Beyond Referrals

Mark C. Ward of RevenueArc has worked in B2B technology revenue consulting since the late 1990s. He has built more than 40 revenue systems for technology companies, much of it through private equity operating partners.

We cover:

- Hunting for 20 of the world's top complex solution sellers for Accenture, and the one trait they all shared

- Why growth and true scale are not the same thing

- The four things companies that scale get right at the same time

- Why spending on a marketing engine before you are ready kills your ROI

- Turning a founder's know-how into a playbook new sellers can run

- Why everyone on a 20-person buying team is carrying career risk, and how to deal with it

- The three-month off-ramp clause that helped a client with a low win rate

- What AI means for consultants, and the skills it cannot replace

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Stephanie runs a procurement consulting firm that works with PE-backed companies and Fortune 500 businesses looking to improve EBITDA. She also helps companies get control of their contingent labour.

We cover:

- Why vendor spend often goes unmanaged and how much value that leaves on the table

- Why companies typically overpay 10 to 30% across their vendor base

- Building a procurement function from scratch for a telecom company that saved $65 million over three years

- Why your largest, business-critical vendors are your biggest opportunity

- What a spend diagnostic shows you in the first few weeks

- The misconception that procurement is just buying gloves and screws

- The risk of unmanaged contingent labour, including contractors who stayed 20 years

- A call center RFP that cut $2.5 million from $9 million in spend and added business continuity

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Angelique is the founder and commercial director of New Beginnings, a consultancy she started nearly seven years ago that delivers negotiation, sales, influencing and leadership workshops. She registered the business the day the world shut down for COVID.

We cover:

- How her first clients came from contacts she kept from her previous role, starting in FMCG and CPG

- Why New Beginnings moved past referrals to good old-fashioned picking up the phone

- Researching every prospect properly instead of spray and pray, and using AI to help with the research

- Why a hire to build the business didn't work for them

- Turning down clients who are not the right values fit

- Running private one-to-ones before every workshop so each person is understood

- Helping people realise when they are in the wrong role

- Pushing through uncertainty as a woman starting a business later in life

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Ben Gillen is with Decision Assist, a London-based business that helps leaders frame their biggest decisions and work with consultants in a more structured way. Before that he started an SMB finance company in 2018 and ran a small fund that acquired eight companies and invested in 13 businesses.

We cover:

- Why AI is leaving business leaders more confused, and why every decision is a journey, not one output

- What lending at $100,000 and below taught him about how much small business decisions matter

- Running eight companies at once, hitting a wall, and how that led to Decision Assist

- How a marketing agency with revenue down 60% used a 35-minute business analysis to build a three-year plan

- Finding the real bottleneck by asking the leader around 10 simple questions

- Why referrals are working but cold outreach is harder to crack, and how he plans to shift toward cold and product-led growth

- Why one AI hallucination is too big a risk when it's your five-year strategy

- Looking back: asking for help sooner and bringing in the right people faster

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

David Blois is the founder and CEO of M&A Advisory, a mergers and acquisitions firm with offices in central London that specialises in the marcoms and martech sector. A certified accountant by training, he spent years in corporate finance and as a CFO before starting his own firm about 16 years ago.

We cover:

- Why every deal needs chemistry, cultural alignment and a strong business proposition

- How he went from accountant to CFO of Saatchi's turnaround in Hungary

- Running a business within a business for 15 years before going out on his own

- How he landed his first clients and the cash flow that got the firm going

- Building long-term relationships instead of pitching on promised valuations

- Why consulting firms need both referrals and an outbound system

- Using performance-based pay to keep overheads low and teams motivated

- The biggest career mistake: working for the wrong person

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Danny Calafell is a professional boxer with over twenty years in the sport and the founder of TriWorld, a business scaling firm he has run for sixteen years. He also runs Calmore Ventures, an acquisition management company that partners with businesses that are up for sale.

We cover:

- The four areas TriWorld works on first: sales, marketing, people and operations

- Revenue breakpoints and why companies under fifteen million are still owner operated

- Why selling a business you still run means the buyer just bought a headache

- How Calmore Ventures scales a company before it sells

- Why salespeople should train like athletes, and a Floyd Mayweather story about commitment

- Keeping up with marketing trends, short attention spans and AI

- Winning new clients with phones, email and podcasts, and never relying on one of anything

- Going from boxing and the music industry to a consulting business that made zero dollars for two years

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Georgia Hodkinson is the founder of Georgia's Psywork, a UK-based occupational psychology practice. She spent four years in forensic healthcare before moving into human factors, where she specialises in fatigue management for energy, transport and logistics firms.

We cover:

- Why fatigue is about more than sleep, and the eight elements that drive it

- How task switching and conflicting priorities push people into bias-driven decisions

- The anchoring bias and why it gets riskier when people are tired

- Selling safety: how she frames fewer incidents and lower turnover as financial stability

- A lorry driver case study with 16-hour shifts and unreported incidents

- How she uses focus groups, interviews, surveys and business data to build the full story of a workplace

- Removing risk versus buffering it, and why some challenge at work is healthy

- Her path from forensic mental health wards to occupational psychology

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Andy Coghlan is the founder and managing director of CX Strategy, a customer experience transformation consultancy. Before starting it he worked in a global marketing agency network, was e-commerce director at a major travel agency, spent nearly 10 years at Wipro and worked in a management consultancy's digital, data and AI practice.

We cover:

- How a career across marketing, e-commerce, IT services and consulting shaped CX Strategy

- Building consulting frameworks like his MarTech Blueprint and his Digital Fitness model

- Winning first clients through his network and growing through an affiliate model instead of a full-time team

- Offering interim strategy help to agencies hiring strategy leads, and using second-degree referrals to get introduced

- Why most firms should focus on their top three initiatives and drop the rest

- Why chasing low response rates burns through your market and your brand

- Clients asking whether AI can replace consultants, and where human judgement still matters

- Using AI agents and skills to codify his frameworks so junior team members and affiliates can deliver them

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Barry McNally is Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Do It Better, a UK management consultancy based just outside Glasgow that has worked mainly with the UK public sector since 2019. Before starting the firm he spent nine years in the Royal Navy, including risk work on a £6 billion portfolio at Navy headquarters, and then worked in change and transformation at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

We cover:

- Winning public sector work through larger consultancies and procurement frameworks

- Why business development takes about half his time

- Running the business with 10 AI agents, including an AI chief of staff

- Why AI may replace entry-level trainee roles in consulting

- Fixed-price operating model products for small and medium businesses

- Technician, manager, entrepreneur: the three roles every founder plays

- Why transformations fail on people, not technology

- Hating networking events and doing them anyway

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Don Phillips is the founder of Lloyd Davis Associates (LDA), a network of 40 consultants based in Stockport, UK. After 20 years at Hewlett-Packard and years in interim tech leadership and charity work, he is now launching Cohesion, a platform that helps consulting groups work together.

We cover:

- Why consultancies don't naturally cooperate, and why one plus one can equal three

- Selling a service before you have built it, and why packaging matters

- How small consultancies get stuck in one niche

- UK local government, logistics and Africa as growth markets

- The HP 80/20 rule for entering new markets

- How AI lets a network of 40 consultants compete with the big firms

- "Below the line" vs "above the line": what agents can do and what still needs a human

- Why chasing likes and clicks misses the point in consulting

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.