Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sits down with Matt Blosl, CEO of DexCare, to unpack the leadership mistakes that stall scaling companies and the mindset shifts that fix them.
This episode is for CEOs who have assembled strong functional leaders and are still not getting the growth velocity they expected.
Key Takeaways
- Hiring elite functional leaders is not enough. CEOs who scale fast build C-suites where every leader shares accountability for every key metric, not just their own department’s numbers.
- The first job of a new CEO in a scaling company is protection, not expansion. Fortifying the core value proposition earns the right to move into adjacent markets or new products.
- Siloed OKR structures can kill cross-functional momentum. The interlocks between teams matter more than the individual key results each team is chasing.
- At DexCare, Blosl treats AI as a foundational tool that will change culture, hiring, and how the business is measured. He actively slows his team down on AI deployment to keep the customer problem at the center, not the board slide.
- Blosl’s PE-backed experience across multiple scaling companies shows that CEOs who start from the customer problem and work backward to AI use cases consistently outperform those who build AI because competitors are talking about it.
CEOs Scale Companies by Building One Engine, Not a Roster of Stars
Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, identifies Matt Blosl’s core framework as this: the difference between a company that scales and one that stalls is not the quality of individual leaders. It is whether those leaders function as a single engine or as separate high-performers running in parallel.
Blosl, now CEO of DexCare, a healthcare technology company backed by ICONIQ Capital, Transformation Capital, and Warburg Pincus, has led scaling organizations through multiple PE-backed environments. He has seen the same blind spot repeat across companies at every stage.
“So often what I see is CEOs go out and hire really, really good functional leaders. Go get the most amazing chief product officer. Go get an absolutely stellar chief revenue officer, chief commercial officer. And you’ve got a bunch of stars that are on your leadership team. But what you don’t do is get them to work as one engine.”
The practical consequence of that gap is a C-suite where marketing owns marketing, sales owns sales, and product owns product. Each leader optimizes for their lane. The interlocks between lanes break down. Growth velocity slows, not because the people are wrong, but because the structure rewards individual performance over collective output.
Blosl’s fix starts at the hiring stage. When evaluating a chief product officer, he spends as much time assessing how that person thinks about their peers’ success as he spends on their product vision.
“I’m spending probably as much or disproportionately more time understanding how they work with their peers, and how they see their job as: I’ve got to do what I do so that we can sell. I’ve got to do what I do so that we can retain our customers.”
That mindset, applied across the full leadership team, produces what Blosl calls shared accountability: every leader owns every key metric, not just the ones tied to their function. Sales leaders care about retention. Product leaders care about revenue. Marketing leaders care about product adoption.
The result is not just faster growth. It changes the experience of leading a company.
“Do you want to be in the trench alone or do you want to be in the trench with a bunch of other world class leaders that know that they have your back, you have a shared vision, you have shared accountability.”
This principle, Blosl argues, is not stage-specific. It applies whether a company is pre-profitability or scaling from 100 to 500 people.
New CEOs Break Scaling by Trying to Expand Before They Protect the Core
When Blosl takes over a scaling company, the board and team typically expect him to arrive with new ideas: adjacent markets to enter, new products to build, new segments to target. His first move is almost always the opposite.
“So often the starting point is no, let’s protect the core. Let’s focus. Focus on what got us here.”
This runs counter to what most organizations expect from a new leader. Companies coming out of hyper-growth phases are often simultaneously trying to do too many things. The energy is dispersed. The value proposition is diffuse. The team is stretched across initiatives that dilute rather than build.
Blosl’s rule: fortify the core before earning the right to expand. That does not mean ignoring change. Customer needs shift. The original product may need to evolve. But there is almost always a core value proposition worth protecting before new territory is worth pursuing.
“There’s usually still a core that we need to just protect. And we need to really just fortify that before we go off and think about how we’re going to scale this way or that way.”
The counterintuitive insight here is that simplifying is often the highest-leverage move a new CEO makes. Not adding. Removing. Narrowing the focus until the company owns something specific, then building outward from that position.
Shared Accountability Fixes What Siloed OKRs Break
Glenn Gow raised a problem he has seen across multiple CEO engagements: companies implement OKRs, and OKRs inadvertently create silos. Marketing chases its key results. Engineering chases its key results. Neither team actively helps the other because they believe they will be measured only on their own numbers.
Blosl’s response: the interlocks between teams are more important than the individual key results.
“Start simple. Because having a really blown out metric structure that looks really good is not worth the paper it’s on if the interlocks are not happening. Sales isn’t going to get there if they don’t have product to sell.”
The framework he uses to address this is the same engine mentality applied to measurement. If the leadership team shares accountability for every key metric, the structural incentive to silo breaks down. Leaders who know their own results depend on their peers’ success will invest in those peers’ success.
This does not require abandoning OKRs or any other management framework. It requires adding a layer that makes cross-functional contribution visible and valued. One CEO Gow worked with added an explicit metric for how well each leader helped colleagues achieve their key results. That addition changed behavior faster than any restructuring did.
The measurement structure should reflect what you actually want: an engine running as one.
CEOs Who Get AI Right Start With the Customer Problem, Not the Technology
DexCare operates in healthcare, a sector where AI conversations are particularly high-stakes. Blosl is direct about where most companies go wrong: they build AI initiatives because AI is what every board meeting and investor presentation demands, not because they have identified a specific customer problem AI solves.
