Behind the SME

As businesses grow, roles change. But too often, the role plan does not change with them.

In this episode of Behind the SME, Adam Kene and Kate Waterfall Hill explore why role clarity becomes more important, not less, as people become more senior.

The bigger the role, the more expensive ambiguity becomes. Senior leaders are expected to make decisions, delegate effectively, develop teams and shape the direction of the business, but many are still working from an outdated or incomplete idea of what their role actually is.

Adam and Kate get practical:

• Why senior people need clear role plans just as much as junior staff
• Why the CEO’s role should evolve as the business grows
• How unclear responsibilities create confusion across the wider team
• Why people sometimes plateau because the business has not defined the next version of their role
• How to distinguish between comfort, stretch and panic
• Why role plans should focus on outcomes, not just tasks
• How to use a simple keep, start, stop and develop framework
• Why role plans should be reviewed regularly rather than written once and forgotten

They also explore the idea of the S-curve and what happens when someone stops growing in a role. Sometimes the answer is not promotion. Sometimes it is a new challenge, clearer expectations or a different curve altogether.

This episode is for founders, managers and leadership teams who want to create clearer roles, better progression and stronger accountability as their business grows.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene. In Season 2, Adam is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the leadership challenges behind growing businesses.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your career is a long-term relationship with work. Like any relationship, it can become energising and purposeful, or draining and transactional.

In Episode 4 of Season 2 of Behind the SME, Adam Kene and Kate Waterfall Hill explore our relationship with work, why it matters more than we might think, and how leaders can build careers that remain fulfilling and sustainable over the long term.

Working hard is not necessarily the problem. For some people, it can be deeply rewarding. The challenge comes when work consistently conflicts with your values, drains your energy or starts affecting how you show up for the people around you.

For leaders in particular, that matters. Impatience, micromanagement, cynicism and over-control can all be signs that the relationship with work has started to shift.

Adam and Kate explore how to recognise those patterns, understand your own boundaries and make more deliberate choices about where your time and energy go.

You will learn:

• Why a career should be treated as a marathon rather than a weekly sprint
• How a leader’s relationship with work can influence the wider culture
• Why fulfilment does not mean being happy at work all the time
• How to identify the work that gives you energy and the work that drains it
• Why resentment can be a sign that a boundary should have been set earlier
• How to understand the real cost of saying yes
• Practical ways to push back, renegotiate priorities and protect your time
• Why individuals have more control over their own fulfilment than they might think

Adam and Kate also introduce a simple relationship-with-work audit, looking at energy, values, control, boundaries, recovery, growth, relationships and purpose.

And there is a practical challenge to try: a “No Week”. Do not automatically say yes. Ask what each new commitment will displace, renegotiate something that is not working and protect time for recovery or focused work.

The question at the heart of the episode is simple: if your job was a relationship, would you say it was healthy?

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene. In Season 2, Adam is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the leadership challenges behind growing businesses.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How much are your meetings actually costing your business?

In Episode 3 of Season 2 of Behind the SME, Adam Kene and Kate Waterfall Hill tackle something almost every growing business struggles with: meetings, meetings and more meetings.

Meetings themselves are not the problem. The problem is meetings without a clear purpose, the wrong people in the room, no preparation and no meaningful outcome.

And the cost adds up quickly.

A weekly 45-minute meeting with eight people uses 312 working hours over a year. At a loaded employment cost of £50 an hour, that is £15,600.

If that meeting appeared on your P&L as a £15,600 recurring expense, would you renew it?

Adam and Kate explore why meeting overload happens, what it can reveal about the wider business, and how leaders can protect more time for focused work without losing the collaboration that good meetings provide.

You will learn:

• Why meetings should be treated as an operational cost
• How excessive meetings disrupt deep work and create task switching
• Why more attendees do not necessarily create more buy-in
• How meetings can mask unclear ownership, weak reporting and missing systems
• When an update should become a dashboard, document, video or message instead
• The five questions to ask before putting a meeting in the diary
• How clearer agendas, attendees and outcomes can make meetings more useful
• Why recurring meetings should have an expiry date rather than running indefinitely

This episode is for founders, managers and leadership teams who want to spend less time talking about work and more time doing the work that moves the business forward.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene. In Season 2, Adam is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the leadership challenges behind growing businesses.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a business grows, complexity grows even faster.

