Most CEOs value loyalty. But as Joshua Fairbairn shared with me on The Scaling CEO, loyalty to friends, family, or the systems that got you started can quietly strangle your company’s ability to scale.
Joshua is the CEO of Morpho MFG, a manufacturing partner that has helped clients produce millions of hardware units worldwide. His entrepreneurial journey began with just $500 in Guangzhou, China, a comedy gig that saved him from going broke, and a failed headphone startup that forced him to refund every dollar to his investors. From that failure, he built a company on grit, honesty, and innovation. His story is a raw look at when loyalty helps and when it kills.
From Headphones to Shovels
Joshua’s first product bombed. But failure gave him insight: it was better to help others build their products than gamble on his own.
“Everybody else was raising money, but they didn’t know how to work with the factories… I was like, I don’t know much, but I speak Mandarin and I’m here on the ground. I can help you more than you can help yourself.”
He pivoted to services, spending two years visiting up to three factories a day to master the supply chain. That grind became the foundation for Morpho MFG.
Fight, Don’t Fold
When I asked him about those early days with $500 in his pocket, Joshua gave advice every CEO under pressure should hear:
“There are days when I don’t want to do it and days when I feel like crap. But if I let those things be the conductor of my life, I’m not going to get anywhere. So just buckle in. Realize there’s going to be good days and bad days and do it no matter what.”
The message: fear kills momentum. Fight creates it.
Build Products That Can Be Made
Joshua sees a dangerous blind spot in hardware startups: they focus on marketing and sales while ignoring manufacturing reality.
“We had a customer… they had a $300,000 design from some fancy firm… I looked at it and almost laughed. It was a very pretty picture, but it’s not designed for manufacturability.”
CEOs must remember: renderings don’t scale. Only manufacturable designs do.
The Loyalty Trap
Joshua admits his biggest mistake: hiring friends and family long after the business outgrew them.
“What got you here won’t get you there… I kept wondering why we weren’t scaling faster. And it hit me: I’d just been hiring my friends who didn’t really have any specialty.”
Loyalty blinded him to the need for specialized talent. For CEOs, the lesson is clear: don’t let your loyalty to early hires kill your company’s future.
Quality Requires Saying No to Growth
Joshua thought scaling meant more customers. His veteran CFO and COO told him otherwise: slow down or quality would collapse.
That rude awakening led him to delegate system-building to experts. The takeaway: CEOs must hire leaders better than themselves and empower them to enforce quality at scale.
AI as Incremental Scale
Joshua is pragmatic about AI.
“Anybody not using it is going to find themselves replaced, not by AI, but by people using AI better than them.”
At Morpho MFG, AI streamlines design and customer management, but humans still do most of the work. For CEOs, the lesson is to embrace AI as a multiplier, not a miracle.
Final Takeaway
Joshua Fairbairn’s story is a reminder that loyalty can be lethal when it locks you into outdated people or systems. Scaling requires discipline: hire specialists, enforce quality, and embrace AI as a tool, not a threat.
I’m Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs who want to scale without letting loyalty hold them back. On my podcast, I uncover the strategies elite leaders use to grow bigger, faster, and with the right team in place.
Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO with Joshua Fairbairn to learn how grit, pivots, and tough choices build companies that last.
