make someone a 10x developer do not transfer to leading a team of 30.
- AI adoption does not require a grand strategy. A $20 ChatGPT subscription that saves one hour per month is a good return on investment. Start there.
CEOs Who Treat Their Business as Fixed Guarantee Their Own Stall
Mark Bluvshtein draws his first management principle from chess. In competitive chess, you must be completely objective about your strengths and your weaknesses. The board gives you feedback whether you want it or not. You cannot lie to yourself about the position you are in.
Mark says the same standard applies to CEOs — and most fail it.
“They assume that what they have today in the business and the team is fixed. It’s the right path where in reality everything about the business could change depending on the needs of the market.”
The companies that win are the ones willing to change everything. Mark points to Twitter as an example of a company that rebuilt its core model. Slack is another — Slack began as a gaming company. The internal communication tool a team member built to support that game became the product, and Slack now serves more than 750,000 organizations worldwide. The founders paid attention to what the market was actually responding to and changed course entirely.
The CEOs who struggle are the ones who fall in love with what they built. The business, the team structure, the product direction — they treat all of it as fixed when none of it has to be.
Ask yourself honestly: Is the way you see your business today shaped by evidence, or by what you hoped it would become?
CEOs Who Say No More Build Companies That Execute Faster
Mark Bluvshtein scaled Wave during its hypergrowth period, from 90 to over 300 people before its $500 million acquisition. If he could go back to the start of that phase with one insight, it would be this:
“Say no to a lot more things. You should just say no to as many things as possible, focus on what really matters and execute on that relentlessly.”
In a growing startup, ideas are never the scarce resource. Execution is. Every yes draws from the same limited budget of focus your team has. The more you add, the less you get on any single priority.
Mark runs a quarterly focus framework at Collage HR. Each department has defined focus areas with the key metrics they are driving. Leaders are accountable for those areas. Mark, as CEO, holds accountability for the overall business and spotting the larger opportunities.
Glenn Gow runs a similar system with the CEOs he coaches, built on OKRs. The point is not the framework itself. The point is that choosing priorities also means explicitly deciding what you will not do. Most CEOs skip that second part.
Mark made one additional observation worth holding onto: “Sometimes I come up with ideas that are very bad.” His team pushes back. That friction is part of what makes the system work. A CEO who always wins the debate has a team that has stopped pushing back — which means ideas that should die, don’t.
Glenn Gow describes a rule he created for his own team when he was a CEO: if he brought in a new idea while they already had a set of priorities, the team had to come back and ask whether he wanted to reprioritize, and what he wanted them to stop doing. That single constraint made him realize how rarely he actually wanted to change course. Most new ideas are interesting. Very few are worth disrupting the current plan.
CEOs Who Stay Involved in Every Decision Slow the Entire Organization Down
Mark Bluvshtein managed a team of 40 people earlier in his career and was involved in almost every decision. He describes what that produced:
“It was detrimental to me because I was extremely busy and it was hectic. It was detrimental to the leaders on my team where they felt like they needed to get me looped in to those situations. But the main issue was really how detrimental it was for the business because I was so involved in so many decisions and I wasn’t focused on the things that only I can do.”
The shift required to scale into the CEO role was learning to say “good enough” — not as a compromise of standards, but as a recognition that perfectionism at the decision level is the enemy of speed at the company level.
Delegating is not just about freeing up your own time. It is about developing your leaders. When you stay in every conversation, you signal that your people’s judgment is not trusted. That signal compounds. They stop deciding. They wait for you. The organization slows down.
The things only you can do as CEO — building strategy, opening the right doors, allocating capital to the right bets — get starved of attention when you are reviewing copy and sitting in on product calls.
What are you doing this week that someone else on your team could do? Now ask: what are you not doing this week that only you can do?
CEOs Who Promote Top Individual Contributors Into Management Roles Pay for It Twice
This is the people management mistake most founders make, and Mark Bluvshtein has watched it play out across every organization he has scaled — Wave, Humi, and Collage HR.
“The best individual contributors, the developers, the salespeople, in any role, they’re often pushed to become team leaders and then you’re taking away their superpower. They must be the 10x developer and then when they’re managing a team of 10 developers, suddenly the output hasn’t changed a whole lot versus what they were doing themselves.”
You lose a high-output contributor. You gain a manager who does not yet know how to manage. The team they now lead loses momentum while that person figures out a job they never asked for.
Mark also flags what often gets missed: a growing number of people explicitly do not want to be people managers. They want to be individual contributors and drive as much impact as possible in that role. Building career paths that honor that is part of running a scaling company well.
“It’s often that promotion of individual contributors and the people leaders, which too often leads to having to remove that person from the organization because suddenly they’re the head of engineering and they lack those skills that are required to scale an engineering team from, let’s say, three to 30.”
Mark also flags the opposite mistake: bringing in professional people managers who are strong on process and organizational structure but cannot get tactical. In a startup, that manager will slow you down. They operate at a level of abstraction that does not match the speed and specificity the team needs.
The model that works in scaling companies is the player-coach. You manage a team and you carry your own work. You write code. You carry a quota. You develop marketing content. You are in the game, not just watching it.
