Fractional COO for Fintechs who want to increase their profits 🦅 Build strength aligned, high-performing teams and stop doing everything yourself.

Growth only matters if it lasts - and scales efficiently.

First one in, last one out of the office?

Still doing work that others should - or that no one really should?
Trading focus and family time for “just a few more hours”?

You’re not disorganized - you’re running a company that’s quietly running on you.

That’s the trap every great founder eventually falls into.
I know, because I did too.

Early in my career, I led a team the hard way — through sheer effort.
Then I started building structures that combined my background in computer science, leadership, and management.
The results: fewer hours, better output, and a team that wasn’t just performing — but thinking.

When I became a CEO, I scaled that approach into a full operating architecture:

🔹focused only on tasks that pushed the business forward,
🔹built trust-based, values-driven teams,
🔹replaced “busy work” with measurable momentum, and
🔹ran everything from hiring to tech and customer service on aligned principles.

We grew from 6 to 7 digits — sustainably, and without burnout.

Today, I work with CEOs and founders who want their freedom back - 
✨to build organizations that scale without dependency,
✨where growth stays real, people stay energized,
✨and leadership sustains - not drains.

 Leadership & Organizational Architect | ETH Alum 🦅
Let’s build a company that grows with you, not on you.

Myrto Z.

Most leaders don't recognise when noise replaces signal.

Why?

Because the shift happens gradually -
One extra meeting here, another urgent request there, until your entire day becomes reactive.

I see this pattern with every founder I work with:
The moment their company hits a certain scale, their role distorts.

They're no longer designing the business -
They're responding to it.

The requests feel legitimate. The questions seem important.

The decisions appear urgent.

But here's what's actually happening: your organisational architecture has outgrown your leadership structure.

When systems lack clarity, everything becomes your problem to solve.

When accountability flows upward instead of outward, every decision lands on your desk.

When execution rhythm breaks down, urgency replaces priority.

The work isn't the issue -
It's that you've become the bottleneck in your own system.

Strong leaders don't need more hours in the day.

They need interference removed so the right decisions become self-evident again.

The signal was always there -
It's just been buried under structural noise.

Myrto Zehnder 🦅

For CEOs who want their freedom back 🦅 | Designing leadership and organizational architecture that keeps growth real, people energized, and results compounding - sustainably | ETH Alum

I carried twelve roles simultaneously - leader, partner, problem-solver - and somehow lost myself entirely in the operational noise.

Back in middle management, I started recognising the system drift.

The gap between what I claimed to value and how I was actually operating.

I was performing competent leadership whilst ignoring every signal from my own decision-making architecture.

The role distortion was complete. I'd become reactive to my own company's demands rather than designing the leadership structure that would serve both the business and my actual capacity.

What I learned then became the foundation for everything:

You cannot lead with clarity when your personal operating system is misaligned.

Not with your values. Not with your time allocation.

Not with your authentic decision-making rhythm.

Later, as CEO, I didn't just survive the altitude - I designed for it.

But only because I'd addressed the leadership architecture first, starting with my own role definition.

The freedom to lead doesn't begin in the boardroom.

It begins with honest assessment of where you're performing leadership versus where you're actually living it.

✨ SPARK ✨  
Scan today for one moment where your external leadership performance didn't match your internal values. No judgment - just diagnostic clarity about the gap.

For the past months, we’ve explored 15 Leadership Villains, the everyday patterns that quietly create friction in teams. They were fun to name, but each one reflects something deeper: a systemic behaviour that shows up when clarity and structure are out of sync.

What looks like a people issue often has its roots in the architecture around the leader,  not the individuals themselves.

We’ve so far only touched the surface.
Each Villain is a signal.
And signals matter.

So as this cycle continues, I’ll be bringing a more structural perspective to the Villains, moving from the surface symptoms to the patterns they reveal in leadership systems.

Same villains. Clearer insight. Deeper layer. More practical relevance for CEOs and leaders.

Because once you see the structure underneath the behaviour, you know exactly where to begin.

I see this altitude loss happen with every CEO I work with.

The moment they drop into operational details, their entire leadership identity shifts.

They stop being the architect of their organisation and become its most expensive project manager.

It's not about workload  -  I've seen leaders handle massive complexity whilst maintaining their strategic altitude.

It's about mental positioning.

When you're operating at ground level, you can only see the immediate problem in front of you.

Every decision becomes urgent. Every conversation becomes tactical.

Every day becomes reactive.

But leadership architecture requires a different vantage point.

From altitude, you see patterns instead of problems.

You see systems instead of symptoms. You see the organisational rhythm that needs your attention, not the operational noise that demands it.

The companies that scale sustainably have leaders who protect their altitude fiercely.

They understand that their primary role isn't to solve problems  -  it's to design the systems that prevent problems from reaching them.

Your altitude determines your organisation's ceiling.

Where are you choosing to operate from?

Something revealing happens when I examine the calendars of overwhelmed CEOs:

The erosion didn't begin with the crisis they're managing today.

It started months earlier, in seemingly harmless moments - accepting "quick calls" that became standing meetings, allowing urgent requests to bypass established processes, and gradually shifting from decision-maker to decision-bottleneck.

