Built to Change

The next chapter at Vertikal6 isn’t simply about growth. It’s about building an organization capable of growing beyond the people who got it here.

Warwick, RI — September 29, 2026 — People sometimes tell Rick Norberg that Vertikal6 has reached rare air.

“Are we?” he asks. “It doesn’t feel like that.”

Harry Curran feels much the same way.

“We’re not even close to where we want to be.”

I recently sat down with Rick and Harry to catch up on the work we’ve been doing together and talk about what they’re seeing as Vertikal6 continues to grow and evolve.

After more than fifteen years of building a successful technology company together, that might seem like an unusual perspective. Vertikal6 has grown, expanded its capabilities, and become a much more sophisticated organization than the business Rick and Harry began building years ago.

But neither of them spends much time talking about what they’ve already built.

They’re much more interested in what Vertikal6 has to become next.

And increasingly, Rick and Harry are realizing that the answer isn’t just about technology, revenue, systems, or services.

It’s also about them.

Because eventually, what makes an organization successful can also keep it from becoming something more.

When heroics work

Rick and Harry took different paths to Vertikal6.

Rick’s entrepreneurial journey grew out of an experience at a technology startup that collapsed. He remembers deciding he didn’t want someone else’s choices to determine his future. Eventually, he committed himself full-time to building his own business.

Harry arrived years later after a career that moved through technology, real estate, construction, operations, consulting, and software. When a mutual friend introduced them, Harry saw a young company with plenty of possibility—and plenty of disorder.

“There was a lot of chaos.”

For Harry, that wasn’t necessarily a problem.

“I am drawn to chaos,” he says. “I am a master of chaos.”

Together, they built through it.

Speed mattered. Ingenuity mattered. Knowing the client mattered. Being willing to jump into almost any problem and figure it out mattered.

Many entrepreneurial companies reach a stage where that works remarkably well. A client has a problem, so someone jumps in. No process exists, so someone creates one. Something goes sideways, and the most experienced person steps in and fixes it.

That isn’t necessarily dysfunction. Sometimes it’s how companies get built.

The problem comes when the company keeps growing, but the operating model doesn’t.

The clients get larger. The problems become more complicated. More people join the organization. More decisions must be made. Eventually, too much happens for a few highly capable people to keep jumping in and saving the day.

At some point, heroics stop scaling.

Rick can see now how his own leadership contributed to that dependence.

“For a long time, I held on probably too tight,” he says.

I think that’s an easy trap for a founder. You know the history. You know the clients. You’ve probably seen some version of the problem before. And after years of doing it, you’ve become pretty good at solving things.

So, when someone comes to you with a problem, solving it feels helpful.

Until you realize you may have become part of the reason they keep bringing you problems.

Letting go is a superpower

Rick describes his role differently today.

“Find the right person, empower them to do their job. Our job is to remove obstacles and hold them accountable, and let them win.”

Then he says something that would probably have been harder for him to say years ago.

“Letting go is a superpower.”

Harry agrees, but adds something important.

“Letting go doesn’t mean looking the other way.”

Those two ideas belong together.

Giving someone ownership doesn’t mean walking away. Harry’s point is that you’re still there. You just don’t have to be the one making every decision.

For Rick and Harry, that means giving other people more room to figure things out—and sometimes get it wrong.

That sounds straightforward until you’ve spent most of your career being rewarded for having the answer.

Looking in the mirror first

Late in our conversation, Rick said something I kept coming back to.

“If the business is stuck, the first place you have to start is with Harry and I.”

That isn’t always where leaders start.

When a business gets stuck, there’s usually no shortage of places to look. The market. A tough client. Someone on the team who isn’t working out the way you hoped.

Sometimes those things really are the problem.

But Rick has experienced something else as Vertikal6 has grown. The company reaches a new level. What worked before no longer produces the same result. Something gets stuck.

And sometimes the constraint is sitting at the top.

“What are we doing that’s not letting us progress?” Rick asks. “Where are we stuck mentally?”

Then he takes it one step further.

“I needed to evolve to let other people evolve and to move things forward.”

That stayed with me.

The founder who once created value by being involved in almost everything eventually has to create value in a very different way: by making it possible for other people to become more capable.

That changes how you define what it means to be useful.

For years, being needed can feel like evidence that you’re doing your job well.

Then one day, being needed for everything becomes evidence that something has to change.

“You’re a leader now.”

