Transforming Company Culture: From Founder-Dependent to Ownership-Driven

When I became Head of Product & Engineering at Advision, I inherited a classic founder-dependent organization. Every decision waited for my approval. Every problem landed on my desk. The team was executing tasks without understanding why, making interface changes that had no measurable impact, and spending cycles on work that didn't move the business forward.

I was the bottleneck, and worse — I had trained everyone to depend on me.

This is the story of how I systematically transformed that culture over six months, from a company built on founder energy to one where leaders owned their domains and drove meaningful results.

TLDR; Key Takeaways for Leaders

Start with clarity about what you want. You can't build a culture without knowing exactly what traits and behaviors you value. My four filters became non-negotiable standards.

Hire for ownership, not just skills. Technical competence without ownership creates smart followers, not leaders. Use interviews to test for real ownership thinking.

Create systems that force accountability. Weekly goals, OKRs, and strategy proposals aren't bureaucracy — they're frameworks that enable autonomous decision-making.

Make it their idea. People can only be truly accountable for strategies they develop. Give them frameworks, but let them own the thinking.

Measure what matters. You can't have accountability without visibility into results. Build dashboards that show real business impact.

The most important lesson? Transforming culture isn't about changing people — it's about hiring the right people and creating systems that enable them to take ownership. When you get that right, the culture transforms itself.

The Problem: When Smart People Stop Thinking

The symptoms were everywhere. In the beginning, I was still operating in VP of Engineering mode — jumping in to solve everyone's problems, telling people how to do their work, and making all the decisions. It felt efficient in the moment, but it created a dependency that didn't scale.

What I discovered was that I had hired a bunch of people who weren't leaders — they were followers. And a lot of that was my fault. I was the kind of person who would immediately step in and solve problems rather than teaching people to think through solutions themselves.

The result? A company where intelligent people had stopped thinking strategically because they knew someone else (me) would always have the answer.

The Foundation: Four Filters for Cultural Fit

Before I could transform the culture, I needed to understand exactly what kind of people I wanted to work with. After reflection, I identified four non-negotiable traits that became my hiring filters:

1. Honest and Transparent

If someone can't be honest with me and themselves, every decision after that is broken. This means admitting mistakes, speaking plainly, and not trying to dodge difficult questions or overhype achievements.

2. Confident and Quick Learner

I work fast and have years of contextual knowledge. I need people who can absorb information quickly and respond with confidence. If you're too worried about pleasing people or too afraid to speak clearly, you can't focus on driving results.

3. Problem Solver and Analytical

For years, I was the only one solving problems. That doesn't scale. I need people who bring knowledge I don't have, can detect problems I can't see, and can explain their thinking logically.

4. Ownership-Minded

No blame, no excuses, no "I thought someone else was doing it." I need people who see problems, raise their hand, and fix them. That's how systems improve and companies win.

Once I identified these traits, I started seeing gaps everywhere — in interviews, Slack messages, strategy documents, and daily interactions. I could finally articulate why something felt off about a person or decision.

The Interview Revolution: Testing for Ownership

Armed with clarity on what I wanted, I completely changed how I interviewed. Instead of jumping straight into technical questions, I stopped everything else and spent a month meticulously planning interview scenarios and questions designed to identify these traits.

I created scenarios where candidates could disagree with me and push back, because I didn't want people who would just go along with my ideas. Here are two examples:

Scenario 1: Pushback on Strategy "Let's say I want to double our content output and you think it's the wrong move. What do you say?"

Good answer: "I'd ask what business problem you're trying to solve. If you're trying to get more reach, maybe there's a better path. If you're looking at rankings, I'd show you data on diminishing returns at our current quality threshold."

Bad answer: "I'd just do it your way because you're the boss."

Scenario 2: Cross-Functional Problem Solving "You're driving tons of traffic to a page, SEO is happy, but Sales is not. What do you do?"

Good answer: "I'd run an audit on intent mismatch, look at the CTAs and page format, then get SEO, product, and sales in the same room to align on one goal: qualified traffic that converts."

Bad answer: "I'd ask SEO to fix it" or "I'd add more calls to action."

Each question targeted ownership, strategic thinking, or cross-functional leadership. I always wanted to walk away from interviews being smarter about the subject than when I went in.

The Ownership Test That Sold Me

The best example of real ownership came from a candidate who had worked at a company that got hit with Google penalties for what some call "parasite SEO." When Google changed the rules, their company lost significant revenue, and she was part of the team responsible.

