The Growth Focus Podcast

The Growth Focus Podcast

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The Growth Focus Podcast episodes

  • The Deal He Lost Waiting for Perfect | Jan-Willem Steur

    Why Technical Expertise Isn’t Enough to Grow Your Business

    Waiting until everything was perfect cost JW’s company a major deal. A competitor brought a similar solution to market first.

    It’s a lesson worth hearing if you’ve built a strong business around your expertise but find that growth takes more than doing excellent work.

    In this episode of The Growth Focus Podcast, Gary Lafferty talks with Jan-Willem Steur, known as JW, an IBM Champion and business development leader at Naviam with 40 years of experience in enterprise asset management.

    We explore the gap between knowing your craft and growing your company. JW shares what he learned from costly mistakes, why he’s comfortable sharing knowledge with competitors, and how he gives his team the freedom to improve the business without waiting for permission.

    Then we get into AI. JW’s view is simple: you need a foundation before you build the roof. Clear processes, useful data and a defined business purpose come first.

    For founders and business leaders, the thread running through this conversation is commercial: how do you turn the value you already create into stronger, more sustainable growth?

    What you can take away

    • Recognise when the pursuit of perfection is delaying a commercial opportunity.
    • Give your team room to act, with early communication when something goes off course.
    • Make your expertise visible so customers can understand why they should choose you.
    • Compete on the strength of your proposition, rather than relying on software your competitors can also sell.
    • Start an AI initiative with the business outcome, processes and data it needs.
    • Learn from past mistakes while keeping your attention on the next chapter.
    • Chapters

      00:00 Introduction: expertise, trust and business growth
      01:28 Meet JW: enterprise asset management and IBM Maximo
      02:53 Better technology, greater complexity
      04:54 Being an expert versus growing a successful business
      08:51 Doocracy: giving your team permission to act
      11:22 Admitting mistakes and the deal lost to perfectionism
      14:09 Sharing knowledge with competitors
      16:02 IBM Champions, passion and professional credibility
      19:45 Why technical leaders struggle to become visible
      23:18 Long-term ambition and the legacy you leave
      25:39 Helping the market hear your company’s story
      27:07 Mentoring the next generation of technical talent
      31:39 AI needs foundations before it needs a roof
      34:54 How JW uses AI to retrieve knowledge and build applications
      37:55 Building a business that can thrive ten years from now
      39:05 Where to connect with JW
      40:34 Closing thoughts

      Connect with JW

      • Jan-Willem Steur on LinkedIn
      • Naviam
      • IBM’s profile of JW and his EAM Business Capability Model
      • Find the revenue gaps in your business

        Growth often means winning new business. It can also mean recovering opportunities you’ve already created and plugging the holes where revenue slips away.

        Gary Lafferty is a Revenue Growth Advisor and founder of Growth Focus. Through revenue and AI audits, Growth Focus helps business leaders identify missing links, prioritise the gaps worth fixing and make better use of the business, customers and opportunities they already have.

        Better Before More.

        • Explore Growth Focus
        • Talk to Gary about your revenue gaps
        • Connect with Gary on LinkedIn
        • Subscribe to The Growth Focus Podcast for practical conversations with the leaders behind growing businesses. If this episode brings someone to mind, share it with them.

          https://youtu.be/GBM4c1WkHOU

          42 min
        • She Made a $1 Million Mistake. Here’s How She Grew Her Tech Business After It | Reshma Moorthy

          How much revenue could a tech services company be leaving on the table because of the way it leads, prices, follows up, or communicates its value?

          On this episode of the Growth Focus Podcast, Gary Lafferty talks with Reshma Moorthy, CEO of Frontier Technologies, a second-generation IT infrastructure business. Reshma shares what she has learned from 20 years inside the family company, including a costly mistake she had to own, a pricing decision that tested her confidence, and the work of building a team she can trust.

          They also discuss how the move toward recurring revenue has changed tech services, where AI is helping Reshma’s team in its sales process, and why a founder’s own stories can help clients understand who they are buying from.

