In our recent interview with Raisul Kabir, founder and CEO of Brain Station 23, we explored one of the most challenging aspects of building a business: growth and scaling. When we last spoke with Mr. Raisul in 2019, Brain Station 23 was a 185-person company. Today, it's a nearly 1000-person organization—one of the largest software services companies in Bangladesh.
Scale is where most companies stumble. Many promising ventures plateau after reaching a certain size. Others collapse under the weight of their complexity. Understanding how to navigate growth—from small team to medium-sized company to large organization—is an existential question for any business with ambition.
The conversation, like several of our previous conversations with Mr. Raisul, offers rare insights into the mechanics of growth and scaling. Mr. Raisul doesn't deal in abstract theories. He walks us through the concrete, messy realities of growth: bringing in partners and making partnerships work, implementing organizational structure, hiring a CFO, learning to believe that bigger things are possible, and building systems that allow an organization to scale without falling apart.
Here are 15 key lessons from our conversation on growth, scale, and building consequential organizations. For more details and fascinating nuggets of insights, read the entire interview here.
In 2012, Brain Station 23 had plateaued at 60-70 people. Mr. Raisul felt stuck. "I felt like we had 'missed the bus' in software outsourcing," he recalls. "I felt that other countries had surpassed us and captured the market, leaving no room for growth."
Then he convinced his friend Mizanur Rahman to merge his company with Brain Station 23 and join as an executive partner. "When Mizan joined as an executive partner, that truly helped us. He also started in sales and marketing. This had a huge impact on our growth, suddenly unlocking huge opportunities for us."
The impact was dramatic. At one point, Mizan was handling 60-70% of Brain Station 23's total sales. Together, they could put the company on a renewed growth path. The company grew from 60-70 people to over 200 people.
The lesson here is that the right partnership can break through ceilings that seem impenetrable. When you're doing everything yourself, your own capacity and perspective limits you. A partner brings different strengths, different networks, and different ways of seeing problems. Together, you can make the pie bigger.
The partnership with Mr. Mizan wasn't smooth initially. "In fact, initially, there was some friction when Mizan joined," Mr. Raisul explains. "He was a solopreneur of his company. I had been operating and managing Brain Station 23 essentially as a solopreneur. When he joined as a partner, me accepting his input as a partner, and him accepting mine, became a challenge."
The friction escalated. "At one point, the partnership actually broke. He left because he wasn't feeling good about it. We then talked, reconciled, and worked together to bring him back. And this time we made sure we don't repeat the same mistakes."
Mr. Raisul's view: "Partnership is always difficult. It requires continuous work—it's kind of like a marriage. Sometimes the partner is upset, sometimes I am upset. We have to work together to address the issues. There will be friction and disagreements, but when trust exists, you can work it out."
This is the reality most people skip when talking about partnerships. It's not just about finding the right person—it's about doing the work to make it function when things get difficult.
When it comes to choosing partners, Mr. Raisul says it is useful to focus on two qualities above all: integrity and empathy.
"Integrity means being honest and keeping your word," he explains. "If a partner has integrity and keeps their word, this ensures a sustainable partnership. If a partner has a history of lacking integrity or commitment—constantly failing to keep their promises—working out the partnership becomes extremely challenging."
But integrity alone isn't enough. "Next is empathy—the ability to understand and acknowledge the other person's perspective. When empathy is present, even with friction, you can work things out."
He's seen partnerships fail even with high-integrity people who lack empathy. "I've seen partners who have high integrity but cannot explain or understand another person's perspective, which makes things difficult. If you can't communicate with a partner and understand each other well, you can't make a partnership work."
When evaluating potential partners, look beyond their skills and track record. Observe how they handle disagreements. Can they see your perspective? Do they keep their commitments? These qualities predict partnership success better than business acumen.
