Adelaide is live. The playbook works. The hiring engine is turning. The supply chain redesign is underway. Then Diane calls Maya on a Tuesday morning and says: “There’s a company in Sydney we should buy.”
The company is called Harvest Box. Three thousand subscribers, eight people, a warehouse in Marrickville, and a Ruby on Rails app running on Heroku. They’ve been operating for two years – founded by a man named Julian Park, 33, who left a product management job at Canva to build “the ethical alternative to Woolworths home delivery.” Julian is smart, passionate, and exhausted. His seed funding ran out four months ago. He’s been paying salaries from personal savings since November.
Diane found Harvest Box through her Sydney network. A founder she’d advised mentioned it at a dinner: “There’s a produce box company in Marrickville that’s doing exactly what you’re describing GreenBox doing. Smaller. Running out of money. Good product, good people, wrong capitalization.”
Diane called Julian the next morning. He was cautious – he’d had two conversations with Hartland Group already, both of which ended when he realised they wanted the subscriber list, not the business. He agreed to meet GreenBox because Diane mentioned the farm relationships. “That’s what we do too,” he said. “We know our farms by name.”
The case for buying
Maya flies to Sydney with Diane and Marcus for a day of meetings with Julian and his team. Charlotte dials in from Perth for the financial review. Patricia reviews the numbers independently.
The case is straightforward. GreenBox needs Sydney. The playbook says: assess the market, find farm partners, set up logistics, hire a squad, launch. That process takes four to six months and costs roughly $400K in setup, hiring, and customer acquisition. Harvest Box has three thousand paying subscribers, existing farm relationships across western Sydney and the Blue Mountains, a warehouse with cold storage, and a team that knows the market.
“Buy versus build,” Charlotte says on the call. “You can build Sydney from scratch for $400K and six months. Or you can buy an existing operation with subscribers, farms, logistics, and local knowledge.”
Diane adds the strategic dimension. “There’s a third option nobody’s mentioned. If GreenBox doesn’t acquire Harvest Box, someone else might. Hartland Group has already approached Julian twice. If they buy Harvest Box, they have a direct-to-consumer presence in Sydney that competes with your expansion before you’ve even launched.”
Marcus, who’s been building GreenBox’s B2B pipeline in Sydney remotely, has a simpler view. “Three thousand subscribers at $20 a week is $60K of weekly recurring revenue. Our cost to acquire three thousand subscribers organically is $135K at current CAC. If we can buy the business for less than what it would cost to acquire those subscribers, the math works.”
The math works. Julian is asking $800K – roughly $270 per subscriber, below GreenBox’s organic acquisition cost of $45 per subscriber when you account for the infrastructure, farm relationships, and team that come with the deal. Patricia runs the numbers and confirms: the acquisition is cheaper than organic expansion, faster than the playbook, and strategically defensive against Hartland Group.
Maya looks at Julian across the table in a cafe in Enmore. He’s tired in a way she recognises – the particular exhaustion of a founder who’s been carrying something alone for too long. She remembers the midnight email she never sent, the one about pausing operations. She remembers the morning after the JTBD interviews, when she sat in her car in the Fremantle car park and cried.
“Why do you want to sell?” Maya asks.
Julian stirs his coffee. “I don’t want to sell. I want Harvest Box to survive. I’ve run out of ways to make that happen on my own.”
Diane, sitting beside Maya, says nothing. But later, in the car, she says: “Every acquisition I’ve seen looks like a marriage on the wedding day and a disaster by month three. The numbers are clean. The people are the problem.”
Due diligence
Charlotte leads the due diligence over two weeks. She’s methodical – financial records, contracts, subscriber data, churn rates, farm agreements, technology assessment, employee contracts. She builds a spreadsheet with forty-seven line items and colour codes: green for clear, amber for attention needed, red for risk.
Most of the spreadsheet is green. Harvest Box’s financials are honest. The subscriber base is real. The churn rate is higher than GreenBox’s – 6% monthly versus GreenBox’s 3.8% – but that’s partly because Harvest Box has no substitution engine. When a farm can’t supply an ingredient, Harvest Box sends whatever’s available. Customers get surprised. Some of them leave.
The farm relationships are solid. Julian built them himself, visiting farms on weekends, attending growers’ markets, earning trust the same way Maya did – by showing up and knowing the difference between a Granny Smith and a Pink Lady.
The technology is red.
