Making The Grade

If you're building a venture-backed software startup and trying to navigate the messy, exhilarating, often brutal stretch from $1M to $10M ARR, this episode is essential listening.

In this Making The Grade episode, we’re joined by Pete Crosby, Founder of Revelesco and one of the most experienced revenue coaches in the UK startup ecosystem. 

Pete has helped countless founders and CROs find clarity, fix alignment, and scale with real commercial rigour. In this conversation, Pete shares the patterns he sees repeatedly across the companies he works with, and the frameworks he uses to help them break through.

Pete also shares the human side of scaling - why team alignment is the silent killer of otherwise great businesses, what makes a true builder in the one to ten phase, and how the best GTM leaders think about culture, hiring, and diversity.

Whether you're a founder, a CRO, or a revenue leader trying to level up, Pete's insight is the kind of hard-won wisdom you'd normally only access through years of experience. 

📚 Episode Chapters

01:40 - The root cause of stalled growth  
05:30 - Finding your ICP with discipline 
10:30 - The four phases of scaling internationally 
18:00 - Defining true predictability 
21:30 - Team alignment & hiring diverse teams 

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to Reshaping GTM in the AI Era - Harrison Rose on repeatable GTM and scaling beyond Founder-Led Sales 

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

Harrison Rose has lived the journey most founders only see from the outside.

As Co-Founder of Paddle, he helped scale from zero to $100M+ revenue - without the “overnight success” story everyone loves to tell. Now he’s doing it again with GoodFit, turning the market-mapping and ICP systems Paddle built internally into a product built for modern GTM teams.

In this episode, Harrison breaks down the real inflexion points that unlocked Paddle’s growth, why founder-led sales is often misunderstood, and how teams get trapped at $2–3M ARR when “founder privilege” masks the lack of a scalable playbook.

You’ll also hear Harrison’s clear-eyed take on bootstrapping vs VC, and how AI is moving from “more output” to actually making GTM decisions, including the coming tension over who owns the top of funnel: CRO or CMO.

📚 Episode Chapters

05:15 - When to hire experienced Sales Leaders 
08:45 - A focus on cold outbound 
11:25 - Seeing ICP as a spectrum
19:30 - Building true repeatability  
25:15 - Funding & the future of AI 

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to From Inception to Acquisition: Natasha Ratanshi-Stein on scaling Surfboard, stage-fit hiring and the importance of founder-led sales

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein has seen startups from almost every angle, as a VC, Operator, and Founder. After scaling customer service operations at Bulb, she saw firsthand how broken legacy workforce management tooling really was. 

That pain became Surfboard, and in today’s Making The Grade episode, Natasha is refreshingly honest about what founders underestimate in the £1 to £10M ARR journey, and her own journey from inception to an acquisition by Dialpad, which was all sparked by an SDR’s mis-targeted outbound message.  

📚 Episode Chapters: 

02:00 - Building Surfboard from idea to acquisition
14:40 - Lessons from selling before a finished product 
30:15 - Transitioning out of being a Founder 
38:00 - Hiring the right Sales Leaders for growth   
44:15 - Navigating funding challenges 

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to Ego, Cash & GTM Discipline: Paul Fifield’s unfiltered lessons from building scalable businesses 

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

What actually breaks a startup between £1m and £10m ARR isn’t usually the thing founders are obsessing over.

In this Making the Grade episode, we’re joined by Paul Fifield - one of the UK’s most experienced go-to-market leaders, and someone who’s lived the full spectrum from predictable revenue playbooks, to rocketship growth, brutal crashes, and the rebuild that follows.

Paul unpacks two defining failures in his career, and the patterns he now sees repeatedly in early-stage SaaS: messy data, woolly ICPs, uncontrolled SDR targeting, false confidence from renewals, and leadership decisions driven by ego rather than fundamentals.

Paul also shares why the GTM playbook is changing fast, what modern CRO capability looks like in 2026, and why AI won’t save teams that haven’t done the foundational work first.