Beyond personal qualities, the structure of the partnership itself matters. "Partnership has to be fair," Mr. Raisul emphasizes. "This is not only about partnership. Fairness is a crucial factor in any relationship or engagement. If a partner thinks he is dealt an unfair hand, that partnership would not work."
He recommends the book Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer for structuring partnerships fairly. "This book provides a detailed and beautiful framework for structuring business partnerships and shareholding, ensuring everyone feels the process is fair."
Unfairness breeds resentment, and resentment kills partnerships. Get the structure right from the beginning, with clear agreements about equity, decision-making authority, and expectations.
For years, Mr. Raisul didn't understand the difference between finance and accounting. "When the organization was small, I didn't necessarily distinguish between finance and accounting. In fact, I didn't understand the difference."
He handled financial planning himself in an ad-hoc way. "I used to determine how many people we could hire based on the P&L generated by current work. Based on monthly income. It was mostly guess work—I have these many projects this month, which would generate this amount and with that amount, I could hire these many additional juniors."
When BD Venture invested, they insisted Brain Station 23 needed a company secretary. Mr. Raisul resisted. "I initially told them we don't need one. That I could manage it myself." When they hired someone, Raisul struggled to manage him. "This was a person who was looking after our finances but I couldn't figure out what task I might assign him because I didn't fully understand that world."
This realization led to a crucial insight: "That's how I realized we needed a CFO. But CFOs are very expensive. And I can't afford a CFO."
The lesson applies broadly. You often don't know what professional expertise you're missing until you encounter someone who has it. The challenge is recognizing these gaps before they become critical bottlenecks.
Unable to afford a full-time CFO, Mr. Raisul shared his struggles with friends. One friend, Mr. Raj, offered to help part-time—dedicating half a day per week for three years.
"I saw a transformation," Mr. Raisul recalls. "Until then, finances were a struggle. Understanding profit and loss of the project was more of a guess work. Most companies in Bangladesh struggle to calculate project P&L month by month."
When Raj started producing monthly P&L and project P&L statements, everything changed. "It gave continuous visibility. Previously, money would come in and go out. Although we never failed to pay salaries in 19 years by the grace of Almighty, we sometimes struggled with cash flow. It was more like a hand to mouth situation."
Eventually, Raj joined full-time as CFO. "It changed Brain Station completely. We started operating differently."
If you can't afford the expertise you need full-time, find creative arrangements. A few hours from the right expert can be more valuable than full-time work from someone less experienced.
Mr. Raisul is emphatic about the importance of proper financial leadership: "Having a CFO is critical. Finance is the business."
This isn't about bookkeeping or tax compliance. It's about understanding your business at a fundamental level. Without proper financial visibility—project-level P&L, cash flow projections, resource allocation—you're flying blind.
Many founders resist hiring financial expertise because it feels like overhead. But as Raisul's experience shows, the right financial leadership transforms how a company operates. It turns guesswork into strategy.
Around 2014-2015, Khalid Quader from Brummer and Partners approached Raisul about investment. The conversation was eye-opening.
"He said they invested in a company in another market which was a 1000 people company at the time of investment and it grew quite big," Mr. Raisul recalls. "He mentioned a possibility to reach 10,000 people eventually. I was quite surprised. I still didn't imagine at that time the existence of a market large enough for that scale. Until then, I hadn't realized the market was that big."
Although the investment didn't materialize, something crucial happened: "The interesting realization for me was that it is possible to build a large company in this space. The conversation made me realize that something much bigger was possible, challenging my previous belief that scaling was impossible."
Mr. Raisul emphasizes this point: "This fact that you learn 'something is possible' is an important factor for our growth. It played a role in the growth of Brain Station 23. Until then I didn't believe that it was possible. I thought we missed the opportunity and there was not much left to do. That belief also limited my efforts."
Our limiting beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies. When we believe growth isn't possible, we don't pursue it seriously. When we learn that others have achieved what we thought impossible, it changes what we're willing to attempt.
