Catalytic Leadership

Why Most Teams Break During Growth (And How Values-Driven Leadership Doesn’t)

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 3 • Episode 113

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When your team starts to grow, things shift — and not always in the way you expect. Bottlenecks show up where trust should be. Communication breaks down just when clarity matters most. If you're leading a digital agency that's scaling fast, the pressure isn’t just in performance — it’s in holding the culture together while everything accelerates.

This week, I’m joined by Brittany Hansen — a tech entrepreneur, co-founder of a bootstrapped SaaS company built without venture capital. Her platform solves for one of the biggest blind spots in business today: how to deliver the right message in the right way to a global, multilingual, multicultural audience.

We unpack the systems she uses to build trust, the decision to scale without outside capital, and how values-driven leadership creates teams that don’t just perform — they stay aligned under pressure. If you’ve ever wondered how to scale your team without losing your voice, your mission, or your momentum… this one’s for you.



📚 Books Mentioned

  • Radical Candor by Kim Scott

  • The 6MX Solution by Chase Hughes

  • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

  • Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards



You can connect with Brittany directly on LinkedIn — she welcomes conversation and is generous with her time. If her insights sparked a question or idea, reach out. She’d love to hear it.



Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

It's an honor today to have Brittany Hanson on the podcast. Brittany is a tech entrepreneur with a special interest in marketing, sustainability strategy and global responsibility. She's co-founded a SaaS company without venture capital, navigating the challenges of fundraising, scaling and doing business in Idaho, a state just beginning to carve out its place in the tech world. She's a wife and a mom, a jujitsu grappler and a lover of all things automotive and fashion-related. Brittany, I'm glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Brittany Hansen:

Thank you so much. I'm incredibly excited to be here today.

Dr. William Attaway:

And I'm excited for this conversation. I think you're going to add a lot of value to our listeners and I'm looking forward to it.

Brittany Hansen:

Me too.

Intro:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host. Author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway. Author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway:

I would love to start with you sharing a little bit of your story with our listeners, Brittany, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Brittany Hansen:

Absolutely so, probably in a way that probably 50% of your listeners can connect with and some not so much. I actually got started with leadership and really learning how to advocate for others as a mom, I was home for 13 years, came out of working America and I learned to advocate for my four children, but specifically my two oldest, who are what's called twice exceptional, which means they are gifted autistic individuals on the spectrum. So brilliant, brilliant kids who struggle socially, and it took me a while to figure out how to advocate for them in a way that didn't just make them feel protected, because you can advocate and make lots of enemies as you go along. What I was learning was how to advocate and make friends along the way and help people, to learn how to also advocate for my children on their own and help my children learn how to advocate for themselves.

Brittany Hansen:

And then, about 13 years in, my sister-in-law and I were at a zoo and we saw a tiny little boy he must have been five or less trying to. We were at the zoo and there was signage and the zookeeper was speaking and he was trying to serve as an interpreter for his parents, who spoke Spanish, and we thought surely there has got to be a better way of doing all of this, and it turned out that there was not a better way, so we patented the idea, got a very talented group of developers together and have since moved forward in delivering information. But if you're going to be experts in delivering information, you dang well. Better be experts in communication and delivering information yourself. That's right. So that has been our learning experience along the way. It's been exciting and grueling and wonderful, so so fascinating.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, there's no such thing as a wasted experience. I often say, and every part of this journey has made you into the leader that you are now, and you can now bring that to bear for your clients, for your family, right for everybody around you, for their benefit, and I love that. Where does marketing come into?

Brittany Hansen:

this? Where does marketing come into this? So when we got started with this business, I realized early on that we were going to have a gap in marketing. When I had gone to school the first time, I had gone, with a specialty in psychology, I decided to go back for marketing, assuming that I probably wouldn't finish in time to be helpful to us. And that ended up not being true. I started finding value right away, and we needed a way to talk about ourselves and to message ourselves. Marketing is a way of distributing information. It's a way of understanding others and yourself and being able to get to the root of things and understand what's most important. So psychology actually fits in really neatly there, as does leadership, because good marketing isn't done by lying or spin. It's done by a real understanding of who you're working with, and the same can be said for leadership. It's not done through lying or manipulation. It's done by understanding who you are and the people that you're working with and helping those things to jive together in such a way that everybody gets to be successful.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that. I would imagine that balancing home life and professional life is somewhat of a challenge.

