In 1997, I joined the BBC as a finance director.
It is one of the most respected organisations in the world. The work is genuinely important. The people are brilliant. The brand is extraordinary.
And within a relatively short period of time, I knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t right for me.
Not because the BBC was wrong. It wasn’t. It was, and remains, a wonderful organisation.
Because the BBC and I were cut from different cloth.
I am, at my core, a commercial animal. I think in revenue, margin, and growth. I look at a P&L and immediately start asking what could be done differently. I want to move fast, test ideas, and build things. The BBC’s culture was the opposite of all of that, and it needed to be. That’s what makes it what it is.
But it also made me deeply, quietly, persistently uncomfortable.
I left in 1999. And it was one of the most important decisions I have ever made.
What the BBC taught me about culture
Here is what I learned from those two years that has informed every business decision I’ve made since.
Culture isn’t a values statement on a wall. It isn’t a team away day or a set of competencies in a performance review.
Culture is the invisible force that determines how decisions get made when nobody senior is in the room. It’s the shared understanding of what matters, what’s tolerated, and what isn’t. It’s the feeling a new employee gets in their first week that tells them, accurately, what kind of place this actually is.
And when you are fundamentally misaligned with it, no amount of talent, effort, or good intention changes that.
I was productive at the BBC. I was professional. I did what was asked of me and I did it well.
But I was not thriving. And the organisation was not getting the best of me either.
That mutual mismatch, where neither party is getting what they need from the relationship, is one of the most expensive things that can happen in a business. I see it in the founder-led businesses I work with all the time.
The lessons from thirty years of deals.
Add Then Multiply includes the full Consolidate chapter, with the real stories behind the deals, and what thirty-odd transactions actually teach you about building a business that lasts.
The three founders I see making the same mistake
After forty years in finance, I’ve come to believe that most founders make hiring decisions based on competence. They should be making them based on a combination of competence and culture. And when the culture piece is wrong, the competence rarely saves you.
Here is what it looks like in the businesses I work with.
The founder who built something real on a clear set of values, and then hired quickly as growth demanded it. Three years later, the team is capable but misaligned. The culture that made the first five employees extraordinary hasn’t survived the hiring of the next twenty. More time is spent managing tension than leading growth.
The founder with a strong brand and a loyal client base, who brought in senior talent to scale, and found that the new arrivals had a different idea of what the business stood for. Clients start to notice. The energy changes. Revenue holds but something essential has been lost.
The founder who is growing fast and needs to hire faster. The pressure to fill seats overrides the discipline to hire right. Twelve months later, the business is being built by people who don’t fully believe in the mission. The culture that made the early version of the company special is harder to find.
Three very different businesses. One shared pattern. Growth moved faster than the culture could carry.
What I did after the BBC
I left in 1999 and joined BSMG Worldwide as CFO Europe. A PR agency headquartered in New York, growing aggressively, making acquisitions, and hungry for the kind of commercial thinking that had felt out of place at the BBC.
I was in the right building.
Within two years, I had made my first seven business acquisitions, buying PR agencies across Europe. The work was fast, complex, and demanding. And I thrived in a way I simply hadn’t been able to at the BBC.
Not because I was better at BSMG. Because the culture and I were aligned.
That alignment, knowing what you stand for and building an organisation where the people around you share those values, is the third of the four foundations I build into every business I work with through Add Then Multiply.
Strategic financial planning. Operational excellence. People and culture. Technology and innovation.
The first two get the most attention. The fourth gets the most excitement. The third, people and culture, is the one that quietly makes or breaks everything else.
People and culture is often where the gaps show up first.
The Growth Readiness Assessment takes you through exactly where your business is today across funding, acquisition, consolidation, and exit readiness, before the pressure is already on.
What culture actually costs when it’s wrong
I’ve seen the cultural misalignment cost businesses more than any financial problem I’ve encountered.
More than a cash flow crisis.
More than a failed funding round.
More than a deal that didn’t close.
Because those things can be fixed with the right support and the right decisions. A culture that has drifted, or was never right to begin with, takes years to rebuild. And in the meantime, your best people leave first. They always do. They have the most options.
In one consolidation I led, we inherited a team whose culture was so different from the acquiring business that we lost thirty percent of the combined team in the first nine months. Not because of redundancies. Because people chose to leave. They read the new culture correctly within weeks of the deal closing and made their decision accordingly.
That loss cost far more than the redundancy programme we had planned for.
The question worth asking yourself today
I was lucky. I recognised fairly quickly that the BBC and I were not right for each other. I made the decision to leave before the mismatch became something harder to unwind.
Most founders aren’t that quick.
They hire someone who doesn’t quite fit and tell themselves it’ll work out. They watch the culture drift and assume it’ll course-correct on its own. They prioritise filling a seat over finding the right person for it.
And by the time the cost becomes undeniable, the work to fix it is significant.
So here is the question worth sitting with.
If you described the culture of your business to a stranger today, and then they spent a week in it, would their description match yours?
If the honest answer is no, that gap is worth understanding before it gets wider.
Know your numbers. Build your foundations. Then add. Then multiply.
What’s the cultural gap in your business that you haven’t quite named yet? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.
Before you go
📖 Get your copy of Add Then Multiply, including the full People and Culture chapter and what it actually takes to build a business that carries its values through growth.
⚡ Find out where your business stands today across all four foundations with the Growth Readiness Assessment.
✉️ Our weekly newsletter, The Multiplier Effect lands every Wednesday. Practical thinking on funding, scaling, and building a business worth owning.
David B Horne
Founder of Add Then Multiply & Funding Focus
Add Then Multiply is a fractional finance and business scaling consultancy helping founder-led businesses at £1M–£10M+ to Fund, Acquire, Consolidate, and Exit.