That realization is also changing how Rick and Harry think about the rest of Vertikal6.

Rick sees a common assumption inside organizations: leadership begins with promotion.

I’m here now. Someday I’ll become a manager. Then I’ll be a leader.

He wants to break that connection.

“You’re a leader now.”

Not because everyone manages people or has positional authority. Because everyone has moments when what they choose to do affects someone else.

An employee can take ownership of a client problem or pass it along. Someone can speak up when something doesn’t make sense or stay quiet. A person can help a colleague work through something or decide it isn’t their responsibility. They can wait to be told what to do next or use their judgment.

Those decisions matter more as an organization grows.

If everything eventually has to travel upward for an answer, you haven’t really created more leadership. You’ve just added more people beneath the same decision makers.

Rick and Harry want something different.

Building capability, not dependence

That helps explain some of the investments Vertikal6 has been making in both the operating and human sides of the business.

The company has brought in outside expertise to strengthen its systems and operating discipline while also working with Dirigo through Level Up, an organization-wide initiative focused on communication, accountability, collaboration, and everyday leadership. The work was intentionally designed to continue beyond the training room through application, reinforcement, and ongoing development.

Harry puts the need more simply:

“There’s so much ground we need to cover here, and I need these people to be the ones covering it.”

There is simply too much ground. Rick and Harry can’t cover it all anymore. Nor should they.

Harry admits he wasn’t entirely sure how people would respond to the leadership work. He had seen training before. People attend. They participate. Maybe they leave energized.

Then Monday comes.

But he started noticing something different.

People were taking it seriously. They were doing the work. More importantly, he started hearing the language outside the sessions. It was becoming part of how people talked with each other and worked through problems.

“It’s sticking,” Harry says.

But even as he sees that happening, Harry is already thinking about what comes next. His concern isn’t simply whether something works while everyone is paying attention.

What happens when the program is over?

What happens when someone new joins the company?

How does this become something Vertikal6 owns rather than something someone brought to Vertikal6?

Rick is seeing another side of the same shift.

During the sessions, he gets to interact with employees he might not normally know well and see how they think. They also get to interact with him as a person, not just as the CEO.

And sometimes, when a group is struggling, Rick catches himself wanting to step in.

He knows he can probably help.

Instead, he stops.

“Let them figure it out on their own.”

And they do.

They step up.

It’s a small moment. But I wonder if that’s what changing an organization looks like before it ever shows up on a dashboard.

What can happen without us?

Harry talks about Vertikal6’s future in terms of sustainability.

“How do we build other people up,” he asks, “not just as individuals, but as a group, to weave a fabric that is strong and stands on its own?”

Then he takes the idea further.

The goal is to build systems and people that “don’t require us even to be here.”

That doesn’t mean Rick and Harry are trying to make themselves irrelevant. It means they’re beginning to measure their value differently.

For years, their value was demonstrated partly by what happened when they were there, the problems they solved, the decisions they made, the clients they helped, the situations they rescued.

Now another question is becoming just as important:

What can happen when they aren’t there?

Can someone else make the decision? Can a manager coach someone through a problem instead of solving it? Can a team disagree and still find its way forward? Can someone make a mistake, own it, learn from it, and become better because of it?

Can a new employee walk into Vertikal6 and encounter a culture strong enough that they begin to understand how people lead here without Rick or Harry explaining it?

Those aren’t really questions about delegation.

They’re questions about whether capability is spreading.

The next version of Vertikal6

Harry is careful not to suggest they’ve figured all of this out.

They haven’t.

He sees signs that something is changing, but he’s already looking ahead.

How does it last? What happens when new employees arrive? How do the things they’re working on today become part of how Vertikal6 operates tomorrow?

“How do we fuel it?” Harry asks. “How do we make it self-fueling?”

I think those may be exactly the questions Rick and Harry should be asking right now.

They spent years becoming exceptionally good at being needed. They knew the clients. They solved the problems. They made the decisions. When something went sideways, they stepped in. Those capabilities helped build Vertikal6.

The work in front of them may be harder. They must build a company where other people can figure things out without always looking to Rick or Harry.

Rick said he needed to evolve so other people could evolve. I keep coming back to that.

Maybe that’s what this stage of leadership asks of the people who built the company. Not to stop leading, but to change what their leadership makes possible.

To replace dependence with capability.

And, in Harry’s words, to build a fabric strong enough to stand on its own.