Brittany Hansen:

It is. It's a line you learn to walk and sometimes you sacrifice in one place or the other. So I had someone tell me once that it's a matter of keeping all of the balls in the air, but knowing which of those balls are glass and which ones are plastic. Yes, so it has been a learning journey, stepping out from having, you know, been a stay-at-home mom and just a full-time advocate for my children into advocating for what I believe are world issues like accessibility, like language and learning and the information really, informationally.

Brittany Hansen:

There's a big disconnect between what is truly accessible and what's just available to people. Those are not the same thing and while walking that line has been difficult, it's also been incredibly rewarding for me and it's taught me when, where and how to use my empathy so that I can connect with people, enable them to do their best and then step back and let them run the both the way that I and my co-founder work. We have to be strong delegators, so we have to understand who we're working with and uh, have high trust in our company and let people deliver. And and uh, as a recovering oldest child perfectionist, that was a learning curve for me to say I'm going to trust you to run with this and, gratefully, we have an incredible team who has done just that.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that. What does it look like? And I'm just, I'm curious, this distinction that you made between availability and accessibility. Can you expound on that a little bit?

Brittany Hansen:

Absolutely so what we find a lot, and not just with language capabilities, although there's certainly part of it. Companies feel like, because instructions or any kind of information you might need is available for you, that it is accessible. It's not If I have cookies in a cookie jar on top of my fridge. Technically they are available. Are they really accessible? I like that.

Intro:

That's good.

Brittany Hansen:

You can't get to them easily. You might break something, you might hurt yourself. It's there, but you don't know how to get to it and you certainly can't use it in the way that it's supposed to be used. So in that way, lots of businesses I mean I don't know how many of us have gone to Ikea and gotten home with that massive sheet of instructions and the pictograms, Right?

Dr. William Attaway:

Me.

Brittany Hansen:

It's available to me to know how to put this together. Is it truly accessible?

Brittany Hansen:

I don't know, because there's an awful lot of user-generated content out there telling you how to put together IKEA furniture, and some of it is wrong and means that it will all fall in on itself when I'm done right. How many of us have used Google Translate to translate something and went hmm, I bet that's not what they meant to say when they said that. Right, but technically, the information was available to you. We cannot make the best decisions without the best information. When we choose, as governments, as companies, as social media influencers, as authors whatever you choose when we choose to put information out there that is subpar or that we haven't chosen to take the time to really curate, we arm people with poor information about ourselves, which means they will make poor decisions regarding us.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's powerful and I think it ties into the whole marketing and communication piece, like how are we going to do this in a way that is intentional, that's purposeful and that is going to drive people more toward being able to understand and comprehend exactly what we're trying to communicate?

Brittany Hansen:

That's really solid and comprehend exactly what we're trying to communicate. That's really solid, thank you. We believe so, and the more we've traveled abroad, the more we've really come to realize that there is a gap. Anybody can do a QR code that says here's the version of this information in Spanish. If it's not in the correct Spanish, it makes no difference to me.

Dr. William Attaway:

Wow, that's very good. So what does your SaaS product do?

Brittany Hansen:

So our platform delivers any information that's placed on the platform seamlessly and automatically in the home language of a user's phone. So your phone is automatically, like you can set it, so it's in Spanish, english, italian. You know hundreds of languages out there. Typically, websites will force you to click, and we've found that anytime there's any level of friction right between you and a consumer or reader, you start to lose people at every single click, because it means you don't understand them. So if you can automatically detect the language of their phone and then deliver it not only in that language, but in that relevancy, you change, and the reason I say that localization is becoming a big thing. We understand that Spanish directly across the border is completely different from Spanish further down in South America. We're starting to understand that better, which is good. The other thing that happens, though, is cultural relevancy gets lost, which is good. The other thing that happens, though, is cultural relevancy gets lost.

Brittany Hansen:

My favorite example of this, or one that we've run into, is we work with a shoe designer who also does business in the UAE. Many people could help him deliver his information in Arabic. The problem is that just the same information that is for the Italians, the Americans, the Canadians, doesn't resonate in the UAE. In fact, he shouldn't be using the same videos or pictures because they are offensive in the UAE. So when our software finds out that you speak Arabic, it doesn't just change the words. It changes the relevancy, it changes the images, it changes the languages, because the people that you're working with understand you. They understand that. It's not that you need the same information in Arabic. It's that you need information that will enable you to make the best choices.

