Nobody Was Expecting You

It was a Saturday afternoon in Chennai, and the accountancy team was working.

Six people, heads down, producing the financial overview the founder needed for a call the following morning. Outside, the city was doing what Chennai does on a Saturday — loud, bright, indifferent to the working week. Inside, on the third floor of a building that announced itself to nobody, the team produced numbers in the particular focused silence of people who know exactly how much is riding on getting them right.

To reach this office, you had to know it existed. Past a small telecommunications shop on a busy shopping street, through a gap that did not announce itself as an entrance, up three flights of concrete stairs that bore no signage, no directory, no indication that anything significant waited at the top. The kind of office that made sense from the inside and was invisible from everywhere else.

Ajay had finished his work in the UPS room. Early thirties, short-cropped hair, and an Iron Maiden t-shirt—a flaming mummy clutching a chainsaw, rendered in the maximalist style of classic heavy metal cover art. He had spent the morning maintaining the battery stack that kept the office running during the power cuts so familiar to anyone dependent on the Indian grid. The work was done. The meeting room was available. His helmet sat on the table beside the laptop, and his biker boots—the kind that have seen serious road time—were up on the table as well. He had made himself entirely comfortable in the founder's chair, the large LED screen used for hybrid meetings during office hours pumping out something at 100 beats per minute.

It was, from his perspective, a perfectly reasonable Saturday afternoon.

The shy knock at the glass door was almost inaudible beneath the music.

The finance team looked up. At the door stood a young Japanese man—impeccably dressed, early thirties, with the particular composure of someone who has been sent on a mission and intends to complete it properly. He asked, politely, for the founder.

Ajay looked at him. Turned down the volume a single notch. And told him, with the casual authority of someone who was clearly in charge of the place, that the office was closed and he could come back Monday morning. Then he turned the volume back up and returned to his laptop.

The visitor hesitated. Asked again, as he was promised a meeting. The finance team—kinder, more aware of what was happening—explained that the founder was currently on a plane to Europe for business meetings. And there was no one else to call. They offered a business card with an email address. If he could write, everything would be handled in the proper way.

The young man looked at the card. Then at the room. Then at Ajay, settled in the founder's chair with his feet on the table and his flaming mummy chainsaw mummy on full display.

He bowed. Squeezed the card in his hand. Turned and left the way he had come—down three flights of unmarked stairs, past the telco shop, back into the Saturday street where Chennai was preparing itself for another packed cricket game.

The finance team scolded Ajay for being unfriendly to a visitor who had clearly been sent on something important. He shrugged.

He was not wrong, exactly. The office was effectively closed. Monday morning was the correct answer to most questions asked on a Saturday afternoon.

He just did not know—could not have known—that the young man at the door had flown from Japan to evaluate this company as a potential supplier. That his visit was part of a formal selection process. That what he had come to assess was not just the product or the price but the organization itself—its professionalism, its readiness, its capacity to be trusted with a long-term relationship.

What he assessed, instead, was Ajay.

The company had started well. Genuinely well—international clients, real projects, a founder whose deal-making ability was exceptional and whose presence, when available, made everything around him move faster and with more purpose. People joined because they could see what was being built. The early team was small enough that everything worked—twenty, thirty people, the founder knowing everyone for years now, problems solved before they became problems. The organisation functioning on proximity and trust and the often pleasant social cohesion that small groups generate without effort.

Then it grew.

The logic was sound. More clients meant more work. More work meant more people. Team leads made the case—we need to expand, the demand is real, and the capacity is not there. The founder agreed and moved on to the next deal.

What arrived was not quite what was needed.

The salaries were modest—competitive within the local market but not enough to attract the candidates who had options. The candidates who accepted were not always the ones most wanted. And the ones that accepted, regularly found better offers before their start date. Not seldomly, new hires decided to walk away in their first month when the full scope of the chaos became clear. This became a pattern that everyone mentioned and nobody solved.

The ones who did arrive were young, credentialed, and largely unprepared for what the roles actually required. While MBA's were common, independent judgment was rarer. The gap between the qualification and the capability was wide enough that the people already doing substantive work found increasing portions of their days consumed by explaining, correcting, and redoing. One untrained junior is manageable. Two create conflicting outputs. Three or four, and the senior people who were hired to produce results find that producing results has become the thing they do least.

