Over the past few months, I’ve been working quietly on something that feels both overdue and deeply personal.
Not a trend piece or the next hot take.
A playbook.
The WELL Founder Playbook exists for one simple reason; most founders are scaling companies faster than they are scaling themselves.
In HealthTech especially, the pressure is different.
You’re not just building a product, whilst operating in regulated systems, making decisions that affect real people’s health and lives.
You’re carrying investor expectations, team livelihoods, governance risk, and moral responsibility. All at once.
And yet, almost every framework for scale focuses on the organisation.
Very few focus on the founder system expected to carry it all.
What I see behind closed doors
Privately, founders tell me things they would never post publicly:
“I feel stupid for struggling, everyone else seems fine.”
“If I slow down, everything collapses.”
“I built this, but I don’t recognise my life anymore.”
“I got investment… and now I feel like I’m fighting every day to protect the original vision.”
These aren’t edge cases.
They’re patterns.
Founders don’t fail because they lack ambition, intelligence, or resilience.
They falter because pressure accumulates faster than their internal infrastructure can carry it.
Burnout isn’t sudden collapse.
Ethical drift isn’t malicious intent.
Loss of clarity isn’t incompetence.
They are predictable outcomes of scale without support.
Why I built The WELL Founder Playbook
After 15+ years building and scaling ventures across health, wellbeing, and highly regulated markets, and after experiencing betrayal, hypergrowth without resources, and the loss of a business through fraudulent investors, I reached a clear conclusion:
Scaling well is not just about systems, strategy, and capital.
It’s about whether the founder is well enough to lead under sustained pressure.
The WELL Founder Playbook is the human counterpart to the HealthTech Scale Playbook.
Where the Scale Playbook focuses on markets, regulation, and operating models, this one focuses on the person expected to hold all of it together.
Inside, I break down six pillars that consistently determine whether founders build their stamina and capabilities sufficiently to last the demands of scaling:
-
Physiological leadership – why biology sets the ceiling for decision-making
-
Cognitive clarity – how decision overload erodes strategy
-
Ethical scale – holding integrity when pressure compresses timelines
-
Commercial discipline – why avoiding hard commercial decisions weakens impact
-
Identity and boundaries – when the company becomes the self
-
Longevity thinking – building for decades, not funding cycles
This isn’t about slowing down or opting out of ambition.
It’s about lasting long enough to build something meaningful.
Why this matters - beyond the founder
One of the final chapters in the playbook is written deliberately with investors and boards in mind.
Because founder wellbeing should not be a “soft” issue.
It’s a material risk factor.
Exhausted founders create predictable outcomes:
-
poorer decision quality
-
ethical shortcuts
-
governance breakdowns
-
leadership churn
-
discounted exits
Healthy founders, by contrast, create clarity, stability, trust, and continuity.
The most sophisticated investors I work with are no longer just asking:
“Can this company scale?”
They’re asking:
“Can this founder sustain scale?”
The WELL Founder framework offers a way to answer that question early, before fragility becomes failure.
An invitation (if this resonates)
Alongside publishing the playbook, I’m opening a limited number of spaces to work directly with founders and leadership teams through Well Purposed.
My work sits at the intersection of:
-
strategy and execution
-
ethics and commercial discipline
-
founder health and company performance
I work best with post-Series A HealthTech founders who:
-
are scaling under real pressure
-
care deeply about integrity and impact
-
want clarity, not noise
-
and understand that sustainable companies require sustainable leadership
If the playbook resonates and you want to explore working together, you can reply to this email, message me on LinkedIn, or find details via Well Purposed.
No hard sell. Just a conversation.
What’s on (and where you’ll see me next)
A few things coming up that may be of interest:
-
HealthTech Summit – I’ll be attending this event and look forward to insights from the ecosystem and founder conversations
-
Working with Favikon – collaborating on HealthTech creator and thought-leadership trends for the year ahead
-
Podcast appearances – several conversations scheduled where we’ll go deeper into founder health, ethical scale, and leadership under pressure
I’ll share details as these go live.
What comes next
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing one pillar of the WELL Founder framework each week on LinkedIn.
Not as content for content’s sake, but as a slow, deliberate conversation about what it really takes to build, and last, in HealthTech.
If you’re building under pressure and feeling the weight of it, you’re not alone.
And you don’t need to break yourself to build something that matters.
—
Sara
Founder, Well Purposed
Author, The WELL Founder Playbook
Responses