How a senior HR executive turned a CEO coaching engagement into a thriving Scaling Up practice
By Verne Harnish
Liat Lazar didn’t become a Scaling Up Certified Coach because she was looking for a career change.
She became one because a CEO she was already coaching handed her the book
Before stepping into private practice, Lazar spent her career as an HR executive inside startups and two Fortune 500 companies, helping leaders navigate rapid growth, change, and complexity.
Along the way, She built a strong professional platform: a podcast, a blog, lectures, events, and a leadership group for Microsoft portfolio managers in Israel. The thread running through all of it was the same: helping leaders grow into the next version of themselves and build stronger organizations around them.
That work eventually led her to a CEO who was applying the Scaling Up methodology inside his own company. To coach him better, she picked up Verne Harnish’s book. She didn’t expect what came next.
“It was love at first sight,” she says. “It captured, in one methodology, so much of what I already believed about growth, leadership, people, and execution.”
That was the click. The work she had been doing inside companies for years suddenly had a name, a structure, and a community attached to it.
From inside the organization to a coach for hire
Lazar didn’t arrive at coaching from the outside. She had been coaching managers and CEOs throughout her career, just from within the companies she worked in. It was always the part of the job she loved most. So when she finally made the leap, it didn’t feel like a dramatic pivot. It felt like coming home to work she was meant to do.
That doesn’t mean it was easy. The financial side of leaving a stable executive career was the most complex part of the decision. But the conviction underneath it was steady: this was the right path. That’s when she decided to enroll in the Scaling Up Coach certification, even during COVID. This meant the entire program was delivered online with no in-person component. It was a huge amount to absorb in a short window.
What she remembers most isn’t the curriculum. It’s the feeling that she was no longer alone.
“I was becoming part of a real community,” she says, “and that sharpened my sense that I was exactly where I was meant to be.”
The kind of leader she works with today
Today, Lazar runs her own coaching practice based in Israel, with select engagements in Greece, Hong Kong, and the U.S. Her clients span industries – gaming companies, real estate developers, construction firms – but she pays less attention to industry than she does to the leader at the top.
The leaders she gravitates toward share one quality: they are ready to grow, learn, and lead differently. That readiness, in her experience, matters more than sector or stage.
And the recurring problem she sees across all of them isn’t what most CEOs assume. It isn’t a strategy problem. It isn’t a market problem.
“The biggest issue I see is not planning,” she says. “It’s executing it.”
Most companies, in her view, plan well. Where they break down is staying focused long enough to convert the plan into results. Execution is repetitive, demanding, and significantly less exciting than strategy – and that is precisely where growth is won or lost. A large part of her work is keeping the leadership team aligned to the plan, and keeping the CEO from pulling the company off it. In many cases, she’ll say plainly, the CEO is the bottleneck. Her job is to help them let go, make the hard calls they’ve been avoiding, and create the focus the company needs to scale.
A real engagement: Beta Real Estate
One of the engagements Lazar is most proud of is her three-year partnership with the founders and leadership team of Beta Real Estate. The founders are sharp, ambitious, and unusually good at execution. As the company grew, they recognized something many founders never admit: they didn’t yet know how to manage that growth well. There was no clear plan, too much overlap between roles, too little focus, and not enough management discipline around execution and cash flow.
What stood out to Lazar was the founders’ maturity. They understood that growth couldn’t be run on instinct alone. It needed a method. Over the course of three years, she worked with them on strategy, executive role clarity, growth engines, management processes, and the kind of leadership standards that hold under pressure.
As Yudik Madar, one of the partners, put it: “Liat works with the three founders and the team. Together, we implemented a focused way of working around goals and performance, as well as work plans and execution. Her work has had a significant impact on our business success, which is why we continue to work together.”
Doubling revenue in six months – through discipline, not heroics
A second engagement shows what disciplined Scaling Up implementation can do on a tighter timeline. When Lazar began working with iTalent, Hire Smarter in February 2021, the goal was to double revenue within twelve months. The company hit it in six.
She is quick to say there was no magic in it. The result came from disciplined execution of the Scaling Up methodology: strengthening the leadership team, sharpening alignment around goals, increasing transparency across the company, and installing a KPI-driven rhythm that connected strategy to execution week after week.
Dana Bash, CEO of iTalent Group, described the work this way: “Liat creates a real connection between strategy and tactics. She helped strengthen our leadership team, create a shared language, and align the company around goals and processes that drive results. We not only reached our growth goals, but we also exceeded them by a wide margin.”
Why the framework works the way it does
When Lazar talks about why the Scaling Up methodology gets results that other frameworks don’t, she keeps coming back to one word: integration.
Most methodologies treat strategy, execution, people, and cash as separate conversations. Scaling Up forces them into the same room.
And in her experience, the most powerful leverage isn’t in any one of the Four Decisions: it’s in working the connections between them. Strategy that isn’t supported by the right people doesn’t survive contact with reality. Execution without cash discipline runs the company into the ground. And People decisions made in isolation from strategy create misalignment that takes years to undo.
One specific tool keeps producing outsized results in her engagements: the FACe (Functional Accountability Chart). It looks deceptively simple on the page, but it tends to open the conversations leaders have been quietly avoiding.
When she runs the exercise with a client, what surfaces is usually the same set of issues: unclear roles, a structure that no longer fits the company’s size, and a leadership team that has outgrown the way work is divided. In one case, the FACe led directly to a redefinition of the CEO and VP of Sales roles. The revenue numbers moved shortly after.
The life she’s built around the work
Lazar’s life looks different now than it did during her corporate years, in two ways that matter to her.
The first is that she no longer feels alone in her work. There is always someone in the Scaling Up community, somewhere in the world, with a sharp perspective to offer. For an independent practitioner running engagements with senior leadership teams, that kind of professional backbone is genuinely rare.
The second is balance. She works four days a week and keeps one day for the things she loves outside of work. After two decades of being permanently on-call inside corporate environments, that, too, feels like success.
The community has done more than support her practice. She is part of a monthly mastermind group of fellow Scaling Up coaches who share real client situations, challenge one another’s thinking, and stay close personally: something that has mattered more than ever given the situation in Israel over the past few years. The friendships, the advice, the doors opened through shared connections: all of it shapes how she shows up in her client work
For someone weighing the leap
Lazar is direct with people considering the same path she took. If you have real leadership experience, sound judgment, and a genuine desire to help others grow, she says, you probably already have more of what it takes than you realize.
Coaching isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about listening deeply, asking the right questions, and helping people see what they can’t see on their own. Honesty, clarity, care, and the willingness to challenge: those, in her view, are the qualities that make the difference.
Looking back on her own decision, she points to a few things that mattered most. She started using what she was learning right away with existing clients, even while she was still nervous about it. She set goals she felt in her bones she had to reach. And she stayed focused. She didn’t try to do too many things at once. She knew what needed to work, and she put her energy there.
If she had to compress what she’s learned into a single line, this is it: courage matters, but focus is what turns courage into results.
Being a great coach, she adds, isn’t only about the tools or the methodology. It’s about who you’re willing to become. The path keeps asking you to learn, grow, and stretch. But for those who take the work seriously, it’s deeply meaningful because you get to help leaders build real companies, not just chase ideas.
“And that,” she says, “is a privilege.”
Ready to turn strategy into results the way Liat did with her clients?
If your company has a solid plan but struggles to execute it consistently, a Scaling Up Certified Coach can help you align your leadership team, sharpen your focus, and build the discipline that drives real growth. Connect with a Scaling Up Coach today and find out what's possible when planning and execution finally work together.