If you’re a founder, CRO, VP Sales, or an Operator trying to help a business graduate from Series A to Series B - this one is a masterclass in what to do, what to avoid, and what to take seriously before the market forces you to.

📚 Episode Chapters

03:04 - Lessons from Failures and Successes 
24:04 - The impact of ego in leadership
28:13 - Scaling strategies from $1M to $10M 
35:05 - The evolving role of the CRO   
41:06 - Leaning into fractional talent as a startup  

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to Designing an AI-first Business - Bethany Ayers on hiring stage-fit leaders & the GTM playbooks that actually work in the AI era 

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

Bethany Ayers isn’t experimenting with AI at the edges of Metomic; she’s using it to redesign how the company operates, with an ambitious goal of becoming an AI-first company. 

In this episode of Making the Grade, Bethany Ayers, CEO of Metomic, joins us to unpack what it really means to build an AI-first organisation, and how it impacts hiring decisions, GTM design, and leadership accountability. 

Beth shares why her default is now AI before headcount, how Metomic is using AI coworkers to strip out busy work across SDRs, engineering, marketing, and leadership, and why one SDR can now deliver the output of two to three. 

But this isn’t an AI hype conversation. Beth is equally candid about the fundamentals that don’t change: why stage-fit exec hiring still breaks scale-ups, why founders step away from sales too early (or not at all), and why clarity on ICP, pipeline targets, and operating rhythm matters more than ever.

If you’re rethinking how to scale with fewer people, higher leverage, and sharper focus, this episode offers a clear, practical blueprint, without pretending the trade-offs don’t exist.

📚 Episode Chapters: 

01:50 - Hiring the right Sales Leadership  
03:22 - Evolving GTM Strategies 
16:45 - The intersection of Product and Sales 
22:04 - Leveraging AI in your Sales Team 
30:35 - Future of Work: Balancing AI and People 
36:10 - Diversity in Leadership 

⛳ Mentioned in today’s episode: 

Metomic: https://www.metomic.io/

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to Building for efficient growth - Pavilion’s honest growth journey & the real problem behind the short CRO tenure with Sam Jacobs

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

Most growth stories celebrate momentum, but very few actually share the behind-the-scenes of what happens when momentum stalls. 

In this Making The Grade episode, we’re joined by Sam Jacobs, Founder & CEO of Pavilion - the community built to give in-seat GTM leaders the peers, frameworks, and rooms they need to operate under real pressure. 

Sam takes us on a journey from the early days of Revenue Collective dinners to Pavilion’s Covid-era surge. But there’s no skipping the hard bits in this episode. Sam shares the painful consequences of growing too fast, loosening ICP, and chasing scale for growth’s sake.

This is a rare, unfiltered conversation about what happens when your biggest strength gets diluted, and how you rebuild when churn becomes the signal you can’t ignore.

No matter whether you’re a Founder currently building or a GTM Leader facing the various challenges the market throws at you, there’s endless practical advice in this episode, ready for you to apply straight away. 
 

📚 Episode Chapters

01:15 - Pavilion’s origin story 
09:23 - Scaling mistakes & lost focus 
19:08 - The short CRO tenure 
22:20 - Building P&L Fluency for Revenue Leaders 
29:00 - Sustainable GTM Strategies 
39:34 - Planning for a successful exit 


⛳ Mentioned in today’s episode: 

• Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/
• Intro to P&L Fluency: https://www.joinpavilion.com/pavilion-university/intro-to-pl-fluency 

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to What it really takes to win in the US - Honest lessons from Natalie Johnson

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

US expansion is one of the fastest ways for a venture-backed SaaS company to accelerate growth…or blow up months of momentum, burn a painful chunk of cash, and leave a trail of “scar tissue” behind.

In this Making the Grade episode, Tom Glason sits down with Natalie Johnson, a seasoned revenue leader who’s lived the 1 to 10 million ARR journey multiple times - across the UK and the US - and now leads revenue at one of Europe’s fastest-scaling AI companies, AutogenAI.

