Episode #655: From Acquisition to Focus: Scaling NBR - with Michaela Cusack
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, host Kevin Brent is joined by Michaela Cusack, solicitor and co-owner of NBR, to explore what really happens when you acquire an established business and then set about changing its direction. Michaela and her business partner Matt acquired NBR in 2020. They were stepping into an unfamiliar intellectual property sector, taking responsibility for a long-established team and, almost immediately, dealing with the impact of Covid. Their rationale for the acquisition was compelling. Through Matt’s work in mergers and acquisitions, they had seen how businesses...
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Episode #654: ScaleUp Club: Brand Promises. Say It, Mean It, Live It - with Jake Young
ScaleUp Radio
What does your business really promise its customers – and would your team, your suppliers and your customers all give the same answer? This special edition of ScaleUp Radio was recorded live at our latest ScaleUp Club, where we explored the theme “Brand Promise: Say it, mean it, live it.” Rather than our usual one-to-one conversation, this episode brings together three parts of the ScaleUp Club session: an AI Pulse update from Paul Rhodes of Green Gorilla Software, some thoughts from Kevin Brent on why brand promise is a strategic issue rather than simply a marketing one, and a...
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Episode #653: From Kitchen Table to Entrepreneurship - with Carole Duck
ScaleUp Radio
What happens when you spot a problem in your own life, create a solution at home, and gradually discover there could be a much bigger business hiding inside it? In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent talks to Carole Duck, founder of Duxanall Dogbedz, about building a product-led business from the kitchen table, bootstrapping its growth and finding opportunities to move from a handmade product towards a more scalable and potentially higher-margin business. Carole’s original product came from a very practical problem: a puppy that kept chewing expensive dog beds. Her solution was a...
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Episode #652: Is Command and Control Holding Your Business Back? - with Peter Laughter
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Peter Laughter for a fascinating discussion about distributed leadership, why traditional command and control management is increasingly becoming a constraint on growing businesses, and what leaders can do instead. Peter knows the command and control model from experience. He grew a staffing business from around $500,000 to $12 million in revenue in five years. But that success eventually exposed a problem familiar to many growing businesses: when too many decisions and too much responsibility sit with the person at the top, the leader...
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Episode #651: Transforming Chaos into Calm: The Boutique Housekeeping Revolution - with Caroline Chilly and Harriet Greenmount
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Caroline Chilley and Harriet, co-founders of Boutique Housekeeping, a business that is changing the way busy families think about support in the home. Boutique Housekeeping sits in the space between a traditional cleaning service and employing full-time household staff. Its house managers provide a much broader service, helping with housekeeping, tidying, laundry, shopping, meal preparation, errands and PA-style tasks. But this conversation is about far more than housekeeping. It is a fascinating ScaleUp story about finding the right...
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Episode #650: The Art of Leadership: Empowering Founders to Scale Their Businesses - with Tom Van Dyke
ScaleUp Radio
What happens when the thing that got your business growing becomes the very thing stopping it from scaling? In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Thom Van Dycke to explore a challenge that will be familiar to many founder led businesses: growth initially comes because of the founder’s network, relationships, energy and ability to sell. But eventually, there are only so many people the founder knows and only so many hours in the day. At that point, the founder can become the bottleneck. Thom’s own journey into business is unusual. After spending around 20 years as a...
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Episode #649: Building A Business That Can Run Without You
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, host Kevin Brent is joined by entrepreneur Rachel Hill, whose journey takes us from building and selling a multi site childcare business to breathing new life into a closed model village and launching a new consumer brand almost by accident. Rachel started Hillside Childcare at just 26, converting a granny flat into a 16 place nursery as a way of helping to pay a new mortgage. That first nursery eventually became a four site operation looking after 299 children. What makes Rachel’s story particularly interesting is not simply the growth. It is what she...
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Episode #648: Focus, Data and Building a Business That Can Scale - with John Readman
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, host Kevin Brent is joined by John Readman, founder of ASK BOSCO and Modo25, to explore what it really takes to turn a big idea into a focused, scalable business. John's journey offers a particularly useful lesson for founders: sometimes scaling isn't about doing more. It's about narrowing your focus. ASK BOSCO was created to tackle a problem familiar to many e-commerce businesses. Marketing teams can see return on ad spend, finance teams can see profitability, and platforms such as Google, Meta and TikTok all report their own versions of performance. But...
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Episode #647: How to Codify Your Company’s Genius and Escape Commoditisation - with Simon Bowen
ScaleUp Radio
What makes your business genuinely different? And, more importantly, could your team explain it without you in the room? In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent talks with Simon Bowen about the Models Method, the power of visual thinking, and why growing businesses need to codify the distinctive thinking that sits behind what they do. Simon argues that many founder-led businesses have something genuinely special, but much of it remains locked inside the founder’s head. As the business grows, that thinking can become diluted internally. The result is that customers increasingly struggle...
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Episode #646: ScaleUp Club - Aligning Personal & Business Goals - with James West
ScaleUp Radio
This episode of ScaleUp Radio is a little different. We’re taking you inside one of our monthly ScaleUp Club sessions, where members get the opportunity to explore some of the challenges that come with building and scaling a business, share their experiences and put questions to our guest. This month, our main theme was Aligning Personal & Business Goals, and we welcomed back James West, co-founder of ONLE, for a Q&A about building a business that supports the life you actually want to lead. We also had an AI Pulse update from Tim Winstanley, looking at AI watermarking, the...
info_outlineOn this episode of ScaleUp Radio we, once again, bring you a compilation of some great business advice that we’ve heard throughout 2021.
There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s been another challenging year for so many, and we’ve heard some great insights and advice along the way that have helped many of us, and will continue to help us as we face the new year.
We’ve been lucky enough to have a real range of conversations in the past year - from accountants, lawyers, marketers and IT support right through to restaurant owners, franchisees, funeral directors and gin makers.
With all of this diversity it’s been really interesting to see how much common ground there is. At the end of the day the key challenges to building and scaling up a business are not unique to any particular industry or sector. Sure, there are differences, but the key things remain the same. All of our guests have provided some great lessons that they have learned along the way, that can be of real benefit to all of us.
No matter the size of your business - large or small - make sure that you celebrate the wins that you have achieved this year. Small and medium businesses are the backbone of any successful economy and you don’t need me to tell you that it can be hard at times.
But hold onto the reasons that you started out in the first place. You set out to achieve something, and we have all achieved something special; something to be proud of.
Hold onto that star that guides you and drives and work out how you are going to get that little bit closer to it next year.
The links to all of the episodes that these pieces of advice are from are below, so you can spend time getting to know each business owner better.
This is the last episode of ScaleUp Radio for this year. I want to thank you for your continued support for ScaleUp Radio. We are now being listened to in 59 countries across the globe, with more of you listening and downloading now than ever before.
We’ll be back with a new episode on Monday, 10th January. In the meantime, enjoy this excerpts of advice from our episodes in 2021.
Links to episodes featured in this compilation:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Eddie_Perks_2.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Caroline_Butcher_2.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Faith_Guest.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Ben_King.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Greg_Baldwin.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Hollie_Whittles.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Steve_Harris.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Helen_Jones.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Darren_Wilkins.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Paul_McCafferty.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Daniel_Walton.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Kerry_Perkins.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Aasia_Baig.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Celia_Felgate.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Oliver_Percival.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Tom_Field.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Ian_Jarvis.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Peter_Chatterly.mp3
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scaleupradio/Duncan_Gilroy.mp3
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