ScaleX™ Insider Podcast

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Chris Yonker, a Vision Alchemist, Speaker, and Author who specialises in vision creation to align your business and your life.

Chris is a world-leading expert in vision creation. He and his team work with companies (big and small) as well as high achievers like executives, entrepreneurs, athletes, and celebrities to get clarity on what they really want—and then make the strategy mindset and behaviour shifts to create that.

Chris embraces a uniquely collaborative and experiential approach of being in the "zone," developing clarity and composure under fire, and discovering unlimited potential.

He is a seventh-degree black belt, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner, and thought-leader on Personal Performance.

He is regular contributor to the Coaches Council at Forbes.com and his book Soul Intention: An Executive's Guide to Building a Life by Choice, Not by Chance is available on Amazon. He also has his own podcast, the secret thoughts of CEOs.

In today's episode, Chris talks about:

• How our beliefs are based upon our past experiences and how they can influence our current reality
• How our core values can be used as filters to help us make better decisions
• The importance of vision
• The importance of creating an empowering belief system rather than disempowering belief system
• Why sensory acuity is powerful
• How and why we are motivated by pain and pleasure and why it doesn't have to be painful to grow a business
• How psychology controls and limits what we do.

Key Takeaway

"Our sensory acuity is a very powerful thing. We don't tend to think about how all these senses are the conduit to how we absorb what is going on around us. We take all of this information in; we censor it in our own filters with all of our illusions about ourselves and that's how we are driving the reality of this machine called life.

But we can make it different. It can be more balanced, and more whole. You can grow with a higher sense of ease and grace. We don't have to get to where we want to go next doing what we did to get here.

This is in part why some businesses don't grow because they have a paradigm that says, I've got to do more of what I have done going forward, but I've got nothing left to give".

Download Chris' Free Vision Workbook here:

https://greatestyearsofyourlife.com/

Contact Chris

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisyonker/

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-mcgurgan-11854a13/

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Kevin Shulman. Kevin is President of Shulman & Associates/Sandler training, where he has been training business owners, sales managers and salespeople to help them grow their business and reach their full potential. He is the author of 'Goal-Setting Bootcamp' which provides a practical 'how-to' approach with goal setting. It is designed for anyone with dreams and visions for success both personally and professionally.

In today's episode, Kevin talks about:

• The importance of having long and short-term goals with written plans
• Why you should never do goal setting as a solo exercise
• The importance of going back to your values
• Setting goals because of societal pressure
• The major mistakes people make when setting goals
• What we need to give up when setting goals
• Setting the right goals to ensure you are not overwhelmed
• The importance of setting personal goals before business goals
• Why we do not need to limit the number of goals we set
• Why your subconscious works like Google
• The power of positive affirmations
• Going public with your goals
• The importance of setting smart goals
• How having an accountability partner can help you achieve goals .

Listen Out For:

• When setting goals, figure out what you want your life to look like a year from now, five years from now and in retirement. Then look at your business and say, OK, what do I need to do in my business to get that lifestyle?
• We've got a supercomputer that lives on top of our shoulders. It can process an awful lot. We used to say 30-40 years ago that we could only work on two or three goals at a time but what we now know is that you can have 2030 goals and it's not a problem
• Your subconscious can't distinguish the difference between what's fact or fiction so if you continue to tell yourself something, then ultimately that just becomes part of your overall programme.

Key takeaway

A very wise man once said, "you're either part of your own plan or you're a part of someone else's. Make sure you're a part of your own plan".

About the Host

Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-mcgurgan-11854a13/

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Tom Kolditz, the founding Director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. The Doerr Institute was recognised in 2019 as the top university leader development program by the Association of Leadership Educators and named the 4th Leader Development Program in the world by Global Gurus, London.

He has been named as a leadership Thought Leader by the Leader to Leader Institute and as a Top Leader Development Professional by Leadership Excellence. In 2020, he has continued to be ranked in the global top 25 coaches and in 2021, the #6 Start-up expert worldwide.