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm just processing that. No-transcript is going to understand. That's fascinating.

Brittany Hansen:

It's, you know it's. It's been an incredible journey for us. It was something we realized early on. It's like well, it's in Arabic, but this picture of a woman in bikini doesn't work, and so we that's. Part of our patent is that the information changes based on the user and it really provides. The reason I love it is because, globally, we're not always aware of those things. You know, it's fine, like I put it in Spanish yeah, right.

Brittany Hansen:

Not make sense to the people you want it to make sense to. We increasingly live in a very globalized planet, a very where we have to understand each other because the decisions that we make affect each other. How will you do that if you don't know how to message yourself?

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so good. Communication is not just words. It goes far beyond words and what you're talking about is tapping into that, to the cultural background. You're tapping into the understanding of somebody as a 3D human being, not just a language set like Spanish or Arabic. It's really seeing them more holistically.

Brittany Hansen:

Absolutely Little things, like in the Philippines, especially if you speak Tagalog. They don't point like this. That's rude. So they gesture with their lips. But how would you know that?

Dr. William Attaway:

How would you know that? Yeah, right.

Brittany Hansen:

We're here to coach and help, and our product helps you to figure out those things and to help you deliver, because there's no way for everyone to know everything Right, so good, some of the things I mean. We just left Japan and while we were there, the protocols are wildly different than they are here. You're not supposed to gesture with your hands, which meant that I had to sit on my hands for the whole thing. There's bowing, but at the right angle there's a specific place you are supposed to sit in the meeting. There's a specific way to take a business card, and all of that is culturally relevant and something I would not have thought about. And it's not just because I'm a self-centered American although I'm probably recovering you know one of those as well it's because I don't know. I'm not at how. You don't know, what you don't know.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's right.

Brittany Hansen:

So it starts with conversations. It starts with knowing that you're not good at something and enabling yourself to get better at it, and that's really all that we're trying to do is just enable people to deliver the message they want to deliver.

Dr. William Attaway:

So how does that intersect with authenticity? Because I think one question people may be having is wait a minute, but I talk with my hands, but that's who I am. How does this intersect with that reality that people have certain parts of them that are so key to who they are?

Brittany Hansen:

Absolutely, and to that I would say maybe it boils down to ethics or morality on some level. So I love to talk with my hands, right, that's part of who I am. Deeper than that. I'm very culturally sensitive and empathetic. So if it is deeply offensive in your culture for me to do that, or it makes you feel small or it makes you feel like I'm dominating the room, I probably won't do that anymore. We see examples of that all the time. Like I like to dance, but if I go to a Native American powwow, I will probably be careful of how I do that, because I need to be sensitive to who they are.

Brittany Hansen:

This is not about being inauthentic. This is about making yourself adaptable, about learning, understanding and growing and saying you know, who am I really versus what do I just do? You know, it's not me to point at someone, that's just something I grew up with culturally Right. Gesturing with my hands is part of how I like to speak, but if it doesn't fit that moment, then I need to know not to do it, because more important to me is that I'm inclusive, that I'm loving, that I'm understanding, than that I like to talk with my hands.

Dr. William Attaway:

What a great distinction and what a great opportunity for leaders to understand that it's really not about us right. It's about communicating with other people and thinking what is the best way for me to do that in a way that they will receive best? It's putting them first right, and that type of servant leadership, I think, is something that is key for great, truly catalytic leaders, and I love that you're bringing that out, because I think the surface level is so often to say, well, that's just how I am and that's the default, the reactionary response. But I say, well, that's just how I am and that's just, that's the default, the reactionary response. But I love how you say that let's go deeper, let's go underneath that. What is it every leader wants to do? They want to make a difference. If they're trying to be catalytic, they want to make a difference in what they're doing, and what you're describing is a way to do that. But it starts with the mindset that you adopt when it comes to communicating with others.

Brittany Hansen:

Absolutely, it does. Yeah, and I think you're right. That's who I am is a really easy way of saying I don't want to be accountable for the way I make people feel.

Dr. William Attaway:

Wow, that's good. I think great leaders will be and they'll resonate with that and they'll say, okay, this is a growth area for me. There's some growth I need to be thinking about here. You know, as you have started this business and you know, as I read in your bio like no venture capital, like, so you started with zero.

