This article is part of the Business Insights Series, based on a follow-up conversation with Anthony Tse, founder of Institute for Greatness (IFG). Anthony previously built and exited a group of kindergartens in Singapore and now coaches professionals and senior leaders through career transitions, leadership challenges, and personal development work. IFG combines one-to-one coaching, group sessions, and corporate workshops.
Our previous article, “Why resilient leaders turn setbacks into stories“, explored Anthony’s transition from finance to education and then to coaching and public speaking. It focused on how he reframed setbacks as opportunities and how his belief that careers are stories helps leaders reimagine their professional path.
This time, we focused on what happens once the foundations of a business are in place. Year two introduces different problems: how to increase visibility, how to build delivery systems that don’t rely solely on the founder, and how to maintain energy while preparing for scale. The questions raised in year two reveal patterns around identity, trust, and design. What kind of work feels worth doing? Which responsibilities need to stay close to the founder? What needs to be protected as you grow?
Decisions about delegation or visibility change how your business is seen by others and how you relate to it day-to-day. They influence trust, autonomy, and the type of leadership you model to your team and clients. When you’re the founder, these decisions also shape how much mental space you have to think, create, and plan what’s next. The conversation became a mirror for what many founders go through when early traction begins to stabilise. We talked about leverage, delegation, visibility, and what it means to build a business you still want to run in five years.
Scaling doesn’t start with headcount
In the first year of launching a service business, most of the work happens behind the scenes: defining the offer, testing delivery formats, and understanding which clients resonate with the work. For Anthony, this meant coaching professionals 1-to-1, posting regularly on LinkedIn, and recording over 200 hours of sessions. From the beginning, he was thinking about building a method. A structure that others could eventually deliver. That intention influenced how he looked at every task: through the lens of how it might contribute to a larger system. And that leads to one of his earliest decisions:
“There are certain topics that I don’t enjoy as much and I may not be as good on… so I outsource them to people more experienced.”
This line was telling, because it revealed how clearly he had identified his edge and made decisions to support it. Topics like internal company politics, for example, didn’t energise him. Rather than forcing expertise in areas he found draining, he mapped out a roster of collaborators who could cover those topics better.
This choice reflected a business intentionally designed to align with his own strengths and with the goal of developing a coaching method that others could one day deliver. That goal shapes how delegation works in his model.
The decision supports the creation of a coaching system that maintains his standards and thinking, while also allowing others to deliver it effectively. Delegating the areas he doesn’t enjoy or excel at helps him stay consistent with that larger intention: a business that reflects his voice but isn’t dependent on his presence.
Founders often feel pulled to be everything at once. Especially in the first year, when every client and every invoice feels like a lifeline, the instinct is to overdeliver and do it all yourself. This is a common trap. Many entrepreneurs (especially solo founders on a budget) struggle to let go. But that approach limits the business to the founder’s time and energy. What Anthony did instead was define boundaries early, as a condition for scale.
In fact, research shows that leaders who master the art of delegation see outsized benefits: a Gallup study of over 500 CEOs found that “high delegators” achieved three-year growth rates 112% higher than those who struggled to delegate, and generated 33% more revenue on average. In Anthony’s case, carving out what not to do created room for real growth.
I’ve seen this pattern with many of our clients at Serenichron. When a founder starts identifying what drains them and actively structures the business around their strengths, decision-making becomes faster and more sustainable. Instead of worrying whether they’re missing out on opportunities, they start designing the right kind of growth, one that fits their energy, values, and zone of competence.
Anthony spent time observing his own reactions to the work and used those insights to shape his offer in a way that felt aligned with how he wanted to build and deliver value. That’s how momentum starts to build in the right direction.
Year two is about leverage
Now that his systems are in place, Anthony is exploring how to shift from 1-to-1 delivery into formats that multiply his time. This includes masterclasses, corporate workshops, and expanding the reach of his YouTube channel. What’s interesting here is how the move toward leverage starts with the delivery model. Group training, workshops, and content all create more surface area for the same thinking to travel further.
“The goal is eventually to have a roster of coaches.”
This shift in structure mirrors what many founders face as they move from stability into scale. It’s a transition that demands new skills, packaging knowledge, systematising delivery, and trusting others to carry the message. Anthony spoke about preparing these formats carefully, and finalising team engagements in a way that doesn’t compromise the experience for participants. These transitions often unfold gradually and without formal announcements. It doesn’t involve a loud launch or a rebrand. It’s built through assets, presentations, recordings, playbooks, that allow consistency across settings.
Anthony described these decisions in terms of infrastructure, something structural that supports weight and scales with intention. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the real, structural way: something that supports weight later. That’s a valuable mental model. If you treat each content asset or workshop format as a beam or joint in the system, you naturally start to test for strength and adaptability. Does it hold under repetition? Can someone else run it? Will it work in another context?
The mindset here is calm, deliberate growth. It’s an approach we’ve also seen succeed with our clients at Serenichron: invest in building durable tools before you scale visibility. Because when the spotlight comes, you want your systems to hold. Anthony’s move from exclusivity to leverage is a buildout. And it’s the shift that, done well, compounds until it doesn’t.
Delegate the drain, keep the signal
Anthony keeps his core focus on client acquisition, coaching, and content. Nearly all other operations, including accounting, YouTube editing, and LinkedIn management, are outsourced.
“I always think about the trade-off: how much is my time worth? If someone else can do it cheaper or better, I outsource.”