He developed the concept of in extremis leadership—an original crisis leadership model—while serving in the oil fields and palace cities in Iraq. His book on that topic, In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended On It, is used in at least 8 service academies in the US, China, Japan, and Israel. His second book, Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need, is driving a leader development reform movement in higher education in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

In today's episode, Tom talks about:

• How leadership is about giving people what they need
• How to build trust and respect as a leader and make your team want to follow you
• The importance of emotional intelligence in leadership
• The mistakes many leaders make when attempting to win the trust of those they serve.
• How to identify leaders in your organisation
• The importance of getting to know your people
• Why every leader needs feedback
• How actions speak much louder than words.
• The role that education today has claimed in developing leaders for the future.

Key Takeaway

"Leadership is about giving people what they need. It's not about the quality of an individual or a style. People don't care about style; they just have needs. You need to see the world through the eyes of your people to influence and motivate them and give them direction and purpose".

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-mcgurgan-11854a13/

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Dr. Oleg Konovalov, the Da Vinci of Visionary leadership. Dr. Oleg Konovalov is a thought leader, author, business educator, consultant, and coach with over 25 years' experience operating businesses and consulting Fortune 500 companies both in the UK and internationally.

In today's episode, we talk about:

• How having a vision is critical and fundamental to scaling a business with purpose
• How to inspire others to become multipliers of your vision
• How to overcome the challenge of evolving your vision over time
• Less than 0.1% of SME organisations have a vision
• Vision should involve the leadership team, not just the CEO
• Why being positive makes you become a giant
• Why it's the CEO's responsibility to ensure that the vision inspires and motivates the team
• Why leadership is an art
• Revising your vision
• Conditioning ourselves to create a vision
• How caviar can help organisations
• Why you need a clear vision for the culture of your organisation

Listen Out For:

• If you don't have a vision, your strategy is a bridge to nowhere.
• A great vision should inspire people to go beyond themselves.
• When we work on vision and leadership, medium sized businesses return on investment is at about 3000%. Large companies are barely hitting 1000%.
• When visioning, you must talk with people throughout your organisation. They will bring more value than you expect. Their input will make your vision multidimensional.
• Most people are afraid of thinking about the future because they're afraid of it. They don't know what's going to happen, but they must be courageous enough to set the vision and follow it.
• Companies with a vision that sets out to serve others enshrined within that vision, ultimately attract the right people. They have solidity in their purpose, and they are more profitable.
• You must make people free by showing a clear direction where to go. If you don't know where you are going, then you are not free, and you become a hostage of doubts, assumptions, and opinions.
• Vision for organisations means that we have vision for the people working in the organisation, because without right people, an organisation is only a certificate of incorporation.
• The stronger the vision, typically the stronger the culture because you attract people to the organisation who has sight of that vision.
• Vision is not a gift, it just a way of thinking which can be developed.
• If we accept that we have infinite potential, then a vision creates the beacon for us to move towards that potential.
• Vision doesn't have a gender, age, or race.
• Ego kills vision instantly because you don't see the world or the people around you.
• An ambitious vision means that there is more discretionary effort from your team because there's a level of co-ownership. People become more positive about their future, and you make them multipliers of your vision and passion. We are not talking about motivating people, we are talking about inspiring people. Every team member becomes a huge power station of a future inspiration.
• Leadership is an art; a scientific art and vision is a beautiful construct of clearly articulated thoughts.
• A vision must be dynamic, practical, elegant, and simple, regardless of whether it is for now or for years to come.

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Amy Rowlinson, a Life Purpose Coach, Podcast Mentor and a leader in purpose and fulfilment. Amy helps people to focus on their WHY with clarity, uniting their passion and purpose with a plan to create the life they truly desire. Her mission is to reach unfulfilled people who are looking for their WHY to guide them to live a life with purpose and fulfilment.

Amy is Qualified as a Life Purpose Coach, Journal Therapy Coach, Master Practitioner of Time Line Therapy™️ & Hypnosis and an NLP Practitioner and works with clients to help them to design the life they desire through 'living' and not 'existing'.