As Brain Station 23 grew, structure became critical. "When we were five or ten people, I was playing the roles of CEO, Project Manager, and the architect all at the same time," Mr. Raisul explains. "When we became a 30-person team, PMs were given responsibility."
The structure evolved in stages. First came functional managers managing teams by technology: "The head of mobile manages the mobile projects, the head of Java manages the Java projects, and so forth—implementing the concept of 'managers of managers.'"
Then came Strategic Business Units (SBUs)—autonomous business units with P&L responsibility. "So, at one point, I was a manager. Then we introduced functional heads as managers of managers. I was managing the functional heads. Then we introduced SBUs, where SBU heads would manage the managers of managers."
Raisul references The Firm, a book about McKinsey: "It is said about McKinsey that around 1960/70, their partner would go to organizations with a book and present it. The name of the book is Strategy and Structure. The idea is that if your strategy lacks a proper supporting structure, the strategy itself is impossible to execute."
The lesson: structure isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. The right structure makes complex coordination simple. It provides clarity about who's responsible for what, enables accountability, and allows the organization to execute at scale.
When implementing SBUs, Brain Station 23 promoted existing employees into leadership positions with P&L responsibility. These weren't people who had been systematically trained for these roles.
"Critically, these managers were not hired externally," Mr. Raisul explains. "They were existing people in the company taking on greater responsibility, including Profit and Loss responsibility. We were empowering the existing people and giving them responsibilities. They didn't have structured readiness or training to take on P&L responsibility beforehand, but when the responsibility was assigned, they automatically became ready."
He reflects on this phenomenon: "When you give a person responsibility, they grow and take the responsibility—this is something that I have found fascinating."
This challenges conventional wisdom about readiness. We often think people need to be fully prepared before taking on bigger roles. But responsibility itself develops capability. People grow into roles when given the opportunity and support.
Mr. Raisul is frank about the ongoing organizational structure challenges. "Currently, our marketing and sales teams are centralized, but our Strategic Business Units are decentralized," he explains. "An SBU might focus on FinTech and require specialized marketing. Another SBU specializes in e-commerce... These SBUs have separate needs for marketing. But the marketing team is centralized."
These tensions are unavoidable. "Larger organizations are not always exactly like trees. They are more like a matrix. In such an organizational setup, a person might have two bosses—one focusing on the subject matter or functional, the other on delivery—making things complex and confusing."
He references CEO Excellence by McKinsey partners, which discussed projects costing five times the budget due to structural complexity. "These complexities will always exist, and the structure must evolve continuously, updated and monitored."
There's no perfect structure. Every structure poses some problems while solving others. The key is continuously identifying where structure is creating friction and adjusting accordingly.
Reading Scaling Up by Verne Harnish was transformative for Mr. Raisul. The book argues that to scale properly, you need four components: Strategy, People, Execution, and Cash.
"Each of these four pillars has three or four sub-components," Mr. Raisul explains. But implementing the full framework felt overwhelming. "Although reading the book helped me understand what we needed, implementing it felt impossible."
He found a simpler alternative: the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) from the book Traction. "The scaling up process had 16-17 components, which I found quite challenging to implement at our scale. Traction has fewer components—six—and it proceeds step-by-step, making it easier to start."
They hired a coach, Haraya Rosario, who helped them implement the system. Through this work, they established what Raisul calls "rhythm": "Rhythm means there is a tempo and dance in the way you execute. You get complex and challenging things done but it feels natural. There is a coherence in how you operate and execute."
Scaling requires systems, not just hard work. An operating system creates the rhythm and structure that makes execution feel natural rather than like constant firefighting.
Most companies define values through brainstorming or adopting generic corporate values. Brain Station 23's coach Haraya Rosario used a more rigorous process.
"She gathered five or six leaders of Brain Station 23 and asked each of us to think of three of our best people—people we admire—and write down their names," Mr. Raisul explains. "Then, we listed the characteristics we admired about those three people, perhaps 10-15 characteristics per person."
