Alma Growth Hacks | Leadership and Board Mastery with Jo Dalton
Leadership and Board Mastery: Building the Right People Architecture for Growth 🎯
As your company grows, you try to grow with it. But the skills, roles and structures that got you started are rarely the ones that will take you to the next stage.
In this first session of our new series Alma Growth Hacks, we’re joined by Jo Dalton, founder of growth and people advisory firm JD & Co, to unpack one of the most critical and often underestimated levers of scale:
building the right leadership team and board at the right time to unlock the next phase of growth.
Drawing on her experience advising founders, boards and investors across high-growth businesses, Jo will explore how the founder role evolves as companies scale, how to make confident leadership hires, and how to design a people architecture that supports growth rather than constrains it.
This session will cover:
How the founder role changes as the business grows
When and how to hire your first leadership team
What “good” looks like in board composition at different stages
The different types of leaders you need as you scale
Timing and decision-making, and how to avoid both premature and overdue hires
How to unlock hidden resources around you, including advisors, boards and networks
The session will close with a live Q&A so prepare all your burning questions 🔥
Whether you’re approaching your first senior hires, thinking about formalising your board, or sensing it’s time to step into a new phase of leadership, this workshop will give you clarity, confidence and practical frameworks to move forward.
Jo Dalton is a Founder, Investor & Board Advisor who has been driving growth for visionary, disruptive brands for nearly two decades. With a keen eye for early stage investments, Jo is a prominent angel investor in over a dozen exciting scaling businesses, with a particular focus on sustainability, the circular economy and health & wellbeing.
Jo is a founding member of The Alma Community, a network of angels set up to invest in female founders and underrepresented groups.
Jo also understands first-hand how much more difficult it is for female-led businesses to attract investment and achieve growth. In 2011, Jo launched JD&Co from her kitchen as a lone founder with no funding in place. Since its inception, Jo is immensely proud to have grown it to now being one of the leading Founder Advisory & Executive Search firms in Europe, advising on growth and building the Boards and Leadership teams of some of the fastest growing disruptive, challenger brands in the world.
As an industry expert, Jo is passionate about sharing her insights and giving back to the next generation of founders and potential angel investors and talks regularly at panels and events. Jo is also a long standing judge and supporter of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards, Ideasfest and the National Startup Awards.
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