At Shopify, engineering leaders are expected to write code — a standard that keeps the organization moving by example and signals to every layer of the team that no one is too senior to do the work.
Mark adds one useful calibration: the player-coach ratio is not fixed. Some roles call for 90% playing and 10% coaching. Others are the reverse. The conversation worth having with your leaders is explicit — how much are you expected to play versus coach right now?
CEOs Who Test AI on Small Problems First Build Adoption That Actually Holds
Mark Bluvshtein does not have a grand AI transformation strategy for Collage HR. He has a simple test.
“A ChatGPT subscription costs $20 per month. If it can save me an hour per month, that’s a great return on investment for me and for any member of the team.”
He is rolling out AI adoption function by function — engineering, marketing, sales — with teams testing specific use cases. The standard is not how many things are being done with AI. The standard is whether it is actually saving time.
He also named a failure mode worth avoiding: teams overusing AI in ways that reduce quality. He has seen companies produce PowerPoint slides built with AI that do not make sense. The tool is not the strategy.
For Collage HR’s clients, Mark’s team launched an AI resume screener that scores each resume from 0 to 100 based on the prompt the HR manager provides, and produces a summary comparing the resume to the job requirements. The results have been strong. That was the first AI feature in the platform. More will follow as the team identifies real use cases rather than adding AI for its own sake.
Mark’s honest view on where AI lands in five years: “Every member of my team will be using AI in one way or another.” He does not know exactly how. He is not pretending to. What he knows is that the way to prepare is to learn by doing, not by waiting for the picture to become clearer.
What Chess Taught Mark Bluvshtein About Scaling a Business
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Say no as the default | Every new idea competes with the priorities already in motion. Protect execution by rejecting most requests, even interesting ones. | Mark identifies saying no earlier as the single insight he would apply before Wave scaled to 300+ people — a discipline he credits with sharpening execution through the growth phase that produced a $500M acquisition. |
| Good enough is a leadership decision | Perfectionism at the decision level is a bottleneck for the whole organization. CEOs must learn to approve and move on. | Managing 40 people with extreme involvement left Mark unable to focus on what only the CEO can do — the shift to delegation is what he identifies as the prerequisite for moving into the CEO role at all. |
| Individual contributors are not automatically good managers | The skills that produce a 10x developer do not transfer to leading a team of 30. Promoting top performers into management too often ends with removing them from the organization. | Mark observed this pattern across Wave, Humi, and Collage HR, and points to Shopify’s player-coach model — where engineering leaders write code — as the counter-example that prevents the cycle. |
| AI adoption starts with a $20 test | Identify where AI saves time today. Do not wait for a strategy. Return on investment is visible at the individual level before it shows up in company metrics. | Collage HR’s AI resume screener — scoring applicants from 0 to 100 against the HR manager’s prompt — produced strong early results and established a repeatable model for identifying the next AI feature based on client time savings, not trend-chasing. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “Sometimes I come up with ideas that are very bad.” — Mark Bluvshtein, CEO, Collage HR
- “Every member of my team will be using AI in one way or another.” — Mark Bluvshtein, CEO, Collage HR
- “Say no to a lot more things. You should just say no to as many things as possible, focus on what really matters and execute on that relentlessly.” — Mark Bluvshtein, CEO, Collage HR
- “It was detrimental to me because I was extremely busy and it was hectic. It was detrimental to the leaders on my team where they felt like they needed to get me looped in to those situations.” — Mark Bluvshtein, CEO, Collage HR
- “The best individual contributors, the developers, the salespeople, in any role, they’re often pushed to become team leaders and then you’re taking away their superpower.” — Mark Bluvshtein, CEO, Collage HR
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs decide what to stop working on when everything feels important?
The discipline is to define your highest-priority focus areas first, with specific metrics attached, then evaluate every new idea against those priorities. Mark Bluvshtein runs a quarterly focus framework at Collage HR where each department has defined focus areas. When a new idea arrives, the question is whether it replaces something already in motion. Glenn Gow applied the same logic as a CEO by requiring his team to ask him directly which priority he wanted to change before picking up anything new. Most ideas do not survive that question.
When should a CEO stop promoting individual contributors into management roles?
CEOs should stop assuming that top individual contributors want to be or will succeed as people managers. Mark Bluvshtein says the promotion of a 10x developer or top salesperson into a team leadership role too often ends with that person being removed because they lack the skills to scale a team. The better model is building dual career tracks — one for individual contributors who want to stay hands-on, and one for those who want to grow into people leadership — and being deliberate about who belongs in which path.
How should a CEO start using AI in their company without getting it wrong?
Start with a specific use case that saves measurable time, not a company-wide initiative. Mark Bluvshtein’s test is simple: if a $20 ChatGPT subscription saves one hour per month, it pays for itself. Collage HR’s first AI feature was a resume screener that scores applicants based on the HR manager’s prompt — a defined task with a clear time-saving outcome. The mistake to avoid is letting teams use AI for everything and producing output that does not make sense. Use it where it works. Learn what works before expanding.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Leadership
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
