Systemising for Growth: What Founders Told Me
A couple of months ago, I ran a survey. I wanted to hear directly from founders before building the next version of my work. I wanted to understand what it's like for them to run a business.
What came back was honest, specific, and in many places, quietly moving. These aren't polished corporate answers. They're founders telling the truth about the overwhelm, the bottlenecks, the things they wish they could just fix overnight.
A few caveats before we dig in. The gender split skewed heavily female, which likely reflects my own audience. The comparisons between groups (particularly male vs female and across different business stages) are directional signals, not definitive conclusions. I'm sharing them because the patterns are interesting and worth reflecting on.
With that said, here's what I found.
Who responded
The founders who completed this survey were mostly women, with a smaller cohort of men and one respondent who preferred not to disclose their gender.
Business tenure ranged widely—from those still in their first year to founders five or more years in, with those two groups making up the majority of respondents.
Most had some form of support around them, with only a small number of fully solo founders.
Gender Breakdown
Business Tenure
Team Size
The challenges that came up again and again
When asked to select up to three challenges around systemising and delegating daily operations, four themes dominated.
Being stuck in day-to-day work. Nearly half of respondents feel they can't lift their heads to think strategically because operations keep pulling them back down.
Unpredictable revenue. The inability to plan ahead because income isn't consistent enough is both an operational and an emotional challenge.
Tool and workflow chaos. Many respondents feel like their systems are disorganised or overlapping. They're not working with a single clean setup as they're working around several messy ones.
No time to document or improve. The irony is real: the people who most need systems don't have the bandwidth to build them.
What's striking is that these aren't niche or unusual problems. They're the same challenges showing up across different business types, sizes, and stages. The details vary, but the shape of the problem is remarkably consistent.
This is something I've noticed in the work I do through HelmCrew. Founders often arrive thinking they have a unique problem. A revenue problem, or a team problem, or a tools problem. And sometimes they do. But more often, the surface problem sits atop the same structural pattern—a business that hasn't been built to run without the founder at the centre of everything.
System & Operations Challenges
What they want instead
The goals section asked respondents to select their top three outcomes from systemising their operations. The results were clear and perhaps surprising.
The most selected goals were a clear weekly rhythm and a smoother workflow. Not aggressive growth. Not a bigger team. Just predictability. The ability to know what the week looks like before it starts.
Close behind: feeling calmer and more in control, and improving revenue consistency. These aren't transformation goals. They're survival-and-sanity goals. They're the goals of people who have been running hard and want to breathe.
Rounding out the top six: freeing up 5–10 hours per week, building a more reliable team or support system, and delegating recurring tasks with confidence.
“These founders are telling us that calm isn’t a nice-to-have.”
I want to pause on calm for a moment because it features so prominently here, and not in the way we usually talk about business goals. These founders aren't saying they want a spa day. These founders are telling us that calm isn't a nice-to-have. It's what they're actually working towards. That it's the measure of whether the business is working.
I didn't build HelmCrew around the word "calm" because of this survey. But when it came back this consistently, across different stages and team sizes, I noticed it. It told me the word wasn't a marketing choice—it was the thing founders were actually reaching for. And I'd argue it's not a personality trait or a mindset shift. It's structural. It's what happens when operations are solid enough that the founder isn't the one holding everything together all the time.
Growth Goals
Do female and male founders experience this differently?
This was the question I was most curious about going in, and the most honest answer is: yes, but the data raises more questions than it answers.
I'm sharing what I found, along with what I think it might mean, while being clear that this sample isn't large enough to draw firm conclusions. Gender differences in how founders build and run businesses are something I'm genuinely keen to explore further.
Both groups share the same core pain: being operationally stuck and unable to think strategically. But the emphasis differs in interesting ways.
1) Revenue anxiety
Female founders put revenue unpredictability at the top of their list of challenges, ahead of being stuck in day-to-day work and not having time to document. Male founders led with being stuck in day-to-day work and tool disorganisation, and were more likely to flag not knowing what to delegate or where to start.
