Episode #640: Why smart leaders still make bad strategic decisions - with David Mansfield
Release Date: 08/24/2026
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...
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Episode #645: Scaling Through Change: Leadership, Diversification and Building a Stronger Manufacturing Business - with Suzie Siddall
ScaleUp Radio
In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, host Kevin Brent is joined by Suzie Siddall, CEO of Opus International Products, a Warwickshire-based precision engineering and manufacturing business working across automotive, aerospace, defence, industrial and medical sectors. Suzie’s story is one of leadership through significant change. Having moved from Managing Director to CEO following the death of the company’s founder in 2024, she has had to balance continuity with the need to reshape the business for its next stage of growth. Today, Opus has a team of around 33 people and significant UK...
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Episode #644: From Generalist to Niche: Scaling Through Focus, Certification and Community - with Janet Tanguay
ScaleUp Radio
What happens when you stop saying yes to everything and commit to the part of your business that customers really want? In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, host Kevin Brent talks to Janet Tanguay, founder of The Hammock Way of Life, about the journey from broad business consulting to building a scalable business around vision boarding, coach certification and a growing global community. Janet's story is a great example of how focus can unlock growth. The turning point came during and after the pandemic. Janet had been using vision boarding to help businesses think creatively about their future,...
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Episode #643: Trust Isn’t a Feeling. It’s a KPI - with Rob McKenna
ScaleUp Radio
What if one of the biggest constraints on your ability to scale is something you’re not measuring at all? In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Rob McKenna for a fascinating discussion about trust: how to measure it, why founders frequently misjudge it, and why building trust isn’t about creating a perfect culture. Rob introduces the WiLD Trust Index, a framework designed to turn trust from something intangible into something leaders can measure, understand and deliberately improve. For founders, there’s a particularly important message here. Delegation and...
info_outlineMaking decisions as a founder or leader is rarely about having perfect information.
In this episode, Kevin Brent is joined by David Mansfield, strategist, board adviser and researcher into strategic decision making, to explore why so many intelligent leadership teams still make poor strategic choices and what business owners can do to dramatically improve the quality of their decisions.
Drawing on doctoral research and decades of board experience, David explains why the process behind a decision matters far more than simply reaching an answer. He shares practical techniques that help leaders combine intuition with evidence, avoid common thinking traps and create greater buy in from their teams.
One standout message from this episode is simple but powerful:
Validate intuition with data, and validate data with intuition.
In this episode you'll discover
- Why nearly half of strategic decisions fail despite being made by experienced leaders
- Why the way you make decisions is more important than the decision itself
- David's developing nine step framework for making better strategic decisions
- How to slow down decisions without slowing down your business
- Why founders often become victims of the qualities that made them successful
- The importance of challenging assumptions before committing to action
- Why communication can be the difference between success and failure at board level
- How to recruit advisers and non executives without creating long term governance problems
- Why every scaling business should invest in strategic finance earlier than they think
- The "Boat Rule" for keeping meetings focused on what really moves the business forward
- Why chasing every opportunity can become one of the biggest barriers to sustainable growth
Key takeaways
One of David's biggest lessons came from serving as a non executive director of Game Group, where concerns over cash flow were dismissed until the business eventually collapsed. Looking back, David realised that while the analysis was correct, the communication wasn't persuasive enough.
That experience sparked years of research into how leaders actually make decisions under pressure.
For founders, David highlights one recurring challenge. The resilience, determination and stubbornness needed to build a business can eventually become a weakness if it prevents leaders from listening to advice or recognising when circumstances have changed.
He also makes a compelling case for building financial capability much earlier by progressing from bookkeeper, to fractional CFO, to full time finance director as the business grows. Clean financial information enables better decisions, stronger investor confidence and healthier growth.
The one key thing
Great strategic decisions aren't driven by instinct or data alone. The best leaders deliberately test each against the other before acting.
About Smart90
Most founders I speak to feel busy but stuck. Plenty happening, but no real clarity on what matters most this quarter. Here's what more than 500 interviews on this show have taught me: the founders who scale choose less, and deliver all of it.
That's what the G90 Summit is for.
A structured half day where we cut through everything competing for your attention, agree the three to five things that must happen in the next 90 days, and build the rhythm to make sure they do.
Quarterly, virtual, £97 a seat.
Scaling up your business isn't easy, and can be a little daunting. Let ScaleUp Radio make it a little easier for you. With guests who have been where you are now, and can offer their thoughts and advice on several aspects of business. ScaleUp Radio is the business podcast you've been waiting for.
If you would like to be a guest on ScaleUp Radio, please click here:
https://bizsmarts.co.uk/scaleupradio/kevin
You can get in touch with Kevin here:
David can be found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjmansfield/
Resources:
What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School by Mark McCormack - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/what-they-don-t-teach-you-at-harvard-business-school-mark-h-mccormack/e52571d3ef38f282?ean=9781781253397&bkshp-astro=t
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-dale-carnegie/82760854e5e9eaa2?ean=9789373070667&bkshp-astro=t
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/never-split-the-difference-negotiating-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it-chris-voss/14cac2e5f5322728?ean=9781847941497&bkshp-astro=t