What appears as sudden clarity loss is actually systematic altitude degradation.

The CEO who once operated from strategic height finds themselves pulled into operational weeds, not because the business demands it, but because the leadership architecture has quietly shifted around them.

Their role has drifted from architect to firefighter.

The organisation, sensing this displacement, begins compensating - creating informal decision paths, developing workarounds, and inadvertently training the CEO to remain reactive rather than directive.

This isn't about time management or delegation techniques.

It's about recognising that leadership clarity requires structural protection, not motivational restoration.

The most capable CEOs I work with didn't lose their edge - they lost their position within their own organisational system.

When you're constantly pulled down to solve what others should handle, strategic thinking becomes a luxury you can't afford.

The hardest truth about leadership?

You're not drowning because you lack capability  -  you're drowning because your systems haven't evolved with your role.

I stopped white-knuckling my days when I realised alignment wasn't just about values.

It was about architecture.

The systems that got you here:
→ Calendar ownership that belongs to everyone else
→ Vision execution that lives in your head alone
→ Decision-making that flows through you

These create role distortion. You become the bottleneck instead of the catalyst.

So I built different systems:
🧩 Time protection that actually holds
🛑 Decision frameworks that reduce cognitive load
🗺️ Vision translation that creates shared ownership

The goal wasn't perfection. It was breathing room  -  for me and my organisation.

Because here's what I learned: if your systems don't support who you're becoming as a leader, they're actively working against your company's growth.

Your calendar reveals your true organisational architecture. And most of the time, it's designed for the leader you used to be.

✨ SPARK ✨
Look at next week's calendar. What's one recurring decision or task that could be systematised, delegated, or eliminated? Start with what's creating the most decision fatigue  -  not necessarily the highest stakes.

Hybridarbeit scheitert selten an Technik. Meist an Führung.

Im aktuellen personalschweiz Fachartikel beleuchten wir, warum hybride Zusammenarbeit kein Organisationsmodell ist, sondern eine Führungsarchitektur - und was heute wirklich den Unterschied macht.

HSLU – Institut für Betriebs- und Regionalökonomie IBR

View company: HSLU – Institut für Betriebs- und Regionalökonomie IBR

Das Innosuisse-Projekt «hyFiT» der HSLU Hochschule Luzern mit Pleinert & Partner zeigt: Erfolgreiche #hybride #Führung entsteht durch das gezielte Zusammenspiel von Kompetenzen, Technologie und Kontext. Führungskräfte, die diese Dimensionen reflektieren und gezielt entwickeln, schaffen Teams, die verbunden bleiben, klar kommunizieren und Innovation ermöglichen – ganz unabhängig vom Standort über Länder, Zeitzonen und Sprachen hinweg.

Mehr dazu im Artikel «Hybride Führung – gekommen, um zu bleiben» in personalSCHWEIZ (Ausgabe 11/2025) von Rea Haldemann, Ingo Stolz, Dr. Helena Pleinert, Moana Monnier und Myrto Z. 

#hslu #hsluwirtschaft

Hybride Führung - gekommen, um zu bleiben

Providing rocket fuel for ambitious teams: evidence based models and methods to unleash the full potential of organizations

Looking forward to my LinkedIn Live conversation with Dr. Henrietta Carbonel!

https://lnkd.in/eCrZuFx9

Justin McNaughton

Partner @ CAS | 🗡️ Lawyer for Emerging Tech Companies | Photographer / Mountain Biker / Dad

𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲:

•	They focus on growth, no time for details
•	They believe legal services create headaches, not growth
•	They DIY with ChatGPT
•	They think they will have time “later”

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲: 

•	Their contracts become sloppy
•	Their operating documents leave massive gaps
•	Investors reject them because “it’s not buttoned up”
•	Their businesses lose momentum

𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀.


Consider the large tech companies you’re disrupting. 

They have a c-suite lawyer who:

• Protects company assets 
• Advises on legal obstacles
• Identifies and reduces risks
• Oversees compliance issues
• Oversees the company's specialist lawyers
• Acts as the company's legal representative
• Acts as a key negotiator in strategic transactions

They 𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗼 have Intellectual property lawyers who:

• Register patents, trademarks, and copyrights
• Safeguard intellectual property
• Enforce against infringers

These companies have $100M legal budgets.

Emerging companies can’t afford all of this, so what do you do?

𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: a combined outside general counsel and intellectual property counsel.


𝗠𝘆 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱:

Over the last 17 years, I’ve worked with all kinds of tech & creative companies:

⇨ I handled trademarks for two leading private timeshare companies
⇨ I negotiate technology agreements across multiple industries
⇨ I’m keen on intellectual property protection and licensing 
⇨ I advised one of the first cell-cultivated meat startups 
⇨ I protected Pitbull's signature "eeeeyoooo" sound 
⇨ I manage m&a for buyers and sellers 
⇨ I negotiate fundraising for startups 

If you plan to exit your tech company or sign a million-dollar contract, send me a dm. 

We’ll set up a call.

Photographs © 2023-2025 Justin McNaughton unless otherwise indicated. 
All rights reserved.
_________________

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