In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Behind the SME, Adam Kene and leadership coach Kate Waterfall Hill explore the hidden cost of complexity and why growing businesses can so easily “sleepwalk” into unnecessary processes, meetings, systems and layers of communication.

A 12-person organisation has 66 potential lines of communication. At 40 people, that rises to 780. At 120 people, it reaches 7,140.

As Adam puts it: “Business growth is linear, but the complexity is exponential, unless you're on top of it.”

So how do you stop complexity taking over?

In this conversation, Adam and Kate explore how leaders can deliberately simplify the way their businesses operate, from creating a shared goal and cutting distractions to improving communication and questioning whether work genuinely moves the business forward.

You will learn:

• Why complexity can increase exponentially as a business grows
• How businesses can “sleepwalk” into unnecessary processes and structures
• Why having a simple, shared ambition helps teams pull in the same direction
• How to use “Will it make the boat go faster?” as a filter for decisions
• Why leaders should cut distractions and focus on what they can control
• How to measure progress without making performance management more complicated
• Why communication channels and meetings should be designed intentionally
• How to create a culture where simplifying work becomes everyone’s responsibility

This episode is for SME founders, business owners and leadership teams dealing with the growing pains that come with scale. If your business feels busier, more complicated or harder to navigate than it used to, Adam and Kate offer practical ways to strip things back and focus on what actually matters.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene. In Season 2, Adam is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the leadership challenges behind growing businesses.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 starts with one of the most important, and often overlooked, parts of a growing business: the people sitting between strategy and delivery.

In this episode of Behind the SME, Adam Kene is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the “sticky middle” of management. Middle managers have a huge influence on culture, engagement and performance, yet many step into the role without enough training, time or support.

Adam and Kate get practical:

• Why managers can have such a significant impact on employee engagement
• The difference between leadership, management and coaching
• Why your best performer might not become your best manager
• How to support new managers with the right training, space and expectations
• Why good leaders do not need to have all the answers
• How managers can set boundaries, manage up and communicate trade-offs clearly
• Why progression should not always mean managing people

This episode is for SME founders, leaders and managers who want to build stronger teams, develop better managers and create clearer progression routes as their business grows.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene. In Season 2, Adam is joined by leadership coach and author Kate Waterfall Hill to explore the leadership challenges behind growing businesses.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI is moving from tool to teammate, and that changes what leadership looks like inside an SME.

In this episode of Behind the SME, Adam Kene speaks with Rahan Arif, a seasoned entrepreneur and transformation leader with nearly two decades at the forefront of digital disruption. Rahan has built and scaled product organisations across cloud, low code, automation, and AI, delivering platforms that have reshaped how enterprises operate. Now, as a founder at BossUp, he is focused on the Agent Boss economy and what it takes to build an AI collaborative future.

Rahan cuts through the noise and gets practical:

• What agentic AI actually means and why it is the next big shift
• Why SMEs often freeze when tech moves fast, and how to move anyway
• How to lead AI agents with the right guardrails and accountability
• A real example of using agents to plan and execute work end to end, using a marketing campaign

This episode is essential for SME founders, leaders, and managers who want to use AI to move faster without losing control. It is also for operators who are responsible for delivery, growth, or customer experience and need a clear way to turn AI into practical outcomes.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene, exploring the real stories and lessons from the entrepreneurs and leaders powering the UK’s SME economy.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Behind the SME, host Adam Kene sits down with Evgeny Shadchnev, founder of Makers and one of the UK’s most respected voices on founder-to-CEO transitions, to unpack the real journey of building, scaling and ultimately stepping away from a high-growth startup.

Evgeny shares how his background in computer science and early career as a software developer led him to spot a major gap between academia and industry - sparking the creation of Makers, a pioneering coding bootcamp that helped thousands of career switchers break into tech. He talks candidly about finding product-market fit, evolving the business model, and scaling from a scrappy startup to a 60+ person organisation working with major corporates like Deloitte.

The conversation goes deep into the realities of leadership: chaotic early culture, self-set salaries, hiring mistakes, and the difficult moment when early team members stop being the right fit. Evgeny unpacks why the skills that make you a great founder don’t always make you a great CEO, and how to recognise when you might be becoming the bottleneck in your own business.

We also explore CEO transitions, stepping aside with intention, emotional maturity in leadership, and why self-awareness is a non-negotiable skill for founders. Finally, Evgeny shares his perspective on AI-first businesses, zero-based thinking, and why the Netflix vs Blockbuster story is a warning every leader should take seriously.