Brittany Hansen:

Yeah, we bootstrapped in the beginning. We bootstrapped hard and that was terrifying to take a step forward and then we have ended up with investors. But we chose not to go the venture route we never had angels, we've never done any of that and not to negate the value of that there are people who have to have it, the value of that. There are people who have to have it. But gratefully, early on, and especially my co-founder realized if we do that we lose our voice potentially in this company and we started as a value-based company. There's money to be made, but it was about value and we didn't want that taken away. We've been incredibly blessed to come as far as we have without that kind of money and the investors that we have had have been chosen and careful and how grateful we are for them as well. But we wanted to do it this way. We wanted to build something meaningful and I feel strongly like that's what we've done and and we're continuing to try and do that every day.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that Talk about the value-centric piece of that Because, you know, a lot of companies talk about values, a lot of leaders talk about values and leading with values and a culture of values. I'm sensing something a little bit different in what you're describing sensing something a little bit different in what you're describing.

Brittany Hansen:

We really try to weave our values into what we're doing, and it's you know it's an interesting time. This happens always with the waves of change come through and something a company said I stand by this. Like six months later it's not as profitable as they thought it would be, and we're restructuring everything and everybody gets put away. That's performative, though. Those are performative values, so we've worked very hard to weave into our actual culture the ideas that we believe in Accessibility. We're a very flat company. Everyone, including anyone under me or anyone under any other leader in our company can go onto our dashboard and see what I'm working on at any time, and they can give me their opinion about it at any time, because accessibility is important to us. We work in the same office with all of our staff. We have full-on staff meetings, anyone can talk to me anytime they would like, and we work hard to pull in people who speak other languages and who have other cultural beliefs so that we can adopt other thought ideas If everybody has a spot at the table.

Brittany Hansen:

I think we see this a lot. We hear everybody needs a spot at the table, and yes, they absolutely do. But if everybody doesn't have a voice, it does no good that they're at the table. A silent family dinner profits you nothing. You ate, oh, that's good. A silent family dinner profits you nothing.

Dr. William Attaway:

You ate. Oh, that's good. A silent family dinner profits you nothing. That's good.

Brittany Hansen:

But if everybody is talking and everybody's minds are open, that's where real change comes from. I like that.

Dr. William Attaway:

So that's really good. Yes, so how do you encourage and draw out the voices when sometimes people are more reticent for whatever reason, due to the background that they have or whatever. How do you encourage that as their leader?

Brittany Hansen:

So really blessed to watch my co-founder do a lot of this, because people come into jobs with trauma from their last job.

Brittany Hansen:

Their last job was amazing right, there's leftover things we bring baggage with us was amazing right, there's leftover things we bring baggage with us. Some of it is allowing people to speak and get things out and make mistakes and have it be very safe for you to make mistakes, have it be safe for someone to say something because they're frustrated in a meeting not screaming right, we have respect for each other. But for someone to say something and then say wow, tell me more about that. It requires a level of curiosity that can sometimes be very painful to have. Wow, I see that you're sensing a breakdown. Tell me what that means. So it requires a level of humility. I'm definitely still practicing, but the more people realize they are actually safe with you, the more likely they are to bring you a concern. And everybody needs that, because if marketing and everybody else is moving forward with something and dev is saying, hey, hey, hey, wait, this is much bigger than you think it is in a lot of corporations, they'll be quiet and just try to get it done and nobody's going to know until six months down the road that this isn't going to be what it's supposed to be. So it's inviting asking, sitting in uncomfortable silences, because sometimes people are waiting to see if someone else will say something or if it's really okay if they speak up. Pausing for 20 seconds doesn't make that like that's enough time for someone to say should I say something and go, and then you've moved on. So silence, asking, asking, asking and rewarding this is something my co-founder, andrew, is very good at. She'll say, oh, that is such a good thought. I hadn't even thought about that.

Brittany Hansen:

I think sometimes people are afraid that if you are the leader and you didn't think about it, that that means something is wrong with you. No, like leaders, just we're supposed to surround ourselves with people who are smarter than us. Yeah, and that's what we've striven to do. And then when someone on a very rare occasion, when someone didn't fit the team, we tried to make that decision very quickly so that we can protect our team. Our team is sacred to us. It's not family you have to be careful saying that kind of thing but our team is sacred to us because our mission is sacred to us and they really believe in our mission as well us and they really believe in our mission as well. So open communication and value alignment are crucially important. And then backing up what you say you're going to do and when you don't apologizing and I learned that as a parent, I learned to apologize to my kids when I did something wrong You'll use it at work all the time. If you don't apologize at work, you have a real problem.