“I don’t want us to get caught up in the gold rush of it. It needs to be thought of very, very specifically.”
His framework is simple. Start with the customer problem or opportunity, exactly as you always have. Do not change that starting point because AI is available. Ask what changes on the problem side for your customer. Often, the answer is nothing. The customer’s problem is the same. What may change is your ability to address it, through faster development cycles, through capabilities that were previously too complex to deliver, through new ways to match supply and demand.
“Think of AI as just a new coding language. AI is not this special project that’s out here. It’s a new foundational tool and technology that we have that we need to rethink how we go about doing what we do.”
That reframing has significant operational consequences. If AI is foundational, it is not a side project with a dedicated team. It changes how you hire. It changes how you measure the business. It changes your culture. Those shifts take longer than one quarter to get right.
Blosl’s advice to his own team is deliberately counter to the market pressure: slow down, take a breath, be thoughtful.
“I don’t have a desire to be first to market in anything in that regard, unless we happen to be, because we found a way to address something that our clients want or need, and we’re able to do it. But we’re not going to do it just to get out there.”
Is AI central to DexCare’s product roadmap? Yes. But every use case traces back to a specific customer need, not to a board slide that needed an AI bullet point.
The Scaling Framework Matt Blosl Applies Across PE-Backed Companies
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Build an engine, not a roster | Every C-suite leader owns every key metric, not just their function’s. Hire for peer accountability as much as functional expertise. | Blosl applies this evaluation model across every PE-backed company he has led. At DexCare, backed by ICONIQ Capital, Transformation Capital, and Warburg Pincus, it shapes full C-suite structure: a CPO who cannot articulate how their work enables sales and retention does not pass the hiring bar, regardless of product vision. |
| Protect the core before expanding | When a company exits hyper-growth, the highest-leverage move is narrowing focus, not adding initiatives. Earn the right to expand by owning something specific first. | Across multiple scaling engagements, Blosl’s default first move has been simplification over expansion, even when boards and teams expect new ideas. The consistent finding: companies that had not yet locked in their core value proposition paid for expansion attempts with diluted execution and dispersed energy. |
| Measure interlocks, not just outputs | OKR-style frameworks create silos when they measure only individual function results. The connections between functions matter more than any single team’s numbers. | Blosl identifies this as the structural gap that defeats otherwise well-designed metric systems: sales cannot hit targets without product, yet most metric structures measure each function independently and leave that dependency invisible. At DexCare, cross-functional interlock visibility is the layer he adds on top of individual key results. |
| Treat AI as infrastructure, not a project | AI changes culture, hiring, and measurement. It is a foundational technology, not a side initiative. CEOs who treat it as a project will be structurally behind. | Blosl has slowed DexCare’s team down deliberately on AI deployment, requiring every use case to trace back to a specific customer need before moving forward. Operating in healthcare, where AI decisions carry elevated stakes, this discipline keeps DexCare’s AI roadmap fully integrated into product strategy rather than running as a parallel initiative chasing market momentum. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “So often what I see is CEOs go out and hire really, really good functional leaders. But what you don’t do is get them to work as one engine.” — Matt Blosl, CEO, DexCare
- “Sales isn’t going to get there if they don’t have product to sell. Those interlocking metrics are more important than the actual key results you’re looking for enterprise wide.” — Matt Blosl, CEO, DexCare
- “Think of AI as just a new coding language. It’s a new foundational tool and technology that we have that we need to rethink how we go about doing what we do.” — Matt Blosl, CEO, DexCare
- “I don’t have a desire to be first to market in anything in that regard, unless we happen to be, because we found a way to address something that our clients want or need.” — Matt Blosl, CEO, DexCare
- “So often the starting point is no, let’s protect the core. Let’s focus. Focus on what got us here.” — Matt Blosl, CEO, DexCare
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs build a leadership team that produces fast, scalable growth?
CEOs who scale fast stop evaluating C-suite hires solely on functional expertise and start evaluating them on how they operate across functions. Matt Blosl, CEO of DexCare, hires for shared accountability: every leader on his team owns every key metric in the business, not just their department’s numbers. When a chief product officer understands that their job is to enable sales and retention, not just ship product, the entire leadership team functions as one engine. That multiplier effect on results is what separates companies that scale from companies that stall.
What is the first thing a new CEO should do when taking over a company that needs to scale?
The first move is almost always to narrow, not expand. Matt Blosl’s default when entering a scaling company is to protect the core value proposition before pursuing adjacent markets or new product lines. Companies exiting hyper-growth phases are often spread thin across too many initiatives. Simplifying what the company already does, owning one specific thing completely, earns the right to expand. Boards and teams typically expect new ideas from an incoming CEO. The highest-leverage move is usually the opposite.
How should a CEO approach AI without getting distracted by hype?
Matt Blosl’s rule at DexCare is to start from the customer problem, not the technology. The customer’s problem often stays the same. What AI changes is the company’s ability to address it, through faster development, through capabilities that were previously too complex to deliver. Treating AI as a foundational tool rather than a project means recognizing it will reshape culture, hiring, and measurement over time. CEOs who rush to deploy AI because competitors and boards are talking about it skip the step that determines whether any of it actually works.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Build Leadership Teams That Scale Their Companies
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.