In today's episode, Amy talks about:

• Where to start when defining your vision and purpose
• How to live with purpose as opposed to existing
• How big and small moments have impact
• The importance of aligning with our values
• How purpose determines who we are
• How its never too late to be who you might have been

Listen Out For:

• You need to understand the difference between living and existing. Are you doing things just because they need to be done as opposed to really focusing on why you are doing them?
• You may get to the very top of the ladder and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall. A. Raine.
• People need to ask themselves what their superpowers are and link that with what the world needs right now. Then you can focus on where you can help and what you can get paid for. This should be a combination of your passion, profession, and vocational mission.
• Ikigai – the Japanese concept of finding your purpose and creating a long and happy life.
• Your purpose determines who you are. We are all driven by purpose. It's your foundation and heartbeat.
• Quite often people can lose their way. It can be referred to as feeling stuck, or unhappy or not quite right.
• When we do things that are purposeful, they are aligned with our values. Establishing your values is an essential part of finding your purpose.
• When businesses apply their values and purpose right from the start, it becomes their core driver. It becomes their key focus and is at the heart of their decisions.
• Quite often business values are echoed from the business leader's personal values.
• When employees' values align with those of the company, that's when the magic happens.
• It's the purpose, the mission and the values of a company that retains people and that's when the productivity will rise.
• The vision talks about the company's future, its aspirations, its hopes, and dreams, and it gives it their direction.
• To enhance performance, it is important to praise people, to encourage them in their roles, to provide them with great feedback and processes and give them opportunities to thrive and grow.
• Journaling is important. By understanding and listening to yourself and your fears, it helps you to reduce stress, boost your working memory and it helps you to become more empowered by regulating your emotions. It provides a gateway to unlock your emotional intelligence and creativity.
• Flow essentially is focus. When you are in flow, you're being more productive. When you are in flow, time just disappears, and you are in the zone and in a state of creative.

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Maura Nevel Thomas. Maura is an award-winning international speaker, trainer, and author on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance and is the most widely cited authority on attention management.

She helps driven, motivated knowledge workers control their attention and regain control over the details of their life and work. Maura has trained thousands of individuals at hundreds of organisations on her proprietary Empowered Productivity™ System, a process for achieving meaningful results and living a life of choice.

In today's episode, Maura talks about:

• Why time management is outdated
• How attention management is the new path to productivity
• How to be present in the moment
• How we become conditioned to distractions
• The biggest challenge of a team's productivity is the culture of the organisation and the behaviour of the leaders.
• Winning the war against information overload
• Managing people's expectations
• Why we must control technology, or we end up at the mercy of it
• How we are training our brains to expect interruptions
• The importance of single tasking
• How to avoid distraction
• Managing work-life balance
• How business leaders can improve their productivity

Listen Out For:

• The biggest challenge that we have is distraction and you can't solve a distraction problem with a time solution. It doesn't matter how much time you have. If you are distracted and frequently task switching, you will not be able to muster brainpower momentum.
• It's not the moments in your life that matter, it's the life in your moments that matter.
• Productivity is about the legacy that you leave behind all the way down to the most important thing you need to do today, and anything in between.
• The more distracted we are, the more distracted we will be, and. We have become conditioned into a habit of distraction.
• When we apply ourselves fully, when we unleash that brainpower momentum, that's when we do our best work. That's when we feel satisfied and accomplished and competent at the end of our day and happy .
• This habit of distraction that we all have is insidious, because it lies to us about what makes us happy
• Productivity has six components and we need all six to really achieve our most significant results on a consistent basis.
• Burnout is such a huge problem. Every time you choose to work, you're not doing something else right. You're not exercising or you're not sleeping, or you're not spending time with your family.
• Leaders have a lot more influence on the lives, the happiness, the health, the wellness and the well-being of their employees.
• When people are happy at work, they tend to be happier at home which affects their kids, their spouse and their communities. When they're miserable at work, then they have nothing left to give to their families or their communities. Exhausted workers mean exhausted families and exhausted communities and exhausted worlds. Exhaustion is optional.
• Just because people expect it doesn't mean that you must conform to those expectations.
• The more you think about ways to single task only one thing at a time mentally, the more you will find that your ability to stay focused increases. Your habit of distraction starts to fall away, and you are reconditioning your brain.
• Sometimes the best thing that you can do for your work is not work. Work Life Balance in simple terms is 'don't work too much' and if you wonder what too much means, studies show that productivity starts to go down after about 50 hours a week.

