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Is Your Talent Scaling as Fast as Your Brand Is?

By Rashmi Dalvi
September 2026
| 5 min read

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Key findings

  • India’s fast-growing consumer brands are scaling rapidly, but their talent strategies, leadership capabilities and organizational structures often lag behind. This creates risks as growth stages compress and business complexity accelerates.
  • As brands scale, founders must evolve from central decision-makers into builders of leadership depth, while companies reassess whether early high performers can grow into larger, more complex roles.
  • Future-ready brands build leadership deliberately, blending internal promotions with external hires, and designing structures around the company’s current stage of evolution — not a distant, overly rigid end-state.

India’s fast-growing consumer brands — from beauty and fashion to food and durables — are scaling rapidly on the back of new products, new channels and new consumers. But how these “insurgent brands” are thinking about talent hasn’t scaled nearly as fast. For founders, investors and acquirers of high-growth brands, there is an urgent need to rethink their talent and organizational structure — or else risk hampering their chances of long-term success.

Amid accelerated growth, companies are jumping much more rapidly through the standard stages of brand growth — establishing product market fit; scaling for growth; expanding channels and markets; achieving profitable growth; and building institutional abilities. In markets like India, multiple growth stages are often compressed into just a few years, and the pathways through these stages often prove neither linear nor clearly defined.

As a result, roles are forced to evolve both quickly and constantly. Leadership capabilities, organizational structure and culture have little time to mature and adapt. For example, many direct-to-consumer brands that were focusing on offline channels were forced to pivot when the advent of quick-commerce changed the distribution game. They had to immediately develop or acquire talent with a specialized set of skills for an entirely new channel.

While growth itself is often viewed as the challenge, it is often the complexity that accompanies growth that creates the greatest strain on a business. Amid rapid and major change, many leaders struggle to adjust.

How talent needs evolve as consumer brands scale
Establishing product-market fit Scaling for growth Expanding channels and markets Achieving profitable growth Building institutional capabilities
CEO/Founder Product builder Scale operator Organization builder Capital allocator Institutional leader
Brand and marketing Founder-led brand Growth marketer Brand and performance leader Brand steward Category builder
Sales and distribution Direct sales Direct-to-consumer/marketplace lead Omni­channel builder National sales leader Institutional GTM leader
Supply chain and operations Fulfilment manager Operations lead Manufacturing and logistics leader Supply chain optimizer Global operations leader
Finance Founder as CFO FP&A/fundraising lead Strategic CFO Value creation CFO Public markets CFO
People/HR Recruiter and culture carrier Talent builder HR leader CHRO and capability builder Strategic CHRO

Breakneck growth can create a gap between a role’s needs and the talent filling it. Brands that once could rely on nimble, close-knit teams are suddenly struggling with decision making as they expand their leadership teams. Below are some consequences of these mismatches:

Founders often serve as the first CMO, product leader, CFO, recruiter and CEO, all rolled into one. As the organization scales, founders need to focus on building talent and enabling others to lead.

Yesterday’s high performer is not always tomorrow’s leader. As organizations grow, the execution-focused operators who helped build a business may no longer be the right people to help scale it. Identifying internal talent who can grow into larger roles can be a gamechanger for the brand. For investors and acquirers, the strength of potential leadership is critical to understanding whether growth can be sustained beyond the founder.

The founder’s role must also evolve. Founders often serve as the first CMO, product leader, CFO, recruiter and CEO, all rolled into one. As the organization scales, founders need to focus on building talent and enabling others to lead. The best founders deliberately seek challenging environments and surround themselves with people who can stretch their thinking.

Culture starts to change. As leadership expands beyond the early core team, changes in organizational culture are inevitable. Informal founder-led cultures give way to a more institutionalized cultures, which often lead to discomfort for the early team. In fact, many founders feel like they don’t recognize the company anymore.

Everyone cannot report to the founder. After serving as the central point for all decisions during the early phases, the founder simply cannot operate that way anymore as the company grows and matures. One CEO we worked with had 11 direct reports at his company of about 500 employees — neither sustainable nor sensible, and creating tensions as well as bottlenecks for decision-making.

While capability requirements evolve at every stage, the most successful brands proactively evolve their talent strategies to build for growth.

Below are some of the key steps for building the right team for the future.

Hire people for what they can do, not just for what they’ve already done. Founders and investors consistently tell us that, when it comes to hiring leaders from outside the company, intrinsic traits matter just as much as past experience. That said, while many founders say they are looking to hire people who are smarter than they are, few consistently follow through on this.

The most successful leaders are those willing to tackle unfamiliar problems, delegate effectively and build strong teams. They are comfortable hiring high-potential leaders and rewarding them for outcomes. For example, the founder of a consumer beauty company we worked with hired a new chief business officer — and promoted that person to co-CEO a year later because of the outsized impact they had brought.

The most successful leaders are those willing to tackle unfamiliar problems, delegate effectively and build strong teams. They are comfortable hiring high-potential leaders and rewarding them for outcomes.

Your next leadership team comes from both within and outside. As organisations scale, building leadership through both external hires and internal promotions creates balance. If all leaders are hired externally, it changes culture dramatically, just as only relying on internal hires can lead to stagnation. The challenge is identifying where an internal promotion makes sense, and which roles would benefit from a fresh external perspective.

Some clients say they want to hire talent from large legacy FMCG companies, and while this experience can bring strong process orientation and understanding of scale, leaders need to be able to combine entrepreneurial adaptability with institutional scale to be successful. This means identifying high-potential internal leaders who can grow into larger roles.

Design your structures based on stage of evolution, not on end-state. Organisational structures that work for older, longer-established incumbent companies may not translate well to high-growth brands. Instead of every function being designed around the organisation’s end-state goals and thereby reducing agility, a more effective structure would reflect the individual stability of each function. For example, more mature functions such as finance or supply chain might be better defined, whereas innovation or new channel development may have a more goal-based structure. Decision rights and ownership need to be clearly defined however to drive outcomes.

• • •

For founders, investors and acquirers, the challenge today is not just about finding talent, but about evaluating whether that talent is evolving at the same pace that the business is. Do you have a team strong and agile enough to adapt to the needs of today and tomorrow? Have you invested in leadership depth as a key growth lever? Are you assessing leaders based on their future potential rather than their past success?

The capability of your talent is as important a value-creation lever as product innovation, channel expansion or capital access. As brands scale faster than ever before, the quality of your leaders and your teams will become a competitive advantage.

The author wishes to thank Kriti Singh and Aarya Kothari for their invaluable contributions to this article.


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