Calm Scaling. Founder Burnout. Agency Growth. Leadership Breakdown. Culture Reset. Operational Excellence.
In this Episode -
Dee Dang talks about scaling to 120 people before burning out and being forced to rebuild.
What you'll learn:
• How to find your ideal pace
• How to run time and energy audits
• How to rebuild culture and ownership
• How to scale without breaking yourself or your team
Scaling a business often looks like success from the outside. Revenue climbs. Headcount grows. Client wins stack up. But inside the mind of a founder, the path upward can feel like suffocation. This episode of The Scaling Paradox dives into the truth few leaders will ever admit publicly. Scaling does not break a company. Scaling exposes what is already broken. And for Dee Dang, co founder of the performance growth agency Right Hook, the moment of reckoning came fast and hard.
In this deep dive conversation, Dee shares how he scaled his agency from early Facebook ads work into a full service DTC growth partner supporting seven and eight figure brands. At its peak, the agency hit 120 employees. The demand was real. The growth was real. The pressure was real. Then the cracks appeared. Quality dipped. Middle management bloated. Systems fractured. Culture drifted. And a failed delivery in front of Shopify’s president exposed the underlying truth. The “sauce” that made the agency great had diluted.
This episode is a full founder level masterclass on rebuilding after scaling too fast. Dee dismantles the myth that more hustle is the answer. Instead he introduces the Calm Scaling framework. A leadership philosophy rooted in flow state fundamentals, Lean thinking from Toyota, continuous improvement, OKRs, time and energy audits, and the idea that pace is a strategic lever not a badge of honor. If founders do not define intensity, intensity will define them.
You will learn how Dee cut his team from 120 to 60 without killing morale. How he rebuilt culture through a single person at a time instead of town halls. How he used Slack threads to spotlight learning, not punish failure. How he restored ownership by pushing teams to share public learnings and sunshine failed projects. How he used Lean tools like A3 thinking, Gemba style observation, constraint mapping, and operational diagnostics to restore organizational clarity and flow.
You will hear what burnout looked like from the inside. How cortisol spikes, guilt, and performance decline created a loop of overwork. How the gym bro analogy explains why founders confuse intensity with identity. How to audit your time and energy to discover the work that drains versus work that drives outcomes. And how to calibrate your personal pace with your organization’s actual capacity. Dee explains why founders lose themselves when scaling and how to reclaim direction, joy, and clarity.
The episode dives into talent density, cultural reset tactics, Dunbar’s number, psychological safety, recognition loops, internal influence mapping, and how to build viral adoption for new behaviors. Dee shares why ownership must replace process worship. Why outcomes must sit above frameworks. Why great leaders do not mimic pace, they architect it. And why scaling sustainably means training like an athlete. Push with intention. Recover with intention. Build an engine for the long run.
If you are a founder, COO, agency owner, or operator scaling from 1M to 30M, this episode is essential listening. It will challenge your assumptions about growth, intensity, leadership, team design, and cultural alignment. It will give you practical tools for diagnosing problems, setting pace, and rebuilding organizational systems without burning out your team or yourself. And it will remind you that calm is not the opposite of ambition. Calm is the multiplier of ambition.