Is it time to adopt a scaling mindset? There is an inflection point in your business growth journey that calls for a shift in mindset. When your product is where it needs to be, your customer base is established and you’ve stayed on course consistently, you can start to think more meaningfully about the kind of business you want to run longer term.    Adopting the right mindset for scale is about moving away from short termism and survival-based decision making to more of a long-term strategic view. Making the shift to a scaling mindset, in essence, is about giving yourself permissi ..read more

When you’re scaling a business it can feel as though the need to think of yourself as a leader has crept up on you. After all, most people set out to make their business a success rather than out of an egoistic need to be at the helm. It’s not uncommon, therefore, for people on the scale up journey to end up as accidental leaders, leading by default rather than design and experiencing myriad challenges as a result. This can be especially common in fast growth organisations where the scale or scope of the challenge combined with the pace of change means that getting things done often takes pre ..read more

When a team is growing fast a lot changes in a short time and high growth adds pressure that can be hard work for the team and the business as a whole. Your job as a leader is to anticipate these changes, get ahead of them when you can and mitigate for the effects by building the right foundations and setting yourself up to be responsive rather than reactive.  So what's shifting and what do you need to be mindful of? Working at scale looks and feels different for everyone. You’re in a space where there’s a potential requirement for more depth or breadth than before and the impact of that ..read more

When you’re leading a fast growth business you need a team who can lift you up. They need to be fully empowered, invested and taking the initiative - they need to treat your business as if its their own. Yet these things come up time and time again as key elements that leaders struggle to cultivate in their people, creating a barrier to growth that is like a silent blight.  So it’s crucial that you know how to make your team truly accountable, instil genuine responsibility, and get them to buy in on all fronts. What creates true empowerment, like good sourdough versus a fast prove tast ..read more

Grow or Go? When your business seems to outgrow certain members of your team, when they expect their loyalty to be valued above all else and when they start to exhibit distracting or disruptive behaviour you might find yourself asking “should they grow or should they go?”. Walking this new line is a juicy challenge that calls for a step up in leadership.  Let’s start by looking at why team members can get inadvertently left behind and why that leads to inevitable friction.   Growth is change – and change is hard. People respond differently to change depending on how they’re a ..read more

Are you tired? I’m tired!   Almost every single client I’ve spoken to in the last 2 weeks has said the same thing… it’s all a bit ‘heads on desks’!   If that’s you, you’ll no doubt be planning to take some time out to rest and recover.   But if you’re like most of the high achievers I work with, that’s sometimes easier said than done. Most of my clients are, at times, pretty bad at taking real time out.   Hardly surprising really. When the buck stops with you it can feel difficult to contemplate taking proper time out.   When you’re running a fast growth business it ca ..read more

There’s a rolling assumption that when you reach the dizzy heights of the CEO role you’re probably immune to the minutiae that drags down our inboxes and to-do lists. I think it’s probably a lesson you learn the hard way that, especially in your first time in this space, it’s actually anything but.   As a first time CEO it’s easy to become a dumping ground. This risk is especially acute when you haven’t done the work to fully empower your team. If you haven’t done this work effectively you become the de facto ‘most passionate person’ and (I’ve seen this a lot) you become the one that take ..read more

How you behave has a significant impact on your people and your business. The decisions you make, the things you prioritise and what you’re motivated by are all reflections of who you are. The relationships you build and how they work is a reflection of your inner beliefs and values. Ultimately, your business will be a reflection of you - so understanding who you are and why is hugely important. Why? Because we can’t do anything about the things we don’t know about. Creating awareness is the first step in any change. Whether that’s a change in how you want to feel, or how you want to be perce ..read more

Before you read this post, I want you to take a second to think about how much you’ve changed in the last 5 years. What have you learned? What have you overcome? How have you surprised yourself? We are evolving all the time. But how often do you this actively? Or to put it another way, how much of your growth is on purpose. In busy roles, especially in fast growth businesses, it’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle of reactivity, rarely stopping to think about whether you’re growing into the kind of leader you need to be to run the kind of business you want to run. With failure rates of ..read more

Before you read this post, I want you to take a second to think about how much you’ve changed in the last 5 years. What have you learned? What have you overcome? How have you surprised yourself? We are evolving all the time. But how often do you this actively? Or to put it another way, how much of your growth is on purpose. In busy roles, especially in fast growth businesses, it’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle of reactivity, rarely stopping to think about whether you’re growing into the kind of leader you need to be to run the kind of business you want to run. With failure rates of ..read more