Beyond Referrals

Jamie Willey runs Bamboo Grove, which helps digital marketing and tech agencies build a proactive sales engine once referrals dry up. He has worked in sales his whole life and has just published his first book, The Inconvenience of Sales.

We cover:

- Why agency founders are often the antithesis of salespeople

- Mapping the customer journey with post-its to find where the middle of the funnel leaks

- Running events with no business talk: golf, Formula 1 and the horse races

- Going line by line through the leadership team's LinkedIn connections to find hidden opportunities

- Why cold outbound should start a dialogue, not sell a product

- Using a book as the hero piece of content, with a 15 to 20% conversion into meetings

- How AI search is changing the way buyers find agencies

- A, B and C tier targeting, and where AI automation fits

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Ian Harris is the founder of Startup Assist UK. After years in corporate sales and business development, he built and sold his own businesses in South Croydon, then set up Startup Assist UK after the pandemic to give startups and small businesses hands-on, one-to-one help with planning, funding and growth.

We cover:

- Why up to a million UK startups a year turns into a tiny number that survive

- Why so much generic advice fails new founders, and why most people "don't know what they don't know"

- Why around 30% of the people who come to him don't have a viable business yet

- How he finds new businesses through Companies House instead of referrals

- Why "I need funding" is never the real problem

- His first question to every founder: why are you starting a business?

- Going from detailed questionnaire to a working business plan in about seven days

- Testing lead-gen organisations from the inside, and getting 78 replies in a day to a LinkedIn post looking for experienced help

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Bruno Perez is Chief Experience Officer and AI Strategy at Sigma Software Group. He has 25 years in design and customer experience, with stops at Accenture, KPMG, Fjord and the team that helped build BCGX, and he works on the gap between what companies spend on AI and what their customers actually feel.

We cover:

- What "organic AI" means and why it starts from the customer, not from cutting cost

- The "last mile" problem: why most AI pilots never reach the customer

- Klarna's AI customer service rollout and why they had to bring people back

- Why Spotify's AI DJ is the right way to apply AI

- Failing at KPMG after moving from Brazil to London, and what it taught him

- How a 250-person delivery team could shrink to 10 to 20 people plus agents

- Why agent-led delivery lets firms charge for outcomes instead of hours

- The risk of AI replacing the junior roles where judgment gets built

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Radha Balani is a partner at Think Beyond, a social impact and sustainability strategy consultancy for sport and entertainment that drives commercial revenue alongside societal outcomes. She has worked in social impact and sustainability in sport for 25 years.

We cover:

- Turning social impact and sustainability from a cost line into a revenue driver

- Staying sticky with clients through secondments, as with Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities and Liverpool Football Club

- Building client experience through consistency, connection and a client collective

- Why Think Beyond walks away from greenwashing and sportswashing deals

- Handling feast and famine with anchor clients and a dedicated BD function

- Targeted, relationship-first outbound instead of mass email

- Liverpool's Red Way and lifting match-day recycling at Anfield from around 20-25% to the nineties

- Why she wishes she had learned to sell earlier in her career

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Ran Aroussi runs Automaze, a software development agency of close to 30 people that acts as the development team for small to mid-sized companies. He has 35 years in software, from algorithmic trading to ad tech, and builds open source tools like yfinance, which gets about 30 million downloads a month.

We cover:

- Why clients now arrive with vibe-coded prototypes, and why he likes it

- AI as a force multiplier that makes great developers amazing and mediocre ones worse

- Why slapping AI onto existing processes misses the point

- How open source tools and a personal brand bring in almost all of his clients

- Why he caps the business at around 15 to 20 clients

- Moving from a few spikes a year to one or two new clients a month by releasing a tool every month

- "Service as software" and AI-first services checked off by a professional

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Eric Sambaluk runs Sambaluk Consulting, a boutique firm of independent consultants who help small and mid-market companies with strategy, project management, and sales and marketing.

We cover:

- Why the step-by-step playbook has to be tailored to each client even when the framework is shared

- How to find new markets, including helping European and Asian companies enter the US

- The two mindset blocks clients bring: low confidence and overconfidence

- Why his firm keeps senior experts on delivery instead of passing the work to juniors

- His ideal client: leaders willing to question what has not worked and get help before there is a crisis

- Why he values quality over quantity in the client book, and is wary of leads from broad advertising

- Treating every career setback as a learning opportunity

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Devon Hankins leads Ascension Strategies, an executive coaching and business consulting firm. They do leadership coaching for executives and strategy and planning for small businesses, mid-sized nonprofits, academic institutions and government.

We cover:

- Why clients struggle to admit they need outside help, and keeping it about the business, not personal

- Finding clients through relationships, client referrals and strategic partners instead of prospecting

- Why Devon wants trust from clients, not loyalty

- Hitting the ceiling of your first-tier network, and the decision to outsource some marketing

- Treating pain points and walls as signs of growth

- A strategic plan that anchored a Louisville organization through a leadership shake-up, and the difference between executing and implementing a plan

- A coaching client who dropped limiting beliefs and found "the job role of a lifetime"

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.

Ray Florio of Strategia Partners explains why he walked away from the typical consulting model. He talks about running a senior-only team with offices in New York, Shanghai, Paris and Zurich. He shares how his firm builds referrals into the deal itself, the client win that closed an $800 million profit gap, and why AI should add value rather than cut staff.

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners for consulting firm owners who want to grow past word of mouth.

Harvey Berman has spent close to 40 years in sales. He was number one out of 300 reps at Intel twice, then moved into leadership. In this episode he shares three failures that shaped him and what he did after each one.

We cover:

- The night an older colleague stopped him making a fool of himself in front of senior leaders

- Cutting out a distributor on a $2M deal, and how he won back his trust (they're now best friends)

- Closing a deal to show off to his new team, and why it backfired

- How boxing and jiu-jitsu kept his ego in check

- Why you should find a mentor who isn't your dad

- How he handles reps with big egos and reps who are underperforming

- Losing most of a $3-4M commission in the dot-com crash, and why he never thought about quitting

- Why effort and results never arrive at the same time

Beyond Referrals is a podcast by Elite Growth Partners.