How to navigate the tension between personal identity and business identity as your company scales
Every founder starts as the face of the business. Early customers buy into you, your story, your credibility, your energy. But as companies grow, the centre of gravity often shifts. The personal brand that once powered growth can begin to hold it back.
This article looks at why it happens, and what you can do when the company brand finally needs to stand on its own legs.
You'll learn how to spot the early warning signs, how to manage the transition, and how to protect your team, your culture and your equity narrative while doing it.
Every founder starts as the company’s heartbeat. In the early days, customers weren't buying the product because of the founder’s conviction, credibility, and their story.
That closeness is an asset at first, one which accelerates trust. It gives the brand a human face when the business barely exists.
But as companies grow, something subtle, and often uncomfortable, happens.
The founder’s personal brand can start to overshadow the business itself, and there can be tension between personal visibility and organisational maturity.
In the early years, Neumann was the WeWork brand, charismatic, visionary and central to the company narrative.
But as the business scaled, his personal behaviour, governance decisions and public persona began overshadowing the company’s value proposition. When WeWork attempted its 2019 IPO, investor concern centred less on the business model and more on Neumann’s leadership and control structure, ultimately leading to the IPO’s collapse and his removal as CEO.
In situations like this, the brand becomes emotionally tied to the founder’s actions, which can be an enormous operational and reputational risk.
When customers, investors or employees struggle to separate the founder from the business, the company’s resilience is compromised.
This is where tension builds. Growth introduces complexity in governance, with multiple stakeholders, diverse teams, external scrutiny, and suddenly the founder-as-brand model stops scaling.
Here’s what typically happens:
If every major sale, investor conversation or press moment needs the founder’s name attached, the company can’t scale beyond the founder’s capacity.
For example, Gymshark’s Ben Francis stepped down as CEO in 2017 because the company needed operational leadership beyond what he could personally provide. He has spoken openly about this transition and why it mattered for the brand’s growth
The more the founder dominates the brand, the more investors consider several questions:
This is common in scaling companies. For example, Bumble’s IPO documents made specific reference to Whitney Wolfe Herd’s public profile and its material impact on the brand, explicitly flagging it as a risk factor.
The founder overshadows the product. People stop talking about value and start talking about personality.
That’s fine for influencers, but not so good for a company trying to build sustainable enterprise relationships.
If everything is routed through the founder, employees can feel like executors, not contributors.
It becomes harder to retain senior talent who want their own leadership footprint.
When the founder’s personal brand crowds out the company, decision-making slows, risk escalates, and cultural cracks begin to show.
You don’t need to erase your founder's story, but you do need to rebalance it.
The most successful companies create space for the founder and the brand to coexist, each doing a different job.
Think of it like brand architecture.
For example, Satya Nadella at Microsoft rebuilt the brand by shifting the centre of gravity away from Bill Gates’ legacy and towards a modern cultural narrative grounded in empathy and innovation. Nadella’s interviews and writings show how intentional this reset was.
To avoid the founder bottleneck:
This creates resilience, which is a critical factor for investor confidence and cultural stability.
If the founder holds all the power, all the visibility, and all the equity narrative, the company is fragile.
Practical steps:
Vestd data consistently shows that organisations with clear, structured equity frameworks report higher alignment and retention, because the value sits with the company, not an individual.
“This company isn’t just built on me. It’s built on us.”
Customers need to understand:
“You can trust the brand, even when I’m not in the room.”
Investors need reassurance:
“The company is designed to operate independently of my personal profile.”
This shift strengthens confidence across the board.
Creating distance between the founder identity and the company identity is a growth milestone, not necessarily a dilution of influence.
Your personal brand got you here. But the company brand will take you further.
At some point, every founder faces the same decision.
Managing this transition with clarity, fairness and structure isn’t just good governance, it’s an investment in your team, your culture and your long-term valuation.
An employee share scheme, managed through Vestd, is one way to link your company’s success directly to your team’s rewards and to turn growth into a shared goal.
Book a call to find out how.