          Growth Focus is built around a simple idea: better before more. Before spending more to create demand, look closely at the revenue opportunities already inside the business. That means examining the customer journey, the sales process, the client experience, and the decisions that affect conversion and profitability.

          This conversation is especially relevant if you lead an MSP, VAR, IT services firm, tech consultancy, or another founder-led B2B service business. Reshma’s experience is a reminder that revenue performance depends on more than bringing in new leads. Leadership, pricing, trust, follow-through, and the ability to explain your value all play a part.

          Chapters
          00:00 Why Gary wanted Reshma on the podcast
          00:51 Reshma’s path into the family business
          02:12 Who Reshma is outside the CEO role
          03:25 First impressions and the value of listening
          04:51 Choosing the family business over nursing
          07:45 Frontier Technologies and the clients it serves
          08:56 What helps a business keep growing
          12:07 Delegation, trust, and getting things done
          14:28 Cash flow and the challenges of leading a small business
          16:38 Owning a costly business mistake
          20:52 Finding the confidence to raise a project price
          23:59 The shift toward recurring revenue in tech services
          25:39 How Reshma’s team uses AI in sales
          27:00 What her team sees as her greatest strength
          28:51 Reshma’s vision for the next three years
          30:50 Why tech founders should share their stories
          33:13 Building authority by showing who you are
          36:13 Reshma’s advice to founders: bet on yourself
          36:57 How to connect with Reshma

          Connect with Reshma
          Frontier Technologies: https://ftiusa.com/
          Tipsy Technologists: Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMkB2WG91lD2F5Xmr7d05mg
          LinkedIn: Search for Reshma Moorthy

          Gary Lafferty is a revenue performance advisor and founder of Growth Focus Partnerships. The Growth Focus Podcast explores how founders and business leaders can generate more revenue from the business they have and the opportunities already in front of them.

          Subscribe for conversations on revenue performance, sales, leadership, customer experience, and growing a more profitable B2B services business.

          #GrowthFocusPodcast #RevenuePerformance #B2BServices #TechFounders #ITServices

          39 min
        • Why Your AI Is Costing You Sales (Not Saving Them) | Travis McGregor

          Every founder I talk to is using AI to grow faster. Almost none of them are asking what AI is quietly costing them. This week I sat down with Travis McGregor, CEO of SLC Digital, who's built and exited one company already and is now building a second around mobile SIM security.

          Travis put his finger on something I see constantly working with MSP owners and B2B tech founders: AI isn't the problem. Treating AI like the source of your thinking is. Travis was at an event in San Francisco recently with forty AI companies in the room, and they all sounded the same. Same pitch, same language, same positioning. That's not a coincidence — it's what happens when everyone feeds the same prompts into the same models and lets the output do the talking.

          The companies who actually grow revenue are the ones who use AI as what Travis calls a clerk, an assistant for the repeatable work, while the founder keeps total ownership of the thing that actually closes deals: understanding the customer well enough to speak their language back to them.

          We get into why AI can only hand you probability while a human in the room can hand you certainty, why funding can quietly erode the thing that made your business different in the first place, and the one growth lever Travis says still works no matter what the market is doing.

          If you've ever wondered whether your AI-assisted growth is actually working, or just making you sound like everyone else, this one's for you.

          00:00 — Why AI changes how founders hire, not who gets replaced

          01:14 — AI as a clerk, not the source of ideas

          02:25 — Good data in, good data out: the discipline most founders skip

          04:14 — Where tech founders waste the most time and money

          07:01 — Forty AI companies, one identical pitch: the sameness problem

          08:23 — Why polish matters more once everyone has the same tools

          12:19 — The 2018 mindset still running modern companies

          13:52 — A hard lesson on scaling most founders learn too late

          18:42 — What Travis would do differently in the first 12 months

          19:11 — Funding, KPIs, and the slow erosion of founder passion

          23:48 — The one action every founder should take after this episode

          26:28 — Quick-fire round: stop doing, double down, the AI myth, the most dangerous scaling habit, and the growth lever that never stops working

          Guest Contact

          Travis McGregor, CEO, SLC Digital (Sovereign Line Communication)