Anthony’s approach to delegation is deliberate and clearly thought through. Delegation, for Anthony, aligns with the structure he’s been building since the early days of IFG. It reflects a long-term design choice aimed at sustaining focus and scaling effectively.
Every time-consuming task he removes is a way to redirect focus to the parts of the work that move the business forward. This includes refining presentations, planning keynote speeches, and guiding clients through high-stakes decisions.
He’s built an infrastructure that protects his attention and keeps the work meaningful. That’s a useful lens for other founders to apply. Outsourcing decisions can reflect priorities such as energy, expertise, and overall design, rather than being guided solely by cost. In this sense, delegation becomes a leadership behaviour: a way of modelling what matters.
As I shared during our conversation: “I found that the level of resistance business owners have towards this mindset is much higher than I ever expected.” The instinct to hold everything tightly can stop progress entirely. Especially when founders equate control with hands-on execution, rather than strategic direction.
The mindset that built IFG is one that resists busywork disguised as ownership. What Anthony keeps is signal. What he delegates is noise. That filter helps the business stay focused, even as it grows.
Growth shows up in jumps
Business expansion doesn’t usually follow a straight path. In Anthony’s experience, growth tends to move in waves, there’s an initial push, a stretch of consolidation, and then another surge.
“Usually there’s an inflection point, and then the viral, referral effects start.”
He compared this rhythm to what happened with the preschool business he previously ran. In year one, they focused on building operations and defining a reliable experience. It wasn’t until year two that the flywheel began to turn, thanks to referrals, satisfied parents, and more confident messaging. Now, in coaching, a similar rhythm is emerging. There’s greater structure, better articulation of value, more client testimonials, and the first signs of external visibility.
Anthony is focused on designing a structure that supports long-term growth, with each stage intentionally planned. And that idea, growth as staged momentum, deserves reflection. In many service businesses, we see founders overwhelmed by the demand to grow fast without clear infrastructure. The result? Friction. Quality dips. Teams stretch thin. Anthony’s approach is a counter-pattern: start with the systems, then layer visibility, then scale delivery.
“Once you put the right system in place, 3x or 4x becomes easier than 2x.”
This observation points to a practical truth: growth tends to accelerate more smoothly when supported by the right systems. With strong foundations, the business can absorb complexity without breaking pace. What sounds counterintuitive is often true in practice: it can be easier to scale fast when your base is strong than to double a weak model slowly.
This reflects the classic flywheel effect described by Jim Collins: each turn of progress builds on the last, compounding your investment of effort until momentum takes over. In other words, many small, consistent pushes in the right direction can lead to a seemingly sudden leap forward once the flywheel gains speed.
This way of thinking about growth changes how founders prepare. Instead of chasing attention early, the emphasis shifts to asset-building: presentations, onboarding flows, messaging templates, video libraries. These assets create surface area. They allow the founder to replicate results without diluting quality. It’s a mindset that privileges readiness over reaction.
For readers designing year two or three of their business, the key is to prepare for incoming referrals by ensuring the business is equipped to handle them. What systems are in place to receive them? What client experience are they walking into? Anthony’s story shows that growth is a test of how well the business has been built to absorb it.
Design for the business you still want in 5 years
Anthony approaches business building with long-term satisfaction in mind. The way he structures IFG resembles the work of someone designing something they want to live in. This shows up in how he’s building content, training models, and even in how he thinks about legacy. Anthony’s design approach includes enjoying the process of reaching people and maintaining a sense of pride in how the impact is made.
“Now I know this stuff takes a long time… but hopefully year two is the jump.”
His patience acts as a filter. Instead of reacting to visibility spikes or chasing trends, Anthony prioritises formats that allow ideas to live longer. He reuses effective posts, turns them into assets, and repackages them into deeper resources. His philosophy is to build once and let that work travel, something we often encourage clients to do when designing knowledge products or advisory offers. He treats each part of his business as something that should accumulate value over time. It’s a mindset that filters out distractions and focuses on enduring relevance.
As I shared with him: “If you’re writing slop, then yeah, people won’t read. But if you’re writing something crafted, purposeful, addressing a real pain, that can be 10 pages long and still land.”
Designing for longevity focuses less on length and more on depth. And that changes how content gets written, how teams are shaped, and how delivery models evolve. It helps to be recognisable and reliable where it matters most, rather than trying to show up in every space at once. Anthony’s design choices remind us that a well-built system rewards you twice: once when it helps you show up, and again when it continues to deliver value without you having to repeat the effort.
Conclusion: build before you broadcast
The founders who build businesses with staying power tend to treat Year 1 as the groundwork phase. It’s when they learn where energy flows best, what processes are sustainable, and what offer they actually want to scale. The ones who succeed later are often those who resisted the urge to rush visibility and instead focused on getting the structure right.
Anthony’s current trajectory reflects that choice. His coaching business has developed reliable delivery systems, growing reach, and a point of view that resonates across platforms. The systems now support his ability to scale without becoming reactive. This stage of growth involves preserving energy, making clean decisions, and staying aligned with a long-term vision.
For founders reading this, it may be useful to reflect on what phase you’re in. Are you still in the buildout, refining the offer, installing the systems, or are you starting to sense a readiness to scale? Either way, the question that matters most is whether your foundation can support what’s coming next.
Anthony also shares ideas regularly on his YouTube channel. You can explore his talks and interviews here: https://www.youtube.com/@Institute_IFG/videos
Want help building systems that can scale with you?
