What happens when the founder who built a business to $10 million becomes the very thing keeping it from reaching $50 million?
In this episode of the Business Builder's Playbook, host David Bush sits down with Maria Trysla — a former two-time CEO and multi-year CMO of fast-growing technology companies who now works as a revenue architect and go-to-market executive advisor. Maria specializes in helping companies in the $5M to $50M range diagnose what's quietly stalling their growth and build the repeatable systems to get past it.
Here's what you'll learn by watching or listening to this full episode:
• How to spot the early warning signs of a CEO growth plateau before it stops your momentum completely
• Why telling your sales leader to hire more people is almost never the answer to a growth problem — and where the real issue is hiding upstream
• How to shift from episodic, founder-driven activity to a system-driven revenue engine built on predictable pipeline
• How to move from being "founder-led" to "founder-inspired" — and why that distinction determines whether your company can ever scale past you
• Why treating customer success as a service function instead of a strategic growth driver is quietly draining your expansion revenue
• How to use an inside-out, outside-in discovery process to uncover the real problems hiding underneath the surface-level symptoms
• Why your acquisition, retention, and expansion conversations should be happening with equal urgency — and what it costs you when they're not
• How to remove "decision friction" from your organization so pipeline creation accelerates instead of waiting on you
• How AI can surface the expansion signals already sitting in your customer data, without digging through spreadsheets
• What most companies get wrong about aligning sales, marketing, customer success, and product around shared revenue metrics
Find all the show notes and links here: https://www.businessbuildersplaybook.com/Maria-Trysla