Episode #650: The Art of Leadership: Empowering Founders to Scale Their Businesses - with Tom Van Dyke

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 pastor, he left ministry in 2020 and moved into entrepreneurship. Starting as a copywriter, he reached $10,000 a month by his fourth month before gradually evolving his business towards working with established founder led companies.

Today, his approach centres on helping businesses develop their own frameworks for positioning, marketing, sales and lifetime value rather than blindly following somebody else’s blueprint.

One phrase captures that philosophy particularly well:

“Adapt, don’t adopt.”

There is no universal formula for building a successful business. Geography, background, customers, market conditions, team and the founder themselves all change the answer.

The founder’s plateau

One of the big themes in our conversation is the point where founder driven growth stops working.

In the early days, being highly sales focused can be an enormous advantage. Founders use their personal relationships, reputation and energy to win work.

But eventually the network runs out, the diary fills up and capacity becomes the constraint.

Scaling then requires something different.

The business has to become capable of generating opportunities, converting them and serving customers without everything passing through the founder.

Thom shared the example of one client who, after just two months of working on this transition, was able to take their first weekend off in three years.

That is a useful reminder that scaling is not simply about increasing turnover. It is also about creating a business that no longer depends on the founder being permanently available.

Four frameworks for sustainable growth

Rather than prescribing a generic blueprint, Thom works around four areas:

Positioning

What genuinely makes the business different and gives customers a reason to choose it?

Marketing

How does the company consistently attract the right opportunities rather than simply more enquiries?

Sales

How does the business create a repeatable way of converting those opportunities without relying entirely on the founder?

Lifetime Value

How does the business continue creating value through repeat work, referrals and re engaging previous customers?

The important point is that these frameworks need to fit the business rather than forcing the business to fit somebody else’s system.

Positioning is about much more than marketing

One of the standout parts of our discussion is the role positioning plays throughout a business.

Strong positioning can support better pricing because customers understand why the company is different.

It can help with recruitment because potential employees understand what the organisation stands for.

And it can improve consistency because the whole team has a shared answer to the question: why should somebody choose us?

But that only works when positioning moves beyond the founder.

If only the owner can explain what makes the company special, the business is still dependent on the owner.

The whole team needs to understand it, believe it and be able to communicate it.

Scaling means becoming a leader

Thom identifies three important ingredients for making that transition:

True leadership

Investing in people and culture rather than simply directing activity.

Humility

Being prepared to ask the team for feedback and hear answers the founder might not necessarily want to hear.

Positioning

Creating a clear shared understanding of what makes the business different.

Together, these help the founder move from being the person responsible for everything towards becoming the person who creates the environment in which others can succeed.

The opportunity in “AI proof” businesses

We also discuss Thom’s focus on founder led businesses such as skilled trades, often with teams of around eight to ten people.

These businesses can face a very different set of scaling challenges from technology businesses or solopreneurs.

Demand may not be the problem at all.

Instead, they may be struggling with capacity, finding good people and protecting margins.

Thom talks about businesses where margins can be around 2% when an industry benchmark may be closer to 8%.

He also makes the point that marketing does not just have to attract customers. In businesses affected by talent shortages, it may also need to attract employees.

And because the underlying skilled work is much harder for AI to replace, these businesses potentially have significant long term resilience.

The one key thing

The one key thing from this conversation is that scaling starts when the founder stops trying to be the answer to everything.

The founder’s energy, relationships and skills may have created the growth, but the next stage requires leadership, trust, clear positioning and repeatable systems that other people can use.

Or, in Thom’s words:

Adapt, don’t adopt.

Build the approach that fits your business rather than copying somebody else’s blueprint.

Smart90 and the G90 Summit

Before we get into it, most founders I speak to feel busy but frustrated. Plenty is happening, but the business is not moving forward at the rate they want.

Success creates more options, and those options can pull founders and their teams in different directions.

Here’s what more than 500 interviews on ScaleUp Radio have taught me: the founders who scale choose less, and deliver all of it.

That is what the G90 Summit is designed to help with.

It is 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.

From the frustration and chaos of more, through the discipline of less, to the rhythm of done.

Quarterly. Virtual. £97 a seat.

Smart90.co.uk/summit

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You can also nominate someone with an interesting ScaleUp story to join Kevin on a future episode.

 

Thom can be found here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thom-van-dycke/

 

Resources:

My Burning Story by Minister Sarudzai Dorcas - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/my-burning-story-minister-sarudzai-dorcas/687cc15f27d3f125?ean=9781496977083

Alex Hormuz - https://www.acquisition.com/team/bio-alex

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-culture-code-the-secrets-of-highly-successful-groups-daniel-coyle/10dede03413631bf?ean=9781847941275