The revenue anxiety in female founders is something I keep thinking about. Part of me wonders whether it connects to the roles many of us held in our jobs before going out on our own. If we came from execution-focused positions rather than ones with commercial ownership, then running the revenue side of a business is genuinely newer territory. I can't draw that conclusion from this data, but it's a question worth sitting with.
2) Mental load
What I do think is more certain is this: women are conditioned to keep things together. At home, at work, everywhere. We carry the mental load—often without even realising it—and when we start a business, that same conditioning follows us. The operational overwhelm these founders are describing isn't just a business problem. For many of them, it sits on top of everything they're already holding at home.
Which is why the magic wand answers from female founders hit differently when you read them through that lens. "Trusting the flow of my systems and team without having to think about it." That's not just a systems wish. That's someone who is already thinking about too many things and desperately wants one area of their life where they don't have to.
The team setup difference is one of the starkest findings in the data. Female founders overwhelmingly rely on freelance or part-time support, with very few running a larger team. Male founders were the opposite, with the majority already having a team of four or more. Again, this isn't necessarily about ambition. It likely reflects different business models, industries, and choices. But it shapes everything about how these two groups experience the challenges of running a business.
3) Top goal
One more difference worth naming: male founders ranked feeling calm as their top goal above rhythm, above revenue, above everything else. Female founders ranked it third, behind rhythm and revenue consistency. I find that genuinely interesting. Whether it reflects different starting points, different definitions of calm, or something else entirely—I honestly don't know, but it's worth noticing.
Does business age change the picture?
Yes, and in a specific, almost predictable arc. But I want to push back on the idea that years in business is the right variable to look at. What actually drives the shift in challenges isn't time, it's complexity.
There's a well-known principle in startup circles sometimes called The Rule of 3 and 10: every time your organisation grows past roughly three people and then ten, everything breaks. The systems that worked, the way decisions got made, the way communication flowed—all of it stops working and has to be rebuilt for the new scale. The data here reflects exactly that. It's not that founders get more experienced over time and therefore face different problems. It's that as they add people, complexity compounds and the whole system has to be rethought.
The tool and workflow chaos finding make this concrete. Among founders with freelance or part-time support, less than a quarter flagged tool chaos as a challenge. Among those with a small team of four or more, that figure jumped to 70%. Tools don't multiply because of age. They multiply because of people.
With that framing in mind, here's how the challenges shift:
Under one year: Everything feels urgent at the same time. Revenue, tools, documentation, and delegation all came up equally across this group. There's no single dominant problem because the whole structure is still being built. This stage is less about systemising and more about surviving.
One to three years: This is where revenue anxiety peaks, sharply. Over 80% of this cohort flagged unpredictable revenue as a challenge, the highest rate among all groups. These founders have been going long enough to need consistency but haven't yet found it. This is the prove-the-model pressure point, and it's where I see founders trying the most things (think: coaches, courses, VAs, AI tools), looking for something that will make it click.
Five or more years: The challenge shifts entirely. Tool and workflow chaos, and trust dominate. These aren't new founders struggling to build. These are experienced founders tangled in complexity they've accumulated over time. They've crossed another threshold and—whether they know it or not, everything needs to be rebuilt for the scale they're now operating at.
What they've already tried, and what they want next
The vast majority of respondents have already taken action. Most have used AI tools to speed up admin or documentation. Many have hired a VA or freelancer, or worked with a consultant or coach. Only a small handful said they'd tried nothing yet.
This matters. These aren't people who haven't tried. They've tried, and something still isn't working, or isn't sticking, or isn't quite right. The problem they're bringing isn't ignorance. It's that the solutions they've found so far haven't fully solved it.
Solutions They've Tried
The coaching finding is the one I find most interesting. Female founders tried coaching at nearly three times the rate of male founders. And yet when asked what support they want going forward, both groups converged on the same answer: templates and plug-and-play systems, above everything else.
