Building a Flexible Leadership Model for Swiss Scaleups

How do you scale a company when you can’t afford the senior team you actually need?

Every scaling founder hits the same wall. The company has outgrown what one person can hold in their head - finance, operations, marketing, hiring - but it can't yet justify a full-time C-suite to carry it.

We're excited to welcome Emelie Metscher, Founder of Blaze, to this Startup Grind Zurich event - supported by Hong Kong.

Blaze is Switzerland's fractional leadership engine - matching founders and CEOs with senior CFOs, CMOs, COOs, and Chiefs of Staff on a fractional basis, exactly when they're needed.

In this fireside chat, Emelie will break down how fractional leadership actually works inside a scaling business - from spotting the moment the founder becomes the bottleneck, to building a lean, expert leadership team without betting the company on a single full-time hire.

📅 Date: Thursday, 16 July 2026
⏰ Time: 6:00 PM CET -  (12 AM HKT on 17 Jul)
⌛ Duration: 1h
📍 Location: Online (Virtual Event)

💡 What You'll Learn

✅ How to recognise the moment you've become the bottleneck - and what to do about it
✅ What fractional leadership actually is, and where it beats a full-time senior hire
✅ How to access CFO-, CMO-, or COO-level thinking without the full-time salary
✅ The way to build a lean leadership team that moves as fast as your business does
✅ Why "full-time or nothing" quietly costs companies their best senior talent

🎤 Meet the Speaker

Emelie Metscher is the Founder of Blaze, a fractional leadership network connecting senior executives with Swiss scaleups and SMEs. After a corporate career as a management consultant and Chief of Staff in Sweden and the UK, she spent nearly a decade in fractional roles supporting high-growth companies.

After moving to Switzerland, she kept seeing the same two problems: talented senior women stepping back from leadership because of the country's "full-time or nothing" norm, and founders scaling without the right expertise at the right time because senior full-time hires were out of reach. Blaze is her answer - not a recruiter, not a community, but a fractional engine that matches the right leader with the right company at the right moment.

Emelie is a practitioner first. She still takes on fractional Chief of Staff mandates herself, which means every conversation with founders comes from real operator experience - not theory.

🎯 Who Should Attend?

🚀 Startup founders scaling past the point where they can keep doing every senior role themselves
📈 CEOs and operators weighing their first senior leadership hires
🧠 Senior executives curious about fractional and portfolio careers
📢 Investors and advisors helping portfolio companies build out their leadership teams

🚀 Don't miss this opportunity to build the senior leadership team your company needs

📌 RSVP now to secure your spot