Every growth story has a moment where momentum slows and effort spikes. The pipeline still looks full. The team is working harder. Revenue keeps inching up. Yet progress feels heavier than it should.
I’ve seen this moment dozens of times, and Asher Mathew named it cleanly in our conversation. Early growth carries you through product market fit and go to market fit. Then, as he put it, you hit the phase where “everything breaks.”
For many companies, that tension shows up somewhere between $50M and $80M in revenue. “That’s the point,” Asher said, “where you have to leverage partners.” Not eventually. Not experimentally. You either change how you scale or you grind.
Where Leverage Actually Comes From
Asher lived this problem firsthand at Avalara. Sales teams could only do so much. No matter how talented the reps were, “there were X number of deals on average salespeople would do.” Adding headcount created linear growth. Buying companies depended on timing and capital cycles.
“So we had to ask,” he told me, “where’s the leverage in the business?” Partnerships became the answer. Not because they were trendy, but because they were the only option that changed the slope of growth.
In his words, partnerships became “the vehicle of choice.” Product would keep improving anyway. Acquisitions would come and go with the market. Partnerships created compounding impact without proportional cost.
Many CEOs delay this move because of how they see themselves.
- Some think of themselves as product builders who expect distribution to appear later
- Others come up through sales and stick tightly to what already worked
- First time founders often underestimate what they have not personally experienced
Asher was blunt. “Second time founders for sure understand this playbook pretty well,” he said. “First time founders do not, unless they were coming from a company where partnerships were built into a mature go to market motion.”
That delay is expensive. It costs time, energy, and missed opportunity right when growth should accelerate.
Partnerships Are Not Just About Deals
One of the most useful reframes Asher shared was moving partnerships out of a transactional mindset. Early in his career, he admitted he saw them narrowly. “I looked at it very transactionally,” he said. “It was all about leads, ops, and deals.”
That view changed with exposure. Over time, and especially in his current role, he saw the deeper value. “The adoption and expansion benefits of partnerships have become much more clear,” he explained.
Most CEOs, he said, stop at deal flow. “They’ll say, let’s figure out how many opportunities partners bring us and how we close them.” That misses the real upside.
The leverage comes from how partners help customers succeed after the sale.
- Increasing adoption through integrations
- Driving expansion through trained services firms
- Helping customers extract real value from the product
Asher put it simply. “It’s not just the initial landing of deals. It’s what happens after that.” When partners help customers grow, partnerships stop being a side function and start behaving like a growth engine.
The Playbook Exists
Another myth Asher pushed back on was the idea that partnerships are still fuzzy or unstructured. “Don’t let people tell you it’s loosey goosey,” he said. “There is a playbook.”
The challenge is not whether partnerships work. It’s how you layer them into what already exists. Product led growth, direct sales, acquisitions. All of them can coexist, but only if designed intentionally.
Asher cautioned that partnerships are different from buying growth. “You can buy a company and just consume the revenue benefits,” he said. “You can’t buy a partnership and plug it in the same way.”
That difference forces CEOs to think more deeply about integration, sequencing, and ownership.
Design Yourself Before You Design Scale
The conversation shifted when we talked about Asher’s current company. Partnership Leaders is fully bootstrapped. By venture standards, it could easily raise. That choice was deliberate.
“We intend to remain bootstrapped,” he said, “because the mission we’re on is to elevate people.” Scaling like a software company would break that intent.
His advice to founders was clear and uncomfortable. “You have to understand what company you’re building,” he said. “The design of that company matters a lot.”
Design starts with values. Not slogans. Tested beliefs. Asher described calling close friends and asking, “Would you vouch for me for these values?” Only after that clarity comes structure.
He laid out the sequence plainly.
- Values first
- Operating model second
- Business model third
- Product last
“Pick the model that aligns with your values,” he said. If you do not thrive in frugality, copying Amazon will exhaust you. If you love structure and programs, Microsoft’s model might fit better. Borrowing someone else’s approach without alignment creates friction you cannot scale past.
Firing Yourself as CEO
One line from Asher stayed with me. “A CEO has to fire themselves every single year to prepare for the next year’s role.”
Last year, most of his time was external. This year, it flipped. “I’m 80 percent internal and 20 percent external,” he said. That shift was intentional and calendar enforced.
AI plays into this evolution as well. Asher is not delegating it away. He is sitting with employees, reviewing their work, and helping them think through use cases. When something works, he asks them to share it. When it doesn’t, he wants that shared too.
As he framed it, companies are “developing new capabilities,” and AI is one of them. Capabilities do not spread through memos. They spread through leadership attention.
Scaling the company starts with scaling how you show up.
What This Means for You
Growth stalls rarely mean you are failing. More often, they signal that the approach that got you here cannot take you further.
Asher’s perspective connects the dots. Partnerships are leverage. Values drive design. CEOs must evolve ahead of the company or become the constraint.
If growth feels heavier instead of lighter, it may be time to rethink where leverage comes from and whether you are designing both the business and yourself for the next phase. Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO here.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs. If you are wrestling with growth ceilings, operating models, or how to evolve without becoming the bottleneck, let’s talk.