          Website: slc.digital

          LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-mcgregor-33a41219/

          Gary Contact

          LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/growthfocus

          Website: growthfocus.io

          ─────────────────────────────

          Book your Revenue Leak Audit

          In 30 minutes, you'll find out exactly where the holes are in your revenue, and how AI should — and shouldn't — be helping you fix them.

          growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

          ─────────────────────────────

          34 min
        • Why Your Close Rate Is a Partner Problem, Not a Sales Problem | Drew Allgeier

          Most tech founders are still running lead generation the hard way — cold outreach, event booths they hope will pay off, a sales team grinding through the funnel. Drew Allgeier has a different problem. He has more leads than his salespeople can handle, an 80% close rate, and Fortune 1000 clients including ConAgra, Tyson, and Cornerstone Building brands on his books. None of that came from cold calls.

          Drew is the founder of Starken Tech, a nationwide network infrastructure and LAN deployment company that's spent a decade building what most founders talk about but few actually build: an indirect channel that generates warm introductions daily. Not occasionally. Not when a contact remembers you. Every single day.

          What makes this different from the referral networks most tech companies try to build is the structure behind it. Master agents, strategic partners, and deeply embedded relationships across the technology supply chain — each one incentivised to pass deals because they get paid when Drew closes. The result is that by the time Drew gets on a call with a prospect, the trust is already there. The partner has done the work. The close is almost a formality.

          We also get into the 80% close rate in real terms — how active business intelligence from partners tells Drew where he sits against competitors, what the prospect is thinking, and when to adjust pricing before the proposal even lands. That's not luck. That's a system.

          And then there's the growth ceiling most fast-moving companies don't see coming — the plateau that hits when you can sell but can't deliver. Drew's take on why back-office investment has to run ahead of sales growth is one of the most practical things on this episode.

          If you're in MSP, VAR, or B2B tech and you're still building revenue the slow way, this conversation is worth your time.

          00:00 — Introduction: Drew Allgeier and Starken Tech 00:53 — The 10,000 foot view: 10 years, Fortune 1000 clients, 80% close rate 01:27 — The genesis of the indirect channel: Jay Sherman Henderson and the authorised agent model 03:21 — What most founders miss when trying to build partnerships 05:15 — How master agents like Telarus and Sandler Partners work — and what it actually costs to get in 07:59 — Why events aren't lead generation — they're relationship maintenance 10:15 — The psychology of the booth cheque and why Drew's approach is different 11:10 — The 80% close rate: how partner intelligence shapes every deal in real time 13:51 — Qualifying everything: how to tell a real partner opportunity from a quote shop exercise 16:07 — Strategic partnerships vs. master agents: the Vtech example 18:28 — The continuum of technology services and how to identify partner adjacency 19:14 — Decentralised data centres, product development, and building end-to-end solutions 21:53 — M&A context: what founders get wrong when building a company to sell 22:44 — Organic growth vs. new logo acquisition — and why most people get the balance wrong 24:00 — Increasing consumption: the Seth Godin Purple Cow concept applied to client growth 25:05 — The three levers of revenue growth 26:04 — The plateau problem: what happens when sales outrun delivery capacity 27:47 — Why back-office investment has to run ahead of sales headcount 28:33 — Final question: what should a tech founder do differently this quarter 29:00 — Seek to be of service: the relationship-first philosophy behind consistent revenue 30:55 — "If they're not talking to you, they're leaving you" 31:31 — Close: people remember how you made them feel

          Drew Allgeier | Founder, Starken Tech starkentech.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-allgeier-3910384/

          Gary Lafferty | Host, Growth Focus Podcast | Founder, Growth Focus Partnerships - growthfocus.io   linkedin.com/in/growthfocus 

          ===============================
          Book your Revenue Leak Audit In 30 minutes, you will find out exactly where the holes are in your revenue and how to fix them. growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

          #MSPGrowth #IndirectChannel #B2BTech #RevenueGrowth #GrowthFocusPodcast

          37 min
        • Why Founders Who Say Yes to Everything Stop Growing: The Enterprise Discipline Gap | Sean Miles

          Most founders think growth stalls because they're not selling enough. Sean Miles built RGX — a two-sided marketplace for enterprise asset disposition — landed AT&T as a client, tripled revenue, then deliberately hit the brakes. Not because things weren't working. Because they were working too well, and the infrastructure underneath couldn't hold the weight.

