POPCORNS popcorns.ch

The technology moved ahead.
The company has to catch up.

Growing technology companies rarely get stuck because of the technology. They get stuck because the company around it still runs the way it did with twenty people.

Popcorns builds the operating layer. Who decides, who owns the result, how work moves across teams and what managers are expected to do. We build it with your people and stay until it runs without us.

25 to 350 people GreenTech · Energy · Battery · ClimateTech We do the work, not a report
Book 30 minutes

First step is a measure of where the next stage will break.

The gap

You will recognise at least three of these

At twenty people, informal works. At sixty it stops working, and it stops quietly.

01

Nobody is quite sure who owns the result

Responsibilities overlap. Two teams each assume the other one has it.

02

Every real decision lands on the same few desks

The founders are still the fastest escalation path in the company.

03

People arrive faster than they can be integrated

Hiring works. Getting new people into the way work actually gets done does not.

04

Specialists become managers before the system exists

Your best engineer now runs a team and has no model for the job.

05

The next step keeps waiting

The people who should be building it spend their days unblocking the current one.

The point

None of this is a people problem

It is the layer below the org chart, and it is the one thing nobody has had time to build.

What we build

An operating system for the next stage, and nothing more

We do not design a large corporation before it is needed, and we do not add processes because mature companies are supposed to have them. We start from one question.

The question

What is preventing this company from growing without a proportional increase in chaos and dependency on a few key people?

Organisation

Who decides, who owns the result

  • Ownership of outcomes
  • Decision rights
  • Escalation paths
  • Levels of autonomy
  • Roles the next stage needs

An org chart can look perfectly clear while people spend every day working out who has the final say.

Management system

How a priority becomes work

  • Priorities into commitments
  • Named owners
  • Visible progress
  • Early warning
  • Escalate or solve

If the system needs a director walking the floor every day to connect people, there is no system yet.

People and capability

Who can carry it

  • Role and level architecture
  • Competencies
  • Progression criteria
  • Reward architecture
  • Onboarding
  • Manager capability
  • Workforce planning

Built when the next stage requires them, not because they are nice to have.

Industrial ramp-up

When growth becomes physical

  • Who is needed and when
  • What they must know
  • Who trains them
  • Readiness tracked against the equipment plan

Factory readiness is not only equipment readiness. It is company readiness.

How we work

We do not leave a recommendation. We enter the work.

It is easy to name what is wrong in an organisation. The harder part starts the following Monday, when a manager has to make the first real decision under the new system and a new role architecture has to be applied to seventy real people.

01

Measure

Where the current way of operating will become the constraint on the next 12 to 24 months. Not everything that could be improved.

02

Build

Only what that step requires. Responsibilities, management system, structure, role architecture, workforce planning, or a combination.

03

Run

Real situations with your people. We test the system, change what does not hold, and take on part of the actual workload.

04

Hand over

Knowledge and ownership stay inside the company. If the system still depends on us years later, we did not build it properly.

We keep what already works and add only what is missing.

Usually a lot is already in place. A strong People lead, a good founder rhythm, one function far more mature than the rest. If an internal person can own the work, we work with them. We do not build a parallel company next to the existing one.

Fit

Where Popcorns is most useful

Size
25 to 350 people
Ideal fit
25 to 100 people, where the operating layer decides how fast the next stage happens. Above that the same constraint keeps returning, usually during an intense scale-up, a second site or a ramp-up
Sectors
GreenTech, CleanTech, Energy, Battery, ClimateTech and other engineering-heavy companies
Trigger
Rapid hiring, R&D moving into industrial scale-up, factory ramp-up, a new round, a new site, international expansion, a first major customer
Not for
Companies looking for a diagnosis, a workshop or a methodology to keep on the shelf

One test

Fewer and fewer issues reach the founders simply because they are the only people who know what should happen.

Their time goes back to technology, customers, capital and the next major step. The company behind them turns that step into results.

Book 30 minutes