💡 Highlights include:

• Building Makers and finding product-market fit in the bootcamp space
• Scaling from 0 to 65 people and navigating the chaos-to-structure journey
• When early team members outgrow their roles (and how to handle it well)
• Founder vs CEO: why the skill sets are often very different
• How to have difficult conversations with empathy, not ego
• Recognising when it might be time to step aside as CEO
• The emotional impact of leadership and why self-awareness is critical
• AI-first vs AI-supported businesses: lessons from Netflix and Blockbuster
• Zero-based thinking and preparing your business for an AI-driven future

If you’re a founder, CEO, or leader wrestling with growth, culture, strategy, or the question “am I still the right person for this job?” this episode will challenge, reassure and inspire you in equal measure.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene, exploring the real stories and lessons from the entrepreneurs and leaders powering the UK’s SME economy.

Like what you hear? We’d love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Behind the SME, host Adam Kene speaks with Leanne Maskell - author, coach, and Director at ADHD Works - about her remarkable journey from international modelling and severe mental health struggles to becoming a global voice for neurodivergent empowerment and workplace inclusion.

Leanne shares how receiving an ADHD diagnosis transformed her life and career, leading her to build the UK’s first CPD-certified ADHD coaching qualification and train more than 600 ADHD and autism coaches worldwide. She opens up about living with a brain that never switches off, writing five books by the age of 33 (all best-sellers), and redefining success by embracing, rather than fighting, her neurodivergence.

💡 Highlights include:

• The lived experience of ADHD: hyper-focus, overwhelm & the “interest-based nervous system”
• Turning personal crisis into purpose and global impact
• How leaders can better manage and support neurodivergent talent
• Creating structure and systems to unlock the zone of genius
• Why understanding ADHD, not correcting it, unlocks performance

If you’re a leader, founder, manager or parent wanting to better understand neurodiversity or harness ADHD as a superpower, this episode is for you.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene, exploring the real stories and lessons from the entrepreneurs and leaders powering the UK’s SME economy.

Like what you hear? We'd love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 More platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if public safety could be crowdsourced and improved with the power of AI?

In this episode of Behind the SME, host Adam Kene speaks with Michael Houghton - entrepreneur and co-founder of Community Wolf - about his journey from corporate engineering to building a mission-led startup tackling public safety challenges in South Africa.

They discuss the lessons learned from navigating early career pivots, embracing naivety while building expertise, and creating a platform that empowers communities to participate in safety reporting through WhatsApp and AI tools.

💡 Highlights include:

• How curiosity, obsession, and “happy buckets” guide entrepreneurial decisions
• The journey from corporate engineering to mission-led entrepreneurship
• Building trust at scale while crowdsourcing sensitive public safety data
• Turning mission-first thinking into a sustainable business model
• Lessons in leadership, risk-taking, and learning through discomfort

If you’re a founder, leader, or innovator looking to solve real-world problems and build a mission-driven business, this one’s for you.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene, exploring the real stories, insights, and lessons from the entrepreneurs and leaders powering the UK’s SME economy.

Like what you hear? We'd love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 Find us on other platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if you could see disruption coming and turn it into opportunity?

In this episode of Behind the SME, host Adam Kene, speaks with Athena Peppes — futurist, economist, and former Accenture strategist — about how small and medium-sized businesses can use foresight to anticipate change, build resilience, and stay ahead in a world of constant disruption.

They break down practical ways to “look to the horizon” without losing sight of today’s priorities, from horizon-scanning and team signal alerts to scenario planning and AI readiness.

💡 Highlights include:

• What “foresight” really means and how to apply it inside an SME
• How to run horizon-scanning sessions with your team
• Turning future risks into opportunities
• Building AI literacy and avoiding common leadership blind spots
• Why continuous learning (not prediction) is the real competitive edge

If you’re a founder, leader, or strategist who’s too busy fighting fires to think long-term, this one’s for you.

🎙️ Behind the SME is hosted by Adam Kene, CEO of Kene, exploring the real stories, insights, and lessons from the entrepreneurs and leaders powering the UK’s SME economy.

Like what you hear? We'd love to know!

📩 Contact us: [email protected]

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/behind-the-sme

🌐 Find us on other platforms: https://linktr.ee/behindthesme

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.