Scale: An OX7 Partners podcast

AI is making it easier than ever to do the work traditionally handed to junior employees. But if we automate away the work that helped us learn our craft, where will tomorrow's experts come from?

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why the impact of AI on junior employment is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

• How relying on AI to produce work and provide feedback could undermine the development of professional judgement.

• Why today's productivity gains could create an expensive expertise shortage in 10–15 years, and what businesses can do about it.

Bigger clients, bigger contracts and bigger ambitions. Moving upmarket can feel like the natural next step for a growing business. But after years spent developing your positioning, proposition and go-to-market approach, have you really made the most of the market you're already in?

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why bigger, more prestigious clients don't necessarily make for a stronger business

• How moving upmarket can mean rebuilding the commercial machinery you've spent years developing

• Why understanding the untapped opportunities in your existing market should come before chasing new ones

77% of UK SMEs would rather accept slower growth than borrow to grow faster. Yet plenty of businesses reluctant to make big investments are quite happy spending smaller amounts on disconnected tactics. But is playing it safe actually holding them back?

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why small investments and growth hacks can become an expensive way of standing still
• How understanding your market and identifying what's constraining growth should guide investment decisions
• Why not investing carries risks of its own, and why bigger doesn't necessarily mean better

Winning more work should be good news. But when the costs of delivering it start racking up long before the cash arrives, a string of perfectly good deals can put a growing business under some pretty serious pressure.

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why individually good deals can collectively create a cash problem, and why agreed payment terms can mean you’re financing your customers
• Why closed-won isn’t really the finish line, and what happens when sales, delivery and finance aren’t looking at the same picture
• How to look at the next 90 days of your pipeline and work out whether you can actually afford to win it all

AI can make us faster. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s making the business more productive. Rework, checking and correction can eat into the gains, while every new model release seems to start the hype cycle all over again.

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why speed isn’t the same thing as productivity, and how to work out whether AI is actually improving the outcome

• What happens to the capacity AI creates, and why your business strategy should come before your AI strategy

• Where competitive advantage comes from when you and your competitors have access to broadly the same technology

Getting a product or services launched doesn’t mean you’ve invested enough to make it work. Temporary fixes become permanent, buying becomes harder than it should be, and sales and marketing are left trying to make up the difference.

Dave Heywood looks at:

• How underestimating what an idea needs can undermine the money you’ve already invested

• Why the customer journey matters when deciding what to build, fund and maintain

• How to give an opportunity a proper chance, decide what you’re prepared to lose and know when to stop

We’ve got more information about buyers than ever. But that doesn’t mean we can see everyone influencing the decision. And the pursuit of ever tighter targeting risks overlooking the wider network surrounding the people you’re trying to reach.

Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why the buying group doesn’t tell you the whole story

• How people outside your target accounts can influence the deals you win and lose

• Why tighter targeting can come at the expense of the wider halo around your market

• How to map what you can, target what you know and amplify into the networks that influence them

When a customer tells you they need to cut costs, it’s easy to hear one thing: we need you to be cheaper. But price is only one reason why a customer might be questioning what they spend with you.

They might genuinely have less money. They might not see enough value. Something else might have become more important. Or they might simply lack confidence that you can deliver what you’re promising. And each of those demands a very different response.

In this episode, Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why cost pressure doesn’t automatically mean price pressure

• How discounting and over-servicing can transfer your customer’s cost problem onto your own business

• Why making the future value of an investment easier to see can help customers build and defend the case internally

• How to make your offer more affordable without simply giving your margin away

We group millions of people together based on when they were born, assign them a set of characteristics, and call it segmentation. But how much does knowing someone’s generation really tell us about what they value, how they behave or why they buy?

And even where genuine generational differences exist, are they actually relevant to the decision we’re trying to influence?

In this episode, Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why generational differences can be much harder to prove than the headlines suggest
• How the pursuit of looking younger and fresher can become a substitute for understanding what actually matters to your market
• Why the most obvious differences between customers aren’t necessarily the ones that determine choice
• Three questions to test whether your market segmentation is actually useful

More revenue. More customers. More people. That’s growth, right?

But when headcount and costs keep rising alongside revenue, it’s worth asking whether hiring is really the thing that unlocks the next stage of growth, or whether it’s masking a constraint somewhere else in the business.

In this episode, Dave Heywood looks at:

• Why being busy isn’t the same as genuinely being at capacity
• A four-part test for deciding whether another hire is really the answer
• Why 20% more cost for 20% more revenue isn’t necessarily a problem, provided there’s a credible path to future growth
• The ultimate question to ask before approving your next hire