In this episode, Natalie unpacks what actually works when expanding into the US, why outbound still works and why AI is not an IT rollout but an organisational transformation that rewires how modern revenue teams operate. 

If you’re scaling through the messy middle and considering the US leap, this one’s packed with battle-tested guidance you can apply immediately.

📚 Episode Chapters

01:15 - Lessons from two scaling journeys 
03:12 - US expansion mistakes 
16:26 - Navigating the messy middle 
26:08 - Autogen AI’s Growth Engine  
30:46 - Outbound strategies that actually work 
35:34 - Hiring Revenue Leaders in 2026

⛳ Mentioned in today’s episode: 

• AutogenAI: https://autogenai.com/uk/
• Glyphic: https://www.glyphic.ai/

🎧 Continue listening… 

Make sure you listen to Season 1 Sean Williams - From $60m exit to building an er-defining AI company

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

Welcome back to Season 2 of Making The Grade. 

This season, we’re digging into what it really takes to scale beyond early traction… the ups and downs of the journey from £1 million to £10 million in ARR… and why so many startups are struggling to make that leap.

Each week, we're joined by experienced Founders, Investors, and senior Go-To-Market leaders to unpack the lessons, trade-offs, and decisions that define the £1m to £10m stage.

We’ll explore how to build effective GTM functions and hire truly stage-fit talent, how AI is reshaping go-to-market, what changes we can expect to see in 2026, and what capital-efficient scaling actually looks like in practice.

All with one core question in mind:

How do you build an enduring B2B SaaS business that scales sustainably, stays capital-efficient, and creates real exit optionality?

Expect honest conversations, hard-won insights, and practical advice you can apply straight away, because scaling can be done differently.

Our first episode of the new season will be dropping on Thursday, February 5th, so make sure you hit subscribe to be notified of when it's ready! 

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

What does it really take to make the leap from CMO to CRO and to build a revenue function that actually scales?

In the final episode of Season 1, Tom is joined by Florence Broderick, CRO at General Index, to unpack what it actually takes to make the transition to CRO and what founders should know before hiring their first CRO. 

Florence shares candid insights from her transition to CRO, why she believes marketing leaders can make exceptional CROs, and how she’s balancing growth with capital efficiency in 2025 and beyond. 

If you’re a founder or GTM leader navigating growth right now, you won’t want to miss this episode. 

Episode Chapters

02:30 - Flo’s career journey from dreams of big corporates to CRO 

08:30 - Managing imposter syndrome in a new role 

14:30 - Building her CRO playbook 

22:10 - What every CRO should nail in their first 90 days 

27:30 - Why ‘rockstar CVs’ often fail 

31:45 - The CRO skills that matter most in 2025 

38:10 - AI that uses the needle & metrics that matter 

46:50 - Getting more women into sales

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!

What do you think of when you hear ‘exited Founder’? 

Someone travelling the world or sitting on a remote island sipping cocktails? 

Today’s Making The Grade guest may change your perspective… 

We’re joined by Sean Williams, Co-Founder & CEO of AutogenAI, the AI bid writing software. Before AutogenAI, Sean co-founded Corndell Ltd, which he grew from scratch to 350 people and sold to THI Holdings for $60m. 

In this episode, Sean discusses how to build with an exit in mind, why you need to keep control while fundraising and why US expansion isn’t as easy as some Founders might think. 

Episode Chapters

02:18 - From bid writer to CEO - Sean’s career journey 

08:40 - Post-exit reality & why Sean decided to jump back in the Founder seat

14:36 - Selling a business during Covid 

18:57 - More about AutogenAI and the opportunity 

23:12 - Fundraising without losing control 

27:26 - US expansion do’s & don’ts  

29:33 - GTM in the AI-era - what actually works 

33:43 - Hiring GTM leaders 

Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade?

If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to...

✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform.
✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at [email protected]
✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube.

See you again next week!