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

I am delighted to introduce Dan Lowes, a former RAF Fighter pilot and Executive Officer of the world-famous Red Arrows. Dan has made it his life's goal to consistently operate at a world class level and is immersed in the power of effective communication and the art of debriefing.

In today's episode, Dan talks about:

• The importance of self-reflection when creating a high-performance culture
• Mentally preparing for flying at 1300 mph
• Why planning is important
• Fear of failure
• Tasting failure, accepting it and preparing for it and moving on from it
• How self-reflection can make you highly motivated
• How you can learn from people in your field that you admire
• Three principles to live by when you're a Top Gun graduate
• How his attitude and mindset earned him his place in Top Gun school
• How he stays grounded and humble
• What you can learn from a Red Arrows debrief and how you can apply it to your business
• The importance of communication

Listen Out For:

• I would not be who I am now or achieved what I have achieved if I hadn't failed. I accepted failure, I learned from failure, and I moved on.
• I pinned my life ambition on joining the Royal Air Force and being a fighter pilot at 18 but didn't get into the Air Force on my first interview. I had to go away and reassess what was important for me in life and what I really wanted and grow into that which meant that one year later when I reapplied, I was successful.
• Failure is just a data point on a journey towards your overall goal. It depends on what you do with it which ultimately determines whether you achieve the goal or not.
• I love reading about the people who have been there and done it already.
• I have clearly defined goals and aims. I work out how I can get there. I then choose someone that I really respect in the area and then I model myself on them.
• To be the best in the room, you don't have to shout about it, you don't have to hang banners, you don't have to have badges, you don't have to have the big office and you don't have to have the big car parking space. You just have to be the one that everyone knows when the chips are down, you are going to come running through.
• Do not make assumptions. You have no idea at any point in time what is going on in somebody's life - how they left the house that morning or what information they had or did not have. It is all about asking the right questions before you jump to conclusions.
• Do something that you love and when you stop loving it, work out why and find something else even if that means you have to do something completely different. You need to constantly love what you do because that means you will relentlessly pursue it to the highest levels.
• When you expect something from someone, expect it to be the same all the time. Be consistent across the board which will mean that expectations can be managed and people understand how to operate to the best of their capacity.

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode, I'm delighted to introduce Sam Rathling, one of the world's experts in social selling strategies. Sam is the Chief Visionary Officer (CVO) at the Pipeline 44 Group and Linked Inbound and is a Best-Selling Author and International Speaker. Recently named by Yahoo! Finance as a Top LinkedIn Expert to follow, Sam and her team are on the ambitious mission to generate over £1billion in new sales for their clients. Her book 'Linked Inbound' became an Amazon Best-Seller in just 6 days!

In today's episode, Sam talks about:

• • Her vision to help her customers reach £1 billion revenue by 2025 through LinkedIn and how she helped one client reach £1.2m in revenue.
  • How to create a great LinkedIn profile
  • The three things that business leaders should be doing every day on LinkedIn
  • How you can find great talent using LinkedIn
  • LinkedIn's Social Selling Index (SSI), what it is and how to improve it to become a true thought leader
  • Why LinkedIn has become a vital tool for sales teams
  • The future of LinkedIn and digital interaction post COVID
  • What a butterfly can teach you about the journey of a scaling business owner and entrepreneur

Listen Out For:

