From Action Junkie to Steward of the Ecosystem: Kristof’s Growth Story

Kristof De Maeyer learned to lead by working with the undercurrents of a fast-growing SME.

It is a familiar tension for every SME leader with growth ambitions: you can feel that the organization needs clear strategic direction, yet before you finish your first cup of coffee, you are already knee-deep in operational issues again. When an internal problem is about to blow up, a project seems to be going off track or a client sends out an SOS, the instinct is almost always the same: jump in and fix it yourself.

Kristof De Maeyer knows this dynamic all too well. As COO of All Sport Group, a fast-growing sports distributor, he has seen the company grow over the past ten years from 40 to 110 employees and expand from a business focused on the Benelux to an organization active across Western Europe.

That growth also brought an important realization, and one we will explore more deeply here: what helps you get a 40-person company running smoothly can become exactly what holds you back when you grow to 110.

The FOMO of Operational Detail

For anyone who has built an organization from the ground up, doing is often the comfort zone. “It feels very familiar to stay in the operational side of the business because that is what you know,” Kristof says. “As a leader, you are automatically drawn to wherever the operational need is greatest. The reason is obvious: people know that you understand the situation and can step in immediately to defuse it.”

As the company grew rapidly, however, that same mechanism became a trap.

“I’m addicted to action and movement. It’s very tempting to roll up your sleeves and jump in yourself when something needs to be done. That is also how you build a strong company culture. At some point, though, you start to feel that this is exactly the part you need to let go of a little.”

The shift from constantly jumping in to put out fires to actually letting go was not something that happened overnight. It was more an exercise in learning to sit with the discomfort, Kristof says.

“At first, it’s quite an experimental process. A little bit of vulnerability and a little bit of letting go. In that first phase, it created a lot of stress, pressure and uncertainty. Because, of course, the team automatically looked at me to take the first step. After a while, that becomes paralyzing for everyone involved.”

This shift in leadership style brought another challenge for Kristof too.

“The faster the company grows, the more distance there is between people. In the beginning, it’s great because you know everyone and communication is easy and direct. I have to admit, I really do miss that sometimes, that sense of connection with people.”

Still, he believes it was the right move.

“When you hand things over, you have to trust that they’ll get done. You can’t keep checking whether everything is happening exactly the way you would do it yourself. You have to let the process run and accept that there are different ways to get to the same outcome, or even to outcomes I would never have thought of myself. That’s part of learning to let go. And yes, sometimes that feels uncomfortable.”

Leading the process, not the content

Learning to let go changed the way Kristof saw both his role and his team. No longer as the person who had to do everything and dictate every move, but as the steward of the whole.

“An organization is a living system,” Kristof explains. “When you are growing fast, it is crucial to find the right balance between the people who have been there for a long time and new talent. It would have been much harder for me to transform my role without bringing new people on board. At the same time, a completely new team is not the answer either. Without the people who carry the history of the company, you lose part of its cultural DNA.

What really gave us a boost was the combination of people who had grown with the company from the inside and new talent coming in.”

This new way of leading did not just help the company grow. It gave Kristof more room to grow too.

“My role today is to tell the story. When you are too caught up in the day-to-day running of the business, you simply do not have the space for that. Once you start telling that story clearly, you notice that the right people are drawn to it. In our strategic team, that has led to a perfect fit. Your vibe attracts your tribe. It really is true.”

Alongside telling the story, Kristof now sees his role primarily as looking after the ecosystem within the organization.

“Today, I focus much more on the process than on the task itself. How are people gathering information? Where are they getting stuck? Are they moving at the right pace? I keep an eye on the system as a whole and look for where I need to intervene so the team can move forward again, rather than stepping in and helping with the work itself.

It is a constant movement between checking in and stepping back. In a way, I have become a kind of custodian, someone who looks after the whole and gives people the trust to move.”

This new way of leading did not just give Kristof more breathing room. It also changed the way the wider organization operated.

“At first, people in the team still came to me for confirmation: ‘Can I really make this decision on my own?’ My answer was simple: ‘Go for it. I trust you completely. And if you feel unsure, we’ll talk it through together.’

Instead of one small team making all the key decisions, we now have seven strategic leaders. You can really feel what that has done to the energy in the system as a whole. It has grown exponentially.”

Scaling is a high-performance sport

Given that he leads a company in the sports industry, it is no surprise that Kristof compares scaling a business to elite sport. For him, growing an SME is not about sprinting endlessly. It is more like training for a marathon.

“No elite athlete performs at competition level 365 days a year,” Kristof explains. “High performance is about finding the right balance between training, recovery and rest so you can peak when it matters. Scaling a company works the same way. A lot of entrepreneurs think growth is a straight line up, but it is really more like a staircase.”

After every step up, the organization needs time to settle and recharge.

“There are phases where you push hard and grow, but then you need a plateau,” Kristof explains. “That does not mean standing still. It is a recovery phase where the team gets time to absorb the change, catch its breath, celebrate what has been achieved and recover.

If you jump straight from one growth spurt into the next, you end up draining the system. As a leader, you need the courage to say no to attractive opportunities simply to protect your people’s energy and make sure there is still enough breathing room in the organization.”

The courage to slow down

This way of looking at leadership was shaped in part by the opportunity to reflect with like-minded leaders in the Ecosystem Leadership Circle, facilitated by Debbie Baute.

“When you stop and slow down, you start to realize that this is actually where acceleration comes from,” Kristof reflects. “At first, slowing down feels completely counterintuitive, especially when you are addicted to adrenaline and action. But when you dare to slow down and allow yourself to be vulnerable, you discover how much strength there is in what is happening beneath the surface.”

Kristof’s journey shows that the biggest transformation in a scaling SME rarely happens in the organizational chart or the KPIs. It happens within the leader.

Ecosystem leadership is not about pulling even harder to keep everything moving. It asks us to have the courage to pause between periods of growth.

“In the end, it is very simple, even if it is incredibly difficult in practice,” Kristof reflects. “You cannot close your eyes to uncertainty. You have to embrace it. Give yourself and the organization time to breathe. It is from that place of calm that you create the space for a company not only to grow, but to remain healthy as it grows.”