Most business owners treat systems as something to construct after growth arrives. Nicholas Mukhtar argues for the opposite sequence, and his reasoning comes from watching what happens when companies wait.

He sorts the organizations he advises into two buckets. One is the large, established company that functions like a big-city government, a bureaucratic machine that sometimes cannot get out of its own way. The other is the startup, a group of people covering 20 roles each while trying to become a real operating business. Different as they look, both tend to make the same mistake. They react to what is visible, a missed quarter, a departing employee, a failed launch, without asking what created the conditions for that failure.

Mukhtar’s rule is direct: build the infrastructure before you need it, “because by the time you need it, you can’t afford the downtime.” Waiting turns a manageable design problem into an emergency.

His proof came from Healthy Detroit, the nonprofit he grew to roughly a $15 million annual operating budget by 2017. Rather than open clinics, the organization partnered with the Detroit Parks and Recreation Department to turn public parks into wellness centers offering free fitness classes, screenings, immunizations, and connections to social services. Parks worked as the delivery point because they carried no barrier to entry. No appointments. No insurance cards. No co-pays.

The part that mattered for scale was the design underneath. Every site followed a standardized model. Residents received biometric assessments, connected with partner services through an on-site network, and carried a “Healthy Detroit Passport” that tracked their participation. When a location underperformed, the team could trace the issue to a specific cause instead of assuming the whole concept had failed.

Replicability was the point. A program that worked in one park but could not be duplicated across the city would have reached almost no one. Mukhtar designed for scale from day one, and that habit followed him into private-sector work.

The lesson translates cleanly to founders. Decision rights, communication norms, and reporting cadence feel optional when a company is small and everyone sits in the same room. They stop feeling optional the moment the company doubles and no one can say who approves what. Clarity built early costs a fraction of clarity retrofitted during a crisis.

Growth exposes whatever a company failed to design. Owners who accept that build the boring infrastructure while they’ve still got the time to do it calmly.