The Founder Files

When working from the office or from home, we develop sedentary behaviour that leads to many health issues, impacts our productivity and decreases our overall well-being. In South Africa, most employees don’t meet the WHO recommended activity guidelines of 150 minutes of exercise per week. How to approach health and well-being in the workplace? To answer our questions, we invited Chris Brucchausen, the CEO and Founder of Strove. Strove is an employee well-being platform with a primary focus on helping companies improve the physical and mental health of their workforce.As an athlete and founder of a scaling business, Chris shares his own lessons about defining and showing resilience, enhancing social inclusion and creating a healthier society from home to the office.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Once you’ve enjoyed the episode, support the podcast for FREE:Follow The Founder Files 🔔Leave a review on Apple PodcastShare it on LinkedinThis episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Market Positioning, Competitive Advantages and Customer Experience - and in that order. These are the three pillars that make generating and converting leads significantly easier, which in turn provides the engine for your scalability. This week we speak to Brett Perlstein, the CEO and Founder of SearchKings Africa. SearchKings is a Premier Google Partner that specialises in Google Ads and their main value proposition is to help businesses generate more revenue with a focus on generating greater quantities of leads of a higher quality. Combining Brett's expertise as a Chartered Accountant, a Google Ads expert and the Founder of a scaling business, he provides practical insight into how his own lessons about defining the identity of his business have led to better returns for himself, his team and his clients.Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Working on your culture is not the same as doing team-building events or social engagements like after-work drinks. These are connected, but culture is truly the collective behaviour of the people within your organisation. Now this is an inherently intangible topic and can be really complex or even "impractical" for certain people, but the simplest way to understand and unpack culture is to focus on two main things: values and behaviour. The most important point though is that if it's not translated into behaviour, then it's just talking and not culture. These are the insights discussed with Helene Smuts, the Founder of Credo Growth, a people development company that helps entrepreneurs define their values and operationalise them in their teams to create real culture development. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Building a business is more complex than just having and selling a product or service. The first step towards having a business is to make sure that you're well positioned in the market so that your target customers know that you can address their need(s) and/or solve their problem(s). The simplest way to do this is to find out why your target customers DON'T want to buy from you so you can understand their perspectives, objections and real needs in more detail.This simple yet profound piece of advice comes from Elan Lea, the Founder and CEO of TechZoo Corporation, a company that has brought Nagging Panda to the market. Nagging Panda is a B2B offering that automatically follows up on quotes and debt collection for you, so you don't have to worry about it. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

What does scaling a business actually mean? How do you know that your business is getting ready to scale and you're not just on a growth curve? These are questions we ponder with Rob Nichol, the Founder and CEO of Centr. (an off-site monitoring and surveillance company). The difference for him is that he can see a "hockey-stick" effect in his revenue growth. He's also confident he has problem-solution fit within his current market and he's looking to expand into new markets. The other main indicator is that the oscillation of sales one week and operations the next (a common problem for many start-ups) is starting to flatten out. Right now, his priorities are simplifying communication, creating useful feedback loops for information in the business and empowering his management team to start taking on more responsibility. If you want a practical case of what scaling looks like, then this is the episode for you.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This podcast is brought to you by Metavolve. We help entrepreneurs structure their businesses for growth. We take the chaos out of scaling businesses by turning entrepreneurial intuition into aligned and committed leadership teams with clear strategic direction. We optimise the execution of strategy by helping people adapt to the inevitable change that strategy creates. Working with us to define or execute your strategy means you get access to experienced experts in business strategy and organisational psychology. You get the benefit of a blend of people-centric and commercial perspectives that can understand your context from every angle. And you get the benefit of not being dependent on us for the long term because we share our knowledge and tools with your people to improve their ability to solve future problems. To get in touch with one of our experts, head over to our website. If you would like to get in touch with our host, Cameron Coutts, then you can connect with him on LinkedIn.This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Why should the Founder of a B2B business care about their personal brand on LinkedIn? Surely the brand of the company is more important than the brand of the Founder?Yes and no. The yes part is that you want the company brand to become bigger and more encompassing than your personal brand within your target market, but that's relevant when you're a scale-up not a start-up. When you're a start-up, most people don't contact "your business" they contact you. This means that the more powerful your personal brand is, the more your key stakeholders know who you are, what you do, what you don't do and what they're talking to you about. It makes your sales cycles shorter and increases the likelihood of closing deals. This is incredibly useful when you're still working in the business and it helps achieve the main goals of a start-up - getting enough cash to survive and enough market fit to grow. These are the realisations we had with Jason Luboyera - the Founder and CEO of 360 DigiSales. 360 DigiSales specialises in personal branding and content creation for the Founders of B2B businesses with the main goal of helping to generate inbound leads.Tune in to find out more about personal branding; don't forget to subscribe and enjoy!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