Tom does the technical due diligence remotely, with Priya reviewing. Harvest Box runs on a Ruby on Rails monolith deployed to Heroku. The codebase is eighteen months old, written primarily by Julian and one developer – a woman named Fiona, 28, who joined from a digital agency and taught herself everything about food logistics by building it.
The code works. It handles orders, manages subscriptions, coordinates deliveries, and sends customer emails. It does not have bounded contexts. It does not have a substitution engine. It does not have decision tables. It does not have tests for roughly 40% of the functionality. The deployment process is git push heroku main and hope.
Tom’s assessment is two pages. The summary: “The Harvest Box codebase is a competent monolith built by two people under time pressure. It handles their current scale. It will not handle GreenBox’s national platform requirements. Integration options: migrate to our platform (expensive, disruptive), maintain as a separate system (expensive, indefinite), or wrap in an API boundary and migrate gradually (moderate cost, lower disruption).”
The third option catches Charlotte’s attention. “Explain ‘wrap in an API boundary,’” she says.
Tom pauses. He’s thinking about the bounded contexts work from two years ago – the conversation with Charlotte about where to draw the lines in GreenBox’s own architecture. The principle was: separate things that change for different reasons. Draw boundaries around coherent business capabilities. Let each context own its data and expose a clean interface.
“The Harvest Box system is a bounded context,” Tom says. “It’s a self-contained system that handles Sydney subscriptions, Sydney farms, and Sydney deliveries. Right now it speaks its own language – Ruby, Heroku, its own database schema. Instead of rewriting it in Go and migrating everything to our AWS infrastructure, we put an API layer in front of it. Our platform talks to the API. The API translates between GreenBox’s language and Harvest Box’s language. Over time, we migrate capabilities one by one – subscriptions first, then farm management, then delivery. But we don’t do it all at once, and we don’t break what’s working.”
Charlotte: “That’s the DDD approach applied to acquisition integration.”
Tom: “It’s the only approach that doesn’t require a six-month rewrite while also running a live service with three thousand subscribers who don’t care about our architecture.”
Priya, on the video call from Melbourne, adds: “It’s also what we should have done with the Melbourne expansion. We built Melbourne as a code path inside the existing system. If we’d built it as a bounded context from the start, we wouldn’t have had the cross-squad integration failure in Series 4.”
Tom nods. He doesn’t say it out loud, but he’s grateful. Priya’s right, and she’s saying it in front of Charlotte and Diane, which means it’ll be remembered.
The deal
The acquisition closes in late January. $800K in cash and a small equity stake for Julian, who agrees to stay for six months to support the transition. His team of eight – Fiona (developer), three operations people, two customer service reps, a warehouse manager, and a part-time marketing contractor – become GreenBox employees.
Maya signs the papers in a lawyer’s office in the Sydney CBD. Julian signs across from her. Diane and Patricia are present. Charlotte is on video.
Julian shakes Maya’s hand. “Take care of them,” he says. He means his team, not his subscribers.
“I will,” Maya says. She means it. She also has no idea how hard that promise will be to keep.
Week one
The first week goes smoothly. Maya flies the Sydney team to Perth for two days of orientation. They meet Tom, Sam, Jas, Marcus. They see the Perth office, the warehouse, the planning onion on the wall, the laminated Event Storm photos. Sam runs them through the operational cadence. Tom gives them a technical overview. Jas shows them the customer experience.
The Sydney team is polite, engaged, and quietly terrified. They’ve just been acquired. Their founder sold the company. They don’t know if they’ll have jobs in three months. The orientation feels like a performance review wrapped in a welcome party.
Fiona pulls Tom aside on the second day. She’s direct in a way that reminds him of Charlotte.
“Are you going to rewrite our code?”
Tom hesitates. His instinct – the instinct he’s been fighting since the ensemble programming sessions taught him that his first technical impulse is usually wrong – is to say yes. The Harvest Box code is messy. No tests for 40% of functionality. A monolith with no bounded contexts. His fingers itch to open a blank Go project and start fresh.
But Charlotte’s voice is in his head, from the technical due diligence call: “Rewriting is the most expensive form of technical debt. Can you wrap it in an API boundary and migrate gradually?”
“No,” Tom says. “We’re going to wrap your system in an API and migrate gradually. Your code works. We’re not going to break what works.”
Fiona’s shoulders drop – tension releasing. “Good. Because if you’d said yes, I’d have started looking for another job tonight.”