Of the founders in the one- to three-year cohort who tried coaching, only 17% want it again. That's not a reflection on coaching as a tool; it's a reflection on timing. At that stage, founders are drowning in revenue anxiety and operational chaos. A coach can give you brilliant frameworks and clarity, but you go home to the same chaos and can't implement any of it. What you actually need at that point isn't someone to think with, it's someone to help you do the thing.
This finding sits close to home for me. One of the things I've been most deliberate about at HelmCrew is making sure we've confirmed the diagnosis is right—and that the timing is right for the founder. The Offer Clinic exists precisely because of this: before anyone invests in deeper work, I want to make sure we've identified what's actually going on and whether this is the right moment to act. The survey reinforced why that matters.
Coaching readiness, from what this data suggests, looks something like this: too early in year one, often doesn't stick in years one to three, starts to land again from year five onwards. By that point, founders have enough infrastructure to act on strategic input and enough self-awareness to know they're entering a new era of complexity and could use a thinking partner to navigate it.
That's not a criticism of coaching. It's a case for meeting founders where they actually are.
Preferred Support
What founders wish they could fix overnight
When asked to describe the one thing they'd change about how their business runs, the answers were strikingly consistent in their emotional undertone, even when the specifics differed.
Female founders kept coming back to trust and release. Wanting systems and teams they could rely on without having to supervise, check, or hold together. The desire wasn't for more control. It was almost the opposite: to finally be able to let go.
Male founders wanted clarity and momentum. They wanted a business they could see clearly, and that moved forward without needing them at the centre of every decision."
And for the female founders especially, I think there's something deeper underneath these wishes than just wanting better operations. Home is not somewhere most of us can truly delegate. The mental load there is real and doesn't clock off when we sit down to work. The business might actually be the one place where we can build something we genuinely trust—something that doesn't need us to hold it together all the time. That possibility is what I hear in these responses. Not just operational relief but something closer to freedom.
What I'm taking away from this
A few things stand out as I look at these results.
Founders know something is wrong, but that doesn't mean they know exactly what to fix. They can feel it in the overwhelm, the firefighting, the revenue that won't stabilise. But knowing something is broken and knowing exactly what to fix are two different things. What they're looking for is clarity as much as solution—and ideally, both in a form they can actually act on. This is the part of the work I find most meaningful: not arriving with a predetermined answer, but helping founders identify the right problem before we talk about solutions.
Calm is a business outcome, not a personality trait. The goal that surprised me most was that founders—across gender, tenure, and team size—consistently came back wanting to feel calmer. Not more productive. Not faster growing. Calmer. I think that tells us something important: the founders who are ready to build differently aren't chasing more. They're chasing sustainable. They want a business that runs well without them having to hold everything together all the time. That's what good systems make possible.
The right support at the wrong stage doesn't work. Coaching, templates, courses, VAs, none of these are inherently the answer. What matters is matching the support to the complexity of where you actually are. A founder in their first year needs different things from a founder who's crossed the threshold into managing a real team. Getting that match right is the difference between investing in growth and investing in frustration. The services at HelmCrew are built around this—different entry points depending on your stage and what your business needs right now.
Experience doesn't make this easier; it just changes what's hard. The five-plus-year cohort showed that challenges don't disappear with time. They evolve. More tools, more team dynamics, more accumulated complexity. The work of systemising isn't something you finish. It's something you keep returning to, ideally with better tools and clearer eyes each time.
Running this survey gave me something I didn't expect: not just data, but a quiet confirmation that the problems I've been building around are real, widespread, and matter to the people carrying them. I'm glad I asked.
If you'd like to figure out where your business actually is right now and what it actually needs, the Offer Clinic is the place to start. It's a 90-minute diagnostic session where we identify which structural problem is holding your business back before we talk about what to do about it. Book your spot here.
If you completed this survey, thank you. Your responses shaped everything I'm building, and many of these insights will find their way directly into my work. I'll be sharing the Reset to Scale Starter Kit with everyone who requested it.