We all know the "what" of customer centricity, but not many Founders are well versed in the "how." That's why we're speaking to Marie Whittington, a designer extraordinaire and the Co-Founder of Pepperplane, a design studio that specialises in UI/UX design. In this episode, we chat about how customer experience has evolved in the digital age and why many business leaders still struggle to see things from a user/customer perspective. We discuss what UX and UI mean, and why these capabilities are important. We get some insight into Pepperplane's approach to developing world-class UIs and find out how we can all be a bit more customer-centric. And, of course, we get into Pepperplane's scaling journey to find out about their own entrepreneurial journey and how they're overcoming their own challenges. Tune in, don't forget to subscribe and enjoy!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This podcast is brought to you by Metavolve. We help entrepreneurs structure their businesses for growth. We take the chaos out of scaling businesses by turning entrepreneurial intuition into aligned and committed leadership teams with clear strategic direction. We optimise the execution of strategy by helping people adapt to the inevitable change that strategy creates. Working with us to define or execute your strategy means you get access to experienced experts in business strategy and organisational psychology. You get the benefit of a blend of people-centric and commercial perspectives that can understand your context from every angle. And you get the benefit of not being dependent on us for the long term because we share our knowledge and tools with your people to improve their ability to solve future problems. To get in touch with one of our experts, head over to our website. If you would like to get in touch with our host, Cameron Coutts, then you can connect with him on LinkedIn.This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

In this bonus episode, we chat with our host, Cameron Coutts, about hiring. The reason we chose this topic is that it's come up frequently in recent episodes. Being an Industrial Psychologist, Cameron has expertise in the hiring space and provides some valuable insights to help Founders and leaders make better hires. Tune in to this bonus episode to find out more about this specific topic!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

If you had to choose only one episode of The Founder Files to listen to, then this is the one.Whether it's decisions, prioritisation, time management, habits or approaches, there are certain things that the best Founders do that put them a cut above the rest. This includes everything from hiring and delegation to prioritisation and personal productivity habits. Paul Smith and Ryan Osher are our guests this week providing insights on and to entrepreneurs. They are the Founders of Civitas, a network where Founders and CEOs come together to connect, learn and help each other solve their most complex problems. Paul and Ryan share their most valuable insights from what they've experienced in facilitating peer group sessions with top CEOs, as well as from their own knowledge and experience.Enjoy this goldmine of insights and don't forget to subscribe!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This podcast is brought to you by Metavolve. We help entrepreneurs structure their businesses for growth. We take the chaos out of scaling businesses by turning entrepreneurial intuition into aligned and committed leadership teams with clear strategic direction. We optimise the execution of strategy by helping people adapt to the inevitable change that strategy creates. Working with us to define or execute your strategy means you get access to experienced experts in business strategy and organisational psychology. You get the benefit of a blend of people-centric and commercial perspectives that can understand your context from every angle. And you get the benefit of not being dependent on us for the long term because we share our knowledge and tools with your people to improve their ability to solve future problems. To get in touch with one of our experts, head over to our website. If you would like to get in touch with our host, Cameron Coutts, then you can connect with him on LinkedIn.This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!