The organisation hired for capacity and produced something closer to the opposite. Not because anyone made a bad decision. Because the infrastructure to absorb, direct, and develop new people at this pace was never built. The management layer—the people between the founder and the teams who would have made absorption possible—did not exist. Had never existed. Had never quite been needed until suddenly, with somewhere around fifty or sixty people, it was needed very badly and was not there.

The same logic extended to everything. Financial platforms offered by the major Western providers seemed expensive from the Indian perspective—say, USD 1,500 a month. In Oslo or Zurich, that amount barely covers eight to twelve hours of paid labor, making the investment in proper financial infrastructure a straightforward decision. In Chennai, the same amount buys three junior full-timers who could do a lot of spreadsheeting, besides other things. So juniors it was. Which is why, on that particular Saturday afternoon, six members of the accountancy team were manually reconciling bank statements, GST reports, and project financing records to produce an overview the founder required for a Sunday morning call—an overview that any halfway decent financial platform would have compiled within ten minutes, on a Friday afternoon.

The founder, meanwhile, was travelling.

This is not a criticism. Deal-making founders travel. This one traveled more than most, because the deals he was making were genuinely global and genuinely significant—Singapore, Geneva, New York, back to Chennai, then to Accra, then somewhere else. Conferences. Regulators. Partners. The next transaction that would fund the next phase.

He was doing what he did best. What the organisation depended on him to do.

But the organisation was now seventy, eighty people. And the informal coordination that had worked at twenty-five or thirty—the founder knowing instinctively what everyone was working on, being available to course-correct in real time—had become physically impossible. The threads he had always held personally were now too many and too dispersed for any one person to hold.

Emails accumulated. Messages went unread for days. New tools were introduced: Monday, Notion, Trello, Slack, Xero, and Pipedrive. Some were actually rather useful; most proved to be just a temporary waste of already scarce resources. Tools can help to centralise communication and information, but they cannot make decisions—and decisions were what the organisation needed most. Decisions that required his input sat in queues that nobody could move. Documents circulated in multiple versions because the definitive version required direction that was always pending. Nobody would sign off because a new version was always coming, which required input that was always elsewhere.

And into the space where direction should have been, human nature did what it always does. New centers of gravity formed. Teams that had been collaborating began competing. Certain people began acting with authority they had not been given, because someone had to and nobody else was doing it. Arguments emerged about which function was truly central and therefore deserved more resources.

The people caught in the middle—the majority, who had come to do good work—found themselves spending increasing energy on internal navigation. They could see what was happening. They found it somewhere between baffling and demoralizing. And underneath everything, quiet and uncomfortable, a thought that nobody said out loud: we actually got more done when we were half this size.

The founder returned from each trip to find the financial pressure slightly higher than when he left. His response was the only one available to him—the one that had always worked before. More appointments. Larger projects. More deals. Which required more travel. Which created more absence. Which deepened the vacuum.

The loop closed. And tightened.

On a Saturday afternoon, somewhere in the middle of all of this, a young man arrived from Japan.

He had been sent to evaluate a potential supplier. He had found the address, navigated the busy shopping street, squeezed past the telco shop, and climbed three unmarked flights of concrete stairs. He had knocked, quietly, at a glass door.

And found Ajay.

Who was not the problem. Who was simply the most visible expression of an issue that had been building for years—the issue of an organisation that had grown past the point where one person's presence could hold it together but had not built the structure that would allow it to function in that person's absence.

The Japanese visitor did not know any of this. He knew only what he had seen: a room that belonged to whoever claimed it, and a founder who was somewhere in Europe. A business card was pressed into his hand by a finance team that was kind but could not answer the question he had really come to ask: Is this the right organization for us to start working with?

The answer was in the room. In the Iron Maiden t-shirt. In the feet on the table. In the shrug.

Ajay was not in charge. But in the founder's absence, nobody else was either.

And that, in the end, is what the room said.

Why this happens so consistently—and what thirty years of organizational research tell us about the invisible threshold every growing company crosses—is in the next layer: When the Tribe Outgrows Itself.