          That decision — to flatline intentionally, rebuild the platform, and absorb the short-term cost — is one the vast majority of founders in any sector won't make. They'll keep pushing deals through a system that can't deliver them, and wonder why churn follows growth like a shadow.

          Sean has 25 years in sales and built RGX from a cold idea into an enterprise platform handling multi-site asset disposition for some of the largest organisations in North America. He coined the term "enterprise asset disposition" deliberately, because language shapes what buyers think is possible. He evolved from pure SaaS self-serve to hybrid managed services to a sell-through white-label model — not because it was the plan, but because the market kept telling him what it wanted and he listened.

          In this conversation: what it actually takes to land and keep enterprise clients, how to pilot without giving everything away, when to say no (and why most founders are still struggling with it), and the $15M deal that didn't land on schedule and what it taught him about time-boxing every pipeline opportunity — even the ones that look like slam dunks.

          If you're running a tech business and your pipeline feels healthy on paper but fragile underneath, this is the conversation to have.

          00:00 — Introduction: Sean Miles and RGX 02:25 — Why language matters: coining "enterprise asset disposition" 04:44 — Landing AT&T as a first major client through pilots and relationships 07:32 — The water balloon pipeline: managing growth pressure without breaking delivery 09:37 — Land and expand vs. freemium: what actually works with enterprise clients 11:38 — How the marketplace evolved: from self-serve SaaS to managed services 13:38 — Pivoting from sell-to to sell-through: the white-label opportunity 15:43 — Tripling revenue then flatlineing deliberately: the rebuild decision 18:30 — The MVP reality: selling before you've built it and the delivery gap 20:06 — When sales outpaces delivery: what that costs you 22:12 — Learning to say no: the discipline most founders are still lacking 25:00 — The $15M deal that didn't land: time-boxing your pipeline 27:29 — What most founders in the e-waste space are getting wrong 29:07 — Where to find Sean Miles

          Sean Miles Co-Founder and CEO, Recycle GX (RGX) Website: recycledgx.com Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-miles-5717952/

          Gary Lafferty LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/growthfocus/

          Website: growthfocus.io

          ===============================
          Book your Revenue Leak Audit In 30 minutes, you will find out exactly where the holes are in your revenue and how to fix them. growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

          SEO KEYWORDS Primary: enterprise asset disposition, B2B SaaS growth, e-waste marketplace, founder-led sales Secondary: enterprise sales cycles, pilot strategy, marketplace business model, revenue scaling, sell-through model

          HASHTAGS #B2BTech #FounderGrowth #EnterpriseSales #GrowthFocus #CircularEconomy

          36 min
        • The End User Gap: What Tech Founders Get Wrong | Courtney Poulos |

          There is a gap that sits quietly inside most tech products. It is not a feature gap or a funding gap. It is the gap between the user you pitched and the user who actually shows up.

          Courtney Poulos has been a real estate broker for over two decades. She runs Acme Real Estate in Los Angeles and Acme Florida in Orlando. She has also become one of the most honest and direct testers of PropTech products in her industry - reviewing platforms publicly, giving founders unfiltered feedback, and watching what breaks when theory meets the actual working day of a professional in the field.

          This conversation is not about real estate. It is about what happens when a founder builds a product for the person they imagined rather than the person who will use it. It is about the IKEA effect, the way proximity to a problem warps how clearly you can see the solution you have built. And it is about what AI actually costs a business when the quality control sits with the human operator, not the platform.

          If you run a tech business and you have ever wondered why churn comes earlier than the numbers predicted, or why "user friendly" is the most expensive phrase in your product documentation, this episode gives you the answer from someone sitting on the other side of the sale.