Month one
The API boundary approach works technically. Tom and Priya design the integration layer over a weekend – a Go service that sits between GreenBox’s platform and the Harvest Box Rails app, translating requests and responses. Subscriber data flows from Harvest Box to GreenBox’s central system. Farm availability data flows from GreenBox’s platform to Harvest Box’s delivery engine. The seam is ugly but functional.
The people integration is harder.
Charlotte designs a 100-day integration plan. It’s structured, thorough, and focused almost entirely on systems. Day 1-30: technology integration (API boundary, data sync, monitoring). Day 31-60: operational alignment (shared processes, unified supplier management, delivery coordination). Day 61-100: full platform migration (move Sydney subscribers to GreenBox’s system, decommission Harvest Box infrastructure).
The plan is pinned to the wall in the Perth office. Charlotte reviews progress weekly. The technology milestones are on track. The operational milestones are mostly on track. The human milestones – the ones Charlotte didn’t plan for, because she’s an engineering scaling coach, not a people integration specialist – are falling apart.
The Sydney team feels colonised. That’s the word Fiona uses in a Slack message to Julian, which Julian – still in his six-month transition role – shares with Maya. “They’re making us do everything their way. Our processes, our tools, our cadence. Nobody asked us how we do things. Nobody asked us if our way might be better.”
The specifics accumulate. The Sydney operations team is told to use GreenBox’s supplier management spreadsheet instead of their own. The customer service reps are given GreenBox’s email templates instead of the ones they wrote. The warehouse manager is asked to adopt GreenBox’s packing process – a process designed for Perth’s farm mix and delivery routes, not Sydney’s. Every change is individually reasonable. Collectively, they feel like erasure.
Diane sees it before Charlotte does. She calls Maya on a Friday evening.
“You’re integrating the systems. Who’s integrating the humans?”
Maya is at home, shoes off, sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard. Nadia is cooking. This is their pattern – Maya processes the hard things from the kitchen floor while Nadia makes dinner and listens without looking directly at her, which is somehow exactly what Maya needs.
“Charlotte’s plan covers the integration,” Maya says.
“Charlotte’s plan covers the technology and the operations. It doesn’t cover the people. The Sydney team didn’t join GreenBox. They were absorbed by GreenBox. Those are different things.”
Maya thinks about this. She thinks about the Adelaide launch, which used the playbook – a new team, hired into GreenBox’s culture, trained on GreenBox’s practices. Adelaide felt like an expansion. Sydney feels like an occupation.
“What do I do?” Maya asks.
“Stop telling them how GreenBox works. Start asking them how Harvest Box works. Then find the overlap.”
The Event Storm
Charlotte resists the idea at first. “An Event Storm is a discovery tool for understanding a domain. We already understand the domain. It’s produce box delivery. We’ve been doing it for three years.”
Diane: “You understand GreenBox’s version of produce box delivery. You don’t understand theirs. And the Sydney team doesn’t understand yours. The Event Storm isn’t for the domain. It’s for the people.”
Charlotte considers this. She’s quiet for a long time – the kind of quiet that Tom recognises from the Cynefin session, when Charlotte acknowledged that not everything could be solved with process.
“Fine,” Charlotte says. “But we do it properly.”
They run the Event Storm in the Marrickville warehouse on a Saturday – neutral territory, Sydney’s space. Present: Maya, Tom, Fiona, the three Sydney operations staff, Sam (flown in from Perth), Jas (video from Perth), and Charlotte (facilitating). Julian is there, standing in the back, watching his company be understood for the first time by the people who bought it.
The sticky notes go up. Orange for events. Blue for commands. Yellow for questions. Pink for hotspots. The standard format – but the content is different from any Event Storm GreenBox has run before.
Sydney’s delivery process is different from Perth’s. They use a different courier network – smaller, more personal, drivers who know the neighbourhoods. Their farm relationships are structured differently – Julian visits farms fortnightly rather than using a portal. Their substitution process is manual – Fiona makes the calls based on what she knows about each farm’s availability, calling farmers on Thursday morning to confirm what’s in the box.
The Perth team sees things they didn’t expect. The manual substitution process is slower than GreenBox’s decision-table engine, but Fiona catches edge cases that the engine misses – a farmer’s crop failure that hasn’t been reported yet, a seasonal shift that’s two weeks early. Her knowledge is Maya’s knowledge from year one, before the decision tables codified it.