Dr. William Attaway:

This is true. Yeah, if you haven't, as a leader, apologized in the last week or two, you probably missed something where you should have. Yeah, that's a key skill. I totally agree with that, Brittany. You have to lead at a higher level today than you did five years ago. The same thing is going to be true five years from now. As your business continues to grow and scale and your influence increases. You're going to have to lead your team and your clients, your business, in a better and higher way. How do you stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the new leadership skills that your team and your clients are going to need you to have?

Brittany Hansen:

So much of that for me is a show of will and a show of force with myself. I love to learn and grow, so every couple of years I find something new I want to be involved with. You mentioned I do jujitsu. I picked that up about three and a half years ago because I realized I was strategic but that I needed better ways of coming up with strategy, right? So I threw myself into a sport where, by all initial accounts, I don't belong, right. I'm tiny and I have kind of like a squeaky voice and like. I used to run half marathons and it ended up that I love it.

Brittany Hansen:

10 years before that, when I turned 30, I learned to play the harp because I I needed something new in my life. I did yeah, I play the harp. There's things like that all along the way. It's great and I do a lot to read self-improvement books, to read business books, to take classes All of that's important. But if you don't know how to implement the things you're learning, that's where you're going to struggle, and so what I try hard for is things I can immediately implement into my life and see how they're going to change me as a person. I'm doing that with ChatGPT right now and other AI. I'm trying to learn how I can use it ethically, how I can use it to level up so that it's not a weapon that can be used against me, but something that I am well-versed in and I know how to use it in the right way. So, staying open and adoption and just pushing yourself I think a lot of leaders are really good at but don't push yourself in the directions you already know you're good at, like that's just safe.

Brittany Hansen:

If I'm good at cha-cha, right, if I'm good at Latin dance and I'm like, do you know what? I'm going to be really brave and I'm going to try salsa, am I really being brave or am I protecting myself?

Dr. William Attaway:

Right, brave, or am I protecting myself? Right, that's good. That's good and safe. Is not where the greatest leaders operate, and I love that. I'm still thinking about the harp. I love that. Do you still play?

Brittany Hansen:

I do, there is yeah.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so awesome.

Brittany Hansen:

I do play. I don't play for the original purpose, which I was going to do a death doula program and help people transition from kind of life to death. But there is something that's so calming about an instrument you hold against you as you play and just feel it. I love it to this day, my goodness.

Intro:

So fantastic.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that. So, thinking about your journey and I mean you are continually learning in so many different ways, experientially, from other people and through books and such Is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you'd recommend to the leaders who are listening?

Brittany Hansen:

Oh, there are a thousand books. I would recommend Radical Candor. It can be a little hard to read but it's excellent. What's at the root of it, and I'm reading one right now. If you struggle at all with reading people, which is vitally important as a leader, there's one that just came out called 6MX. Is what is the 6MX solution? It's the six minute x-ray that will help you to understand body cues and body language, doing it in part so I can screen it and give it to my boys who really struggle to read body language. But really interesting and a great way to implement all the things you learn from people like Vanessa Van Edwards, or what's the difference? So cool to read about those things but sometimes very difficult to implement, and this is a great way of implementing that knowledge.

Dr. William Attaway:

I haven't read that. I'll have to check that out. Thank you.

Brittany Hansen:

Of course, it's a great one.

Dr. William Attaway:

Brittany, this has been such a fantastic conversation that I have so enjoyed. I know people are going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn more from you and more about what you're doing. What is the best way for them to do that?

Brittany Hansen:

The easiest way is just to find me on LinkedIn. I'm there all the time and I would love to meet up with you. You're always welcome to message me and I'll send you a link and we can talk for 30 minutes. I love to hear people's ideas. I love to hear about your businesses, so please do, if you have that thought, don't hesitate, reach out. I'd love to hear from you.

Dr. William Attaway:

Thank you for what you're doing, thank you for the difference that you're making and for being a model of what a continually learning leader looks like.

Brittany Hansen:

Well, thank you, and for what you're doing and the way that you're leading people and making your knowledge available to so many people. I think it's phenomenal and I'm a big fan.

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