When I asked what she learned, she explained the situation and then said: "We got sloppy towards the end. In the beginning, we were intentional and careful about which deals we took. We started getting lazy, and that's why Google penalized us."

I gave her a perfect excuse: "Wasn't it just bad timing? Google was rolling out penalties to everyone around then."

Her response was perfect: "No. We analyzed every competitor, looked at who got hit and who didn't. The ones who got sloppy got penalized. The ones who stayed disciplined survived. If we hadn't been lazy, we could have made it through, but we didn't. That was our mistake."

I had handed her an excuse for failure on a silver platter, and she said no — here's what really happened. That's real ownership.

The Transformation: Three-Stage Cultural Reset

With the right people identified and hired, I developed what I called the "Advision Turnaround Plan" — a systematic approach to transform the company from founder-led to distributed and scalable.

Stage 1: Culture Reset - Four Daily Rules

I established four core principles that every single person in the company needed to embody:

Clarity - Understand your job and responsibilities completely
Urgency - Make decisions quickly before problems escalate
Impact - Choose tasks that clearly help the company grow or save time
Ownership - Take full responsibility for your domain and help the team succeed

Implementation wasn't gentle. I sat with each leader constantly — mentoring, growing, and explaining what I learned. I forced them to make decisions about people on their teams who didn't meet these standards. This wasn't a "let's give them three months and see if they improve" situation. The cultural transformation needed to happen now.

I coached leaders on how to identify the right people, but I never told them who had to go or stay. That was their decision. My job was to make it absolutely clear why they needed to take action and what the signs were of people who didn't fit the culture.

Stage 2: Leadership Activation - From Permission to Ownership

The goal here was simple: turn leaders into decision-makers who run their departments without constantly asking me what to do.

I started with a Weekly Leadership Update system in Slack. Every Monday, leaders posted two goals they needed to accomplish that week. Every Friday, they replied with whether they met those goals or not. If they didn't, they explained why and what they'd do differently next week.

The first problem? The goals they were setting weren't aligned with what I thought needed to be done. I was constantly reacting after seeing their weekly goals, jumping in to correct course instead of providing clear direction upfront.

The solution was OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Each department developed quarterly objectives that we locked in together. Now their weekly goals had to tie back to these larger objectives. This gave them the framework to make decisions without constantly checking with me.

I had to do significant coaching on what constituted a real goal versus a task:

Task: "I'm going to finish 10 articles this week"
Goal: "I'm going to increase our NFL content indexation rate from 65% to 70% this week"

After 3-4 weeks of constant mentoring, they started to get it. I was finally getting a stream of weekly goals that were aligned with business objectives, were actual goals (not tasks), and were getting accomplished.

Stage 3: Visibility and Accountability - Making It Stick

The final piece was ensuring leaders could be truly accountable for their results. For that to work, their strategies had to be their ideas, not mine. If I told them what to do and it failed, they could always say "your idea didn't work."

I developed a Strategy Proposal Process — seven questions that took about an hour to answer but forced complete thinking:

What are we trying to build? (Single measurable outcome)
What's the biggest bottleneck right now? (With data/evidence)
What's the first lever we're pulling? (Specific first action)
Why is this the right lever? (Logic, data, or user insight)
What are we ignoring for now? (Explicit decisions about scope)
How will we know it's working? (30-60 day leading indicators)
If it fails, what do we do next? (Backup plan)

If leaders could present their ideas in this framework, I'd almost always let them run with it. It showed me they'd done their homework and thought things through completely.

Building the Dashboard Infrastructure

None of this accountability was possible without visibility into results. We had no dashboards, no way to tell if teams were productive or if strategies were working.

We built comprehensive tracking using Airtable and Looker Studio to monitor:

Revenue and conversion rates
Traffic quality and SEO performance
Content production efficiency
Team productivity metrics
Goal completion rates

Once leaders were setting their own goals, developing their own strategies, and could see real-time results, they became truly accountable. No more excuses, no more "I need to check with Brian" — because it was their idea and their system.

The Results: What Real Ownership Looks Like

The transformation took about six months, and the results were dramatic. Through this process, I uncovered issues everywhere — bad HR practices, excuse-making in development teams, management problems — but the system I'd built meant each leader took ownership of fixing their domain.

More importantly, every good hire I brought in made the system better. They pointed out flaws, shared best practices from previous companies, and contributed ideas that improved our processes. That's when I knew it was working — the culture was self-improving.