After consolidating and prioritizing, they created an acronym to make the values memorable: OwnPATH (Ownership, Passion & Commitment, Agility & Excellence, Team Spirit, and Honesty).
This process grounds values in the actual people and behaviors you already value, rather than aspirational abstractions. It makes values concrete and actionable because they're derived from real examples everyone recognizes.
Brain Station 23 has always had a strong purpose. "Simon Sinek talks about this idea of the power of why," Mr. Raisul notes. "For us, we started with the purpose that we want to create employment and earn foreign currency. This has always guided our decisions."
But recently, they've aimed even higher. Their scaling coach suggested a more ambitious target: "Our coach suggested we may set a target to create an impact on a million people's lives."
They're working toward this through an Advanced Academy to train leaders and a Venture Studio to help early-stage companies. "We understand that we can't achieve everything with Brain Station 23 because Brain Station has a particular direction and focus. If we get involved in many different companies, it should allow us to create far greater impact."
Why does a bold vision matter? "A grand vision provides direction during challenging times, especially when leading people through painful journeys. It gives people something more than just money to focus on—a purpose that unites them. People feel we are building something bigger than ourselves."
The insight: humans are meaning-making beings. We need to feel our work matters beyond the paycheck. A compelling vision answers the question "why am I doing this?" in a way that motivates sacrifice and commitment.
For years, Brain Station 23 struggled with sales. "From 2006 to 2012, we had no dedicated sales or marketing staff. I handled all sales and marketing myself," Mr. Raisul recalls. "Around 2012/2013, we began onboarding our first sales personnel."
But hiring salespeople didn't solve the problem. "We found out it wasn't working well. Rather, Mizan or I still ended up having to do the sales ourselves."
The issue was treating sales as intuition rather than a learnable skill. "Sales has a science. But sales can feel like an art, almost like magic, until you break it down and know the details and the science behind it. When you haven't broken it down into simple pieces and don't understand the science, it can feel quite complex and you operate blindly and quite ineffectively."
One principle Raisul learned: "You must gain the customer's respect if you want to close meaningful sales."
The broader lesson applies beyond sales. Many business functions feel like magic or innate talent until you study them systematically. The founder who treats everything as intuition will struggle to scale. The founder who learns the science behind critical functions can build systems that work without them.
The through-line in Mr. Raisul's story is that growth requires continuously unlearning what worked at the previous stage.
When you're small, you can do everything yourself. As you grow, you need to delegate—but delegation without structure creates chaos. So you add structure. But the wrong structure creates new bottlenecks. So you evolve the structure. Then you need systems to maintain the structure. Then you need different kinds of expertise. Then your beliefs about what's possible become the constraint.
Each stage requires letting go of what worked before and learning something new. The solo entrepreneur must learn to partner. The hands-on operator must learn to delegate. Founders who handle finance must learn to trust a CFO. The person who believes in limited opportunities must learn to see bigger possibilities.
This is why so many companies plateau. They keep doing what worked at their current size, even as that approach becomes the very thing preventing growth. Breaking through requires the courage to admit "I don't know how to do this" and the humility to learn from others who've done it.
For founders and operators in Bangladesh navigating the challenges of building and scaling companies, Brain Station 23's journey offers a valuable roadmap. The path isn't straightforward. Partnerships break and must be rebuilt. Structure that works brilliantly at one size becomes a constraint at the next. What feels impossible becomes possible when you learn someone else has done it.
But if you can work through these challenges—finding the right partners, implementing proper systems, building structure that evolves, believing bigger things are possible—the rewards extend beyond your own company. You create employment, develop leaders, and contribute to the ecosystem. You build something that matters beyond yourself.
That's what consequential entrepreneurship looks like in practice.
If you want go even deeper into Brain Station 23's growth journey, read the full interview here.