• • 98% of the people you reach out to will not be ready to buy today.
  • Once you connect with someone, use LinkedIn and content to build your brand and stay top of mind with those people.
  • Make sure you have a great profile. Use a professional headshot and the new cover story feature where you can film a 30 second introduction.
  • Identify your target audience and understand who your ideal client is and what their pain points are. Be Specific.
  • Create amazing content that speaks to your ideal client such as the journey that you are on, what's happening in your organisation, your culture and values and case studies.
  • Use keywords as your LinkedIn profile acts like a web page. Your LinkedIn profile can drive organic search.
  • By the time potential buyers speak to you they are 57% of the way through the buying process.
  • CEOs and business leaders have so much expertise and value to give to their customers and potential customers. It's imperative that leaders of businesses get onto LinkedIn and lead from the front. The CEO or the leader that decides to take the leap and build their personal brand and audience will win every time.
  • Embedding social selling throughout the organisation is vitally important. If every employee was empowered to build their personal brand it would amplify a business 100,000-fold.
  • To become viral and visible, challenge the norm and create content that polarises opinion.
  • LinkedIn creates a sales pipeline and develops your talent pipeline.
  • The Social Selling Index score (SSI) is a metric out of 100 points. If you want to be positioned as a thought leader or an expert in your field, then this score is critical.
  • Salespeople have had to up their game in terms of learning how to sell in a new and different way. Tools such as LinkedIn are important for sales because they can't knock on doors anymore. They can't do the lunches. They can't network.
  • Post pandemic, it's the brands and companies that choose to leverage LinkedIn that are going to be the ones that win, and they're going to be the ones that take market share. They are going be the ones that get ahead of their competition.

About the Host

Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

In today's episode I'm delighted to introduce Paul Akers, the Founder and President of FastCap which started in Paul's garage in 1997 when he simply "fixed what bugged him" and developed his first product: the Fastcap Cover Cap. From humble beginnings, FastCap has thousands of distributors worldwide in over 40 countries.

He wrote his first book, 2 Second Lean, about creating a fun, lean culture which is now available in 15 languages. In 2015, he wrote his 2nd book, Lean Health, in 2016, he wrote Lean Travel and in 2019, he wrote Lean Life and Banish Sloppiness. In 2016, Paul's book, 2 Second Lean, was recognised by the Shingo Institute and won the Research and Professional Publication Award.

In today's episode, Paul talks about:

• The concepts of lean and how it changed his business
• How he took a 45-minute process to five minutes
• The eight deadly sins of waste
• His unique approach to recruiting people
• His simple test to identify star players
• Developing and learning together as a team
• The three characteristic traits of great leaders
• Three pieces of practical advice for growing your people.

Listen Out For:

• Lean is the ability for someone to tap deeply into their weaknesses and address them aggressively
• Lean is the greatest green concept in the world. If you become a lean thinker then you're going to save the planet
• We have a very mature culture. It's like a university for us where we talk about our problems, we show our solutions and look at other leading companies around the world
• Every day, for the first two hours of business, we just develop our people and the way we think
• I have a daily ritual and it's simple. I treat every person that I meet with respect and dignity. Be kind and appreciative. Don't feel like anybody ever owes you anything
• Recruitment - We don't accept resumes. They are all lies. We ask for 60 second videos. If we like the potential candidate, we bring them in for a paid test day. We then ask for the opinions of eight or nine staff and if we don't get 100% of those people indicating that they want to work with them, we don't hire. It's a bulletproof system
• Our people get more done in six to eight hours than the average person gets done in 48. I'll take six hours of my people against 40 hours of anybody else
• We don't have a marketing, sales or HR department and our CFO works 4 days a month. We have six people in our office managing a very complex business with 800 products around the world. In any other business there would be 50 people managing what we do with six.