The Sydney team sees things they didn’t expect either. The decision-table engine. The automated substitution. The customer preference profiles that prevent allergen errors. The monitoring dashboard. Sam’s operational cadence. The planning onion on the wall. These aren’t imposed processes – they’re solutions to problems the Sydney team is currently fighting with spreadsheets and phone calls and Fiona’s memory.
The Event Storm takes four hours. By the end, the wall is covered. Charlotte steps back and lets the room look at it.
“This is what both companies do,” she says. “Not GreenBox’s way. Not Harvest Box’s way. Both.”
Fiona stands up and walks to the wall. She points at the substitution section – where GreenBox’s automated engine and Harvest Box’s manual process are mapped side by side.
“We need both,” she says. “The engine handles the 90% that follows patterns. A human handles the 10% that doesn’t. We’ve been doing the human part for two years. You’ve been building the engine for three. Neither one alone is as good as both together.”
Tom looks at Charlotte. Charlotte looks at Tom. Neither of them says it, but they’re both thinking the same thing: the Sydney team just improved their architecture.
Month two
The Event Storm changes the dynamic. Not completely, not overnight – but the Sydney team starts engaging instead of complying. Fiona begins working with Tom on the API boundary, contributing Ruby expertise and domain knowledge about Sydney’s delivery patterns. The Sydney operations team shares their courier management approach with Sam, who adapts parts of it for Adelaide.
But the deeper problem isn’t solved. The Sydney team came from a company of eight people where everyone knew everything and Julian made every decision by walking across the warehouse floor. Now they’re inside a company of seventy people with squad structures, sprint cadences, planning onions, and a management layer that has meetings about meetings. The cultural distance is enormous.
Two of the operations staff resign in week six. They’re polite about it – “taking other opportunities,” the standard Australian euphemism. Maya knows the truth because Sam, who has spent three weeks building a relationship with the Sydney ops team, tells her: “They don’t feel like they belong. They feel like contractors in someone else’s company.”
The customer service reps follow in week eight. They’ve found jobs at a fintech startup in Surry Hills. Closer to home, better pay, smaller team. Everything Harvest Box used to be.
Julian leaves at the end of month two – a month before his transition period ends. He’s been showing up to the Marrickville warehouse every day, but the work he’s doing shrinks each week. The farm visits are being taken over by Ben, who’s now managing GreenBox’s national farm relationship program. The subscriber management is handled by GreenBox’s platform. The operational decisions are made by Sam’s team. Julian is a founder with nothing to found.
He tells Maya over the phone. His voice is flat – not angry, not sad, just done.
“I built something. You bought it. Now it’s yours. There’s nothing left for me to do here.”
“Julian, I –”
“It’s fine, Maya. Genuinely. You’re doing a good job with it. The Event Storm was smart. Fiona is happier than she’s been in months. The Sydney subscribers are getting a better service than I could have given them.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
“Because I’m a founder, not an employee. And right now I’m an employee in the company I founded. That’s not something I can do.”
Maya sits with the phone in her hand after he hangs up. She’s in the Fremantle cottage, in the kitchen, on the floor. Nadia is reading on the couch.
“Julian left,” Maya says.
Nadia puts her book down. She doesn’t ask what happened. She’s learned to wait.
“I bought his company and he hates me.”
“Does he hate you?”
“He should.”
Maya calls Ren that evening. The bench by the fishing boat harbour, their usual spot. The sun is low, January warm, the kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph from someone else’s life.
“I bought his company and he hates me,” Maya says again.
Ren pours tea. She’s heard this already – Maya called her from the Perth office two hours ago. Ren came anyway.
“Did you buy his company or his vision?”
“I thought they were the same thing.”
“They never are.” Ren hands Maya the cup. “A company is an entity. A vision is a person. You bought the entity. The person doesn’t transfer.”
Maya stares at the water. A fishing boat is coming in, engine chugging, pelicans trailing behind it like a shabby escort.
“When I started GreenBox, I would have sold it for $800K and called it a success.”
“That was before it became part of you.”
“Is that what happened to Julian?”
“What do you think?”
Maya thinks about her parents’ farm. The subdivision signs going up. Her father watching from the road as someone else’s machinery reshaped the soil he’d worked for thirty years. The farm was an entity. Her father’s life in it was something else entirely.
“I think I understand something I wish I didn’t.”
