Every growth-stage CEO eventually runs into the same uncomfortable math. The team that got a business to its current size is not automatically the team that can take it to the next one, and figuring out which people belong in which category is one of the hardest calls a leader makes. Drew Allen faced that math almost immediately after becoming CEO of Grace Technologies, and he faced it having already learned, a few years earlier, exactly how expensive it is to skip the hard parts of a decision.
That earlier lesson came at around twenty-five, when Drew personally championed a new product for a major consumer packaged goods customer, invested four to five hundred thousand dollars and nearly a year of engineering time, and watched it launch to what he calls crickets. The failure traced back to two choices he had made himself, using an outside firm instead of his own team and refusing to validate the idea with other customers out of fear they would not see the value. That experience shaped how seriously he would later take the discipline of building the right team, once the stakes were an entire company rather than one product line.
This story moves through four stages: Build, Break, Breakout, and Breakthrough. Each one shows up in the first three years after Drew took over as CEO.
Drew became CEO of Grace Technologies in January 2021, a family business his father had built, taking over during the tail end of the disruption COVID had caused across the company. He describes his own thinking about the timing bluntly. "I figured nothing could be as bad as 2020," he said, "so it was a good time to take over." The business itself had come through the year down roughly fifteen percent, better than it might have been, and had even completed a few acquisitions when depressed sales volumes made them more affordable.
What Drew inherited along with the company was its leadership bench. "Thin senior leadership team, not a lot of experience," he said, describing the group he had to work with. His father had been the linchpin holding much of the system together, and several of the people in senior roles were, in Drew's own assessment, not the right people to carry the business forward into its next stage.
The clearest obstacle was not a market shift or a lost account. It was that Drew's own leadership team was not built for where the company needed to go next. Within three months of taking over, he had to let go of his COO. Even his CTO, who remains with the company today, was part of what Drew describes as an immature engineering management structure that still needed to be worked out.
The recognition that followed centered on how Drew himself needed to think about people decisions, more than on any single person's performance. "I had to kind of separate that thought from letting go of and causing one person harm," he said. "It's much better to let one person go to keep this thing safe than to continue to harm this and put everyone in jeopardy by having the wrong leader or the wrong employee on the boat." The hardest part, he said, was not removing people who had clearly done something wrong. It was letting go of good people who had worked hard and simply were not the right fit for what the company needed to become.
The reflection Drew describes was less about any one hire and more about how much weight he had been putting on his own judgment alone. His board was telling him he needed to level up the team, while the business itself did not yet have the results to make attracting top talent easy. That was the real constraint. He was trying to build a leadership team strong enough to reach his own ambitions before the business had fully proven those ambitions were realistic.
The decision Drew made was to build a set of outside structures that would keep pushing him rather than relying on his own instincts alone, the same instincts that had convinced him a product would sell like hotcakes a few years earlier. He hired an outside fiduciary board of directors specifically to challenge and refine his thinking. He joined a Young Presidents Organization forum right after becoming CEO in 2021, meeting monthly with a peer group who knew the business well enough to speak into difficult calls. He also hired an executive coaching team, expanding what started as coaching for his CTO into coaching for the entire leadership group. Each time Grace Technologies made a new hire, Drew describes deliberately raising the bar a little further than the last one.
The external result took time to show up. Drew says it was not until the late second year or early third year as CEO that he felt he had a team in place he could actually rely on. "I know that if I put things in front of them, I know that they can execute them," he said, a level of trust that did not exist in his first months on the job.
The internal shift is what Drew now considers the more important outcome. He had once been the twenty-five-year-old who assumed conviction alone could carry a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bet, and who treated the resulting failure as a personal reckoning about his own judgment. As CEO, he applied a different standard entirely, one built around team capacity rather than personal certainty. "I think that a lot of people really underestimate how important your team capacity is," he said, "and the leadership in those roles."
The product that launched to crickets and the leadership team Drew inherited as CEO were different problems years apart, but they shared the same blind spot. Both were built on Drew trusting his own read of a situation without building in the outside checks that might have caught what he could not see himself. The product failure cost four hundred thousand dollars and two years of a stalled sales pipeline. The team he built afterward cost him uncomfortable conversations and the loss of people he liked.
The difference the second time was that Drew stopped treating those checks as optional. A board that could challenge him, a peer group that had seen the same mistakes, and coaches paid to tell him what he did not want to hear were not backup plans. They were the actual mechanism that let him catch, years earlier in the process, the kind of blind spot that had once cost him a year of engineering time and a product nobody bought.