About the Host Director and Founder of Simple Scaling, Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Previously, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

https://simplescaling.com/meet-the-team

Over the past 23 years Claire has worked as a partner to business leaders, founders and entrepreneurs of high growth businesses helping them to scale through their people. As the former Talent Director on the Board of a rapidly growing global organisation, Claire built the optimum people centred structures and systems to enable the company to significantly scale across 6 continents. Prior to that, she spent almost 15 years with an award winning, technology SME, which operated in a highly competitive environment. The company was growing 30% year on year, first organically and then through acquisitions, winning major contracts and attracting some of the best talent in the industry.

A growing awareness that finding great talent is the #1 reason why businesses are unable to scale drove Claire to explore this further and in 2019, Claire and I became business partners and started out on a journey of discovery to extensively research exemplars of scaling to identifying the key attributes that made them successful. Our research culminated in us writing a book, SIMPLE Scaling, Ten Proven Principles to 10x Your Business, which will be published later this year.

In today's episode, Claire and I will be recapping on our favourite moments from the series, the lessons that can be learned from the guests on the show, the takeaways we will adopt moving forward and how people are our greatest enabler when scaling a business.

Listen out for:

• The #1 reason as cited by business leaders for their inability to scale up their business is lack of talent.
• From an HR perspective, I've never been one to reach for the rulebook as it doesn't get the best out of people.
• Once you work out the vision of the company, your greatest enabler is your people.
• One of my favourite quotes is by Zig Ziglar, "You don't build a business. You build people, and people build the business".
• In the world of HR, once you go down the road of compliance, the best you can hope for is mediocracy
• One of the key themes that came across in the series was consistency and discipline. People respond really well to rhythm and building up a regular cadence because they learn to know what to expect. This is particularly important when scaling a business where there is a lot of change. Sebastien Tondeur referred to the fact that 'routine set him free.'
• As a business leader it is important for you to understand yourself and do the inner work. David Jenyns referred to it as 'work harder on yourself than you do on the business.'
• Other key themes that that have come through from the podcast series are kindness, decency, humility, and respect. It is not often that you hear kindness and business in the same sentence.
• Innovation is important to those organisations that have aspirations to scale, but it is not solely the domain of the product development function, it is being innovative in all aspects of the business including being innovative and creative about how you recruit people.
• The top three key attributes in top performers are ability, likeability and drive. To test for ability, we may ask a candidate to present on their area of expertise. To test for likeability, you can look for a good cultural fit and understand if their values align with those of the business. You can test for drive by looking at an individual's network. Look at their outside hobbies and interests and look for signs of passion for what they do.
• When working in competitive environments you must be creative in your approach to recruitment.
• Process is critically important to freeing up the founder, CEO or leader and allowing them to get back to the creative genesis of the business as opposed to getting choked and working in the bowels of the business.
• In terms of what I will introduce into my life going forward, I will be incorporating the pre-mortem referred to by Damian Hughes. I think it is important to understand what could go wrong before you start anything so that you can address it quickly if it arises.

Timeless Takeaways:

• "Think big, start small, scale fast. Change can be minor but the results can be enormous". Sebastien Tondeur
• "Now is the end of the beginning", Adam Hale. What got you here won't necessarily get you there. Business leaders need to constantly refresh and do things differently.
• "Love your team like they are your children". Emmie Faust
• "If your business depends on you, you don't own a business – you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world because you are working for a lunatic". Michael E. Gerber

About the Host Brendan brings 25 years' experience of scaling businesses. Most recently, Brendan spent 16 years as a global business leader with CDE, 12 of those as Group MD, steering the company through the global financial crisis to considerable strategic growth success with offices now in 6 continents employing almost 700 people across the world (from 15) and 25X revenue growth.

He currently acts as a Non-Executive Director to CDE Asia (part of the CDE Group), a company he co-promoted in 2006. In 2019, he co-led the successful private equity funding round which secured investment from IIFL, India's leading integrated financial services group to support the company's future growth ambitions throughout the Asia region.

In 2016, he was awarded the Institute of Directors UK Young Director of the Year and Overall Director of the Year. An avid sportsman and advocate of self-leadership through good well-being practices, Brendan is also training to become a Wim Hof Method instructor.