Month three
By month three, four of the eight Harvest Box employees have left. Fiona stays – she’s found a home in Tom’s engineering team, contributing to the API boundary work and teaching Tom things about Sydney’s delivery domain that he didn’t know he didn’t know. The warehouse manager stays because the Marrickville warehouse is five minutes from his house and the pay is better. Two operations staff – hired by Sam to replace the ones who left – are GreenBox employees from the start, trained on GreenBox’s cadence, with no memory of what Harvest Box was.
The subscriber base holds. Of Harvest Box’s three thousand subscribers, 2,700 are still active. The 10% churn is higher than normal – some of it attributable to the transition confusion, different emails arriving from different systems during the migration, a two-week period where the automated and manual substitution processes conflicted and a Brisbane farmer’s surplus butternut squash ended up in Sydney boxes by accident. But 2,700 subscribers at $20 a week is $54K of weekly recurring revenue, and the number stabilises by mid-March.
Tom’s API boundary is working. The Harvest Box Rails app still runs, handling Sydney-specific logic. GreenBox’s platform handles the cross-city capabilities – subscriber management, payment processing, the substitution engine, the farm availability dashboard. The two systems talk through the API layer. It’s not elegant. Tom calls it “the seam.” But it holds.
Charlotte updates her 100-day plan. The technology milestones are complete – not perfectly, but adequately. The operational alignment is mostly done. The platform migration is pushed to month six – Tom’s gradual approach, one capability at a time, rather than the big-bang cutover Charlotte originally planned.
Charlotte calls Maya on day 90 of the 100-day plan.
“We lost half the team. The technology integration took twice as long as planned. The cultural integration is still in progress. The subscriber base held but we burned goodwill. Julian is gone.”
Maya waits for the verdict.
“It was still the right decision. If we’d built Sydney from scratch, we’d have spent six months and $400K to get to zero subscribers. We spent three months and $800K to get to 2,700 subscribers with a working warehouse and local farm relationships. The maths works. The human cost was higher than it needed to be.”
“What would you do differently?”
Charlotte is quiet. Maya can hear her thinking – the slight pause that means she’s being honest rather than prescriptive.
“I would have done cultural due diligence before the acquisition, not after. I would have spent the first two weeks listening, not integrating. I would have run the Event Storm in week one, not week four. And I would have given Julian a real role, not a transition period.”
“Is that hindsight?”
“Yes. But it’s the kind of hindsight that should become foresight for the next one.”
What the acquisition teaches
Diane runs a retrospective – not Charlotte’s engineering retro format, but a business retrospective with Maya, Charlotte, Tom, Sam, and Marcus. Patricia dials in.
The lessons are uncomfortable.
Cultural due diligence matters more than financial due diligence. The numbers were clean. The culture was invisible until it wasn’t. In future acquisitions (if there are future acquisitions), GreenBox needs to assess culture as rigorously as it assesses revenue – how the target company makes decisions, how they handle disagreement, what they value, what they’d refuse to change.
A 100-day plan needs human milestones, not just system milestones. Charlotte’s plan tracked technology integration, operational alignment, and platform migration. It didn’t track: team morale, relationship building between old and new employees, cultural exchange (not just cultural imposition), or the acquired founder’s emotional transition. These aren’t soft metrics. They’re the metrics that determine whether the acquired team stays.
Conway’s Law works in reverse. GreenBox and Harvest Box had different architectures because they had different organisations. Forcing one architecture – moving everything to GreenBox’s Go/AWS platform – would have meant forcing one organisation: making the Sydney team operate exactly like Perth. That’s what drove people out. The API boundary approach preserved the Sydney team’s operational autonomy while connecting them to GreenBox’s platform. The architecture mirrored the org structure they wanted – connected but not identical – rather than the org structure they’d accidentally imposed.
Technology migration is a people problem. Tom’s API boundary wasn’t the optimal technical solution. A full rewrite would have been cleaner, faster, more maintainable. But a full rewrite would have told Fiona and the Sydney team: nothing you built matters. The API boundary said: what you built works, and we’re going to connect to it, not replace it. The technical decision was a people decision in disguise.
Retention during acquisition requires role clarity and cultural listening. Stay bonuses help. Clear job descriptions help. But the thing that actually determines whether acquired employees stay is whether they feel like they have a future in the new company – not just a job, but a role that matters, in a culture that respects what they bring. The Sydney team members who stayed are the ones who found a place where their expertise was valued. The ones who left are the ones who felt their expertise was being overwritten.
