How Swell uses the Pragma Holis framework to strategically scale.
For many founders, the leap from a solo venture to a full-fledged team is fraught with obstacles that can derail growth. But what if you had a clear, structured framework to guide every decision, turning potential chaos into a strategic advantage?
Growth Beyond the Founder
When Nick, the founder of Swell, began to expand his successful innovation funding consultancy beyond just himself, he faced a common but critical challenge.
As a self-admitted “non-process-driven” person, he needed a way to bring order and structure to the company’s journey. The business was growing fast, from one to five employees in just over a year, and relying on intuition was no longer a sustainable strategy for building a resilient company.
The core issues were twofold: first, how to establish solid business foundations without getting lost in the day-to-day operational demands.
Second, how to align a new and growing team around a single source of truth, ensuring everyone was pulling in the same direction.
Nick knew there were “known unknowns” he had to tackle, but his biggest fear was the “unknown unknowns” that could blindside the business as it scaled.
The immediate value was structure. It gave us a framework to make sense of things, which brought clarity. It helped us slow down, step back, and be more deliberate rather than just reacting all the time.
— Nick Prattley, Founder
Swell
X
Pragma Holis
Strategic Hiring
Tangible Improvements
Data-Driven Prioritisation
Long-Term Value Creation
A Framework for Deliberate Action
Nick adopted the Pragma Holis framework early, engaged as a beta tester even before its official launch, and used it as part of his blueprint for growth.
Working with the team at Pragma Holis, he quickly identified weaknesses in the foundations of two pillars, Marketing & Brand and Data & IT.
This re-prioritisation led him to focus his resources, completing both a brand refresh and the implementation of a new, strategically chosen CRM system.
Once his team had expanded, Swell rolled out the Pragma Holis diagnostic survey. The goal was to get a clear, data-driven snapshot of the business from multiple perspectives. The results were used not just to identify weaknesses, but to facilitate a powerful strategic conversation during a company-wide offsite.
This created a Priority Action List that formed the backbone of their strategy, allowing them to focus their limited resources with precision and confidence.
One of the most powerful insights for the Swell team was using the diagnostic to decide which problems not to solve.
For a small, fast-growing team, the reality is you can’t “boil the ocean.” The diagnostic allowed them to look at areas flagged as red and consciously decide which ones were not a priority for their current stage.
This freed them from the pressure of trying to fix everything at once and gave them permission to focus only on what was truly important for driving the business forward.
This ‘strategic neglect’, guided by data, was just as valuable as identifying the top priorities.
‘From a growth perspective, the framework means we have a solid structure surrouding each core component of the business, ensuring that every area is accounted for.‘
— Michael Barry, Head of Growth