What Table Are You Sitting At?
My dad has been giving business advice for longer than I've been alive. He doesn't dress it up. He just says the thing. So when he told me that the way you manage ten people is completely different to the way you manage thirty, I didn't expect him to call it "coffee table management" — but honestly, it's the most useful framework I've heard in years.
Here's what he means.
Every business starts the same way. Small team. Everyone in the same room — or close enough to it. You know what everyone's working on. Decisions happen fast. Communication is easy because you can just lean across and ask.
Dad calls this the Coffee Table stage. And he's right — it works brilliantly. Until it doesn't.
The problem isn't growth. Growth is the whole point. The problem is when businesses grow out of one table without realising they needed to move to a different one. They add people to solve a capacity problem, when what they actually have is a structure problem. And by the time the cracks show, they've usually been there for a while.
So here are the four tables — where you are, what it means, and what you need to be thinking about before you need to be thinking about it.
The Coffee Table (1–10 people)
This is where most of us start. You don't need layers of management because you are the management. Communication is direct. Decisions are fast. If something goes wrong, everyone knows about it immediately and you sort it out over, well, coffee.
The trap here isn't the Coffee Table itself — it's getting so comfortable at it that you forget to build anything under it. At ten people, you need clear roles. You need to know who makes what decisions and when things get escalated. Not because it's complex right now, but because it will be. The businesses that navigate growth well are the ones who start building good habits before they have to.
The Boardroom Table (10–25 people)
Dad's rule of thumb: when you hit ten, start preparing for thirty.
Because somewhere between ten and twenty, Coffee Table management stops working. You can't talk to everyone directly anymore. Decisions that used to happen naturally now need a process. And if you haven't started thinking about structure, you'll feel it. Not catastrophically — just as a low-level friction that gets louder every month.
This is the stage where roles need to be clearly defined, management layers need to be intentional, and somebody needs to own the rhythm of the business — not just the results. The Boardroom Table is where the real foundations get laid.
The Conference Suite (25–100 people)
By now you've got departments, you've got layers, and you've got people in the business who've never met the founder. Communication doesn't happen automatically anymore — it has to be designed. At this stage, the issues that were small and manageable at twenty-five can quietly become structural problems by fifty if nobody's paying attention to them.
This is where dad does some of his best work. Not because the people are wrong — they rarely are — but because the architecture needs looking at. How are decisions being made? Are the right people in the room? Is the business running on clear governance, or on whoever shouts loudest?
The Auditorium (100–200+ people)
At this scale, the business runs through systems. The leader's job isn't to manage every moving part — it's to make sure the structure beneath them is strong enough to hold the weight. If the Boardroom Table stage was skipped or the Conference Suite wasn't navigated properly, the Auditorium amplifies every weakness. What felt like a communication issue at fifty people becomes a real crisis at two hundred.
The bit I find most useful
Dad has a principle — one he's carried for years — that one person can effectively manage about eight direct reports. Beyond that, you need another layer of leadership. Not because the person isn't capable, but because the human capacity for meaningful oversight has limits. You'll see this everywhere once you look for it: in military structures, in board compositions, in call centres, in farms. The number varies slightly by context, but the principle holds.
And here's what that means practically: organisational stress doesn't announce itself. At ten people, you won't feel it. At twenty, you'll start to notice something. At thirty, if you haven't made changes, you'll know about it.
The question isn't whether your business will grow out of its current table. It's whether you'll be ready when it does.
We work with businesses at every stage of this — from the ones who are still at the Coffee Table and want to get the foundations right, to the ones sitting in the Conference Suite wondering why things feel harder than they should. If you want to know which table you're actually at — and what the next one looks like — that's exactly the kind of conversation we're here for.