Marcus, who’s been quiet through most of the retro, says something that lands. “We bought Harvest Box because it was cheaper than building Sydney from scratch. That’s true on a spreadsheet. But the cost of losing four people – their knowledge, their relationships, the trust they had with subscribers and farms – that doesn’t appear on any spreadsheet. Next time, the acquisition cost should include a line item for cultural integration. A real budget. Real time. Real people dedicated to making it work.”
Patricia, on the call, writes that down.
Dave in Sydney
A week after the retro, Dave Morrison does something nobody expected.
He flies to Sydney. Not for a meeting. Not for a farm inspection. Ben arranged it – Ben, who now manages GreenBox’s national farm relationship programme and has been visiting Sydney farms for the past month, building the relationships that Julian started and that nobody has maintained since Julian left.
Dave visits three farms in western Sydney with Ben. He tells the Margaret River frost story – the year the frost killed a third of the crop and Maya adjusted the boxes and nobody missed a delivery. He tells the $8K story – the scheme that folded and left him out of pocket, and why he trusts GreenBox anyway. He listens to the Sydney farmers’ complaints about the transition – the new portal they can’t figure out, the orders that changed format, the person they used to talk to (Julian) who doesn’t come any more.
Dave doesn’t solve any of these problems. He’s a farmer, not a product manager. But he does something that no amount of process can do: he stands in a paddock with another farmer and says, “I’ve been where you are. These people are worth trusting.”
Ben tells Maya about the visits. “Dad’s not doing it for GreenBox. He’s doing it because he’s a farmer and these are farmers and he thinks someone should be talking to them who understands what it’s like to grow something and hand it to someone else.”
Maya sends Dave a message that evening. “Thank you for the Sydney visits.”
Dave replies the next morning, because Dave doesn’t text at night. “Those Sydney blokes are alright. They just need someone to listen.”
It’s the most Dave has ever said about the acquisition. It’s also the most anyone needed to say.
What’s left
Eight cities. Seventy-five people. The acquisition added three thousand subscribers and subtracted four employees and one founder. The maths is positive. The cost is human.
Charlotte updates her spreadsheet – Row 47, GreenBox. She adds a column she’s never had before: “Cultural integration assessment.” She gives GreenBox a 5 out of 10. “We got it half right. The Event Storm saved us. The 100-day plan failed us. Next time – if there is a next time – we lead with people, not systems.”
Diane, who lost half her team during Sunridge’s scaling and has never fully reckoned with it, says something to Maya that she hasn’t said to anyone before.
“I told you every acquisition looks like a marriage on the wedding day and a disaster by month three. I know that because it happened to me. Not as a buyer. As a seller. I sold Sunridge and watched the acquirer do to my people exactly what you did to Julian’s people. I’ve been carrying that for eight years.”
Maya looks at her.
“That’s why I pushed for the Event Storm,” Diane says. “That’s why I said ‘who’s integrating the humans?’ I wasn’t being wise. I was being scared.”
They’re in the GreenBox Perth office, late on a Friday. Everyone else has gone home. The Event Storm photos are still on the wall – the original ones, from when GreenBox was five people and two hundred subscribers and the whole company was a wall of sticky notes in a room above a cafe.
Maya looks at the photos. She looks at Diane.
“Half the Sydney team left. But the other half stayed. Fiona is building things we couldn’t have built without her. The warehouse manager is running the best-performing logistics in the network. The subscribers stayed. The farms stayed.”
“Is that enough?” Diane asks.
“It has to be. Because the alternative was letting Hartland Group buy them. And I know what Hartland Group would have done.”
“What?”
“Kept the subscribers. Cut the team. Closed the warehouse. Routed everything through their national distribution centre.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because that’s what happened to Freshly.”
The room is quiet. The Event Storm photos watch from the wall – the early days, when every decision was new and nobody had been acquired or acquirer.
Maya stands up. “The next challenge isn’t the acquisition. It’s what the acquisition revealed. We’ve got seventy-five people across seven cities who’ve never been in a room together. The practices that held GreenBox together – the retros, the Event Storms, the Tuesday interviews – were built for a company where everyone knew everyone. That company doesn’t exist any more.”
Charlotte nods. She’s been thinking the same thing. “You can’t maintain culture through proximity when there’s no proximity.”
“So how do you maintain it?”
That question – culture at distance (coming January) – is the one that keeps Maya awake that night. Not the technology. Not the finances. The question of whether what makes GreenBox special can survive the thing GreenBox is becoming.