          00:00 — Introduction: Who Courtney Poulos is and why her perspective matters to tech founders

          01:35 — What 21 years across a disrupted industry actually teaches you about business survival

          03:55 — The competitive reality: being out-teched while you are still building

          05:50 — Why most PropTech is not informed by the people it is supposed to serve

          07:20 — The Real Estate AI Coach channel and what honest product testing reveals

          08:42 — How rare it is for a founder to actually respond to criticism and what that tells you

          10:07 — Why Perplexity is replacing specialist platforms and what that means for your moat

          10:31 — The holistic approach: sitting with the user for a full working day before you write a line of code

          11:31 — The pitch deck user versus the actual user — a live example from the dot-com era

          13:36 — The VC-driven AI bolt-on problem: what it costs when AI is added without accountability

          15:02 — AI hallucination in regulated industries and the liability gap nobody has solved

          16:30 — Is AI actually saving time or creating a new layer of quality control?

          17:48 — Why some buyers respond better to an AI voice than a human one — and what that means

          18:36 — Where AI integration genuinely works and where it is still being oversold

          20:28 — The fireplace analogy: why AI is making human expertise more valuable, not less

          21:47 — The case for keeping the human in the loop — and what happens when you do not

          25:28 — What the best PropTech products are getting right that most are still missing

          27:00 — AI and fiduciary responsibility: who is accountable when the consumer loses?

          29:14 — The one thing tech founders consistently get wrong about their end user

          30:37 — Why human customer service is still the most underrated retention tool in tech

          Guest contact Courtney Poulos — Broker Owner, Acme Real Estate

          Instagram: instagram.com/theclosedcloses

          YouTube: youtube.com/@AcmeRealEstate

          Real Estate AI Coach Channel: youtube.com/@AcmeRealEstate

          Host contact Gary Lafferty — Growth Focus Partnerships LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garylafferty

          Website: growthfocus.io

          ===============================
          Book your Revenue Leak Audit In 30 minutes, you will find out exactly where the holes are in your revenue and how to fix them. www.growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

          Hashtags: #GrowthFocus #TechFounders #PropTech #AIinBusiness #ProductMarketFit

          36 min
        • Why Your Partners Aren't Selling For You (And the Fix That Actually Works) | Missy Trumpler

          Most IT services companies trying to grow through partnerships hit the same wall. The partners are on board, the reseller agreements are signed, and nothing moves. Missy Trumpler, CEO of Agile AI Labs, built her growth engine almost entirely through IT services channel partnerships -- and she knows exactly why most of them fail.

          The answer is not a better partner programme. It is not better sales enablement materials. It is making the partner use the product themselves before they sell it to a single customer. If they do not own the knives, they cannot sell the knives. That one shift is what turned Agile AI Labs from a company with partners into a company with a channel that actually produces.

          This episode covers how she got there -- and the harder growth problem underneath it. Her company solves a problem the software industry has normalised so completely that buyers feel genuine shame admitting it exists. Getting a prospect to acknowledge a problem they have quietly decided to live with is one of the most difficult sales and positioning challenges any B2B tech founder faces. Missy has found a way in.

          What is in this for you:

          How to land your first real partners. Not warm contacts who agree to resell, but partners who use what you built, understand it from the inside, and can speak to it honestly in front of their own customers.

          Why most partnerships fail even when both sides want them to work. The problem is almost never the relationship. It is that the partner is selling from the brochure rather than from experience.

          How to sell into a problem your buyer has normalised. The conversation does not open in the first meeting. It opens about 20 minutes in, once the shame fades. Understanding why -- and how to get there faster -- applies to anyone selling a product that solves a problem the market has quietly accepted as the cost of doing business.

          What AI is actually doing inside software development teams -- and why plugging it into a broken process makes the damage arrive faster rather than fixing anything.

          The one piece of advice for IT and MSP leaders heading into the next quarter.

          Agile AI Labs: agileailabs.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/missy-trumpler-08779611/

          Gary Lafferty | Growth Focus Partnerships Find out where your growth gap sits: https://growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/growthfocus/

          37 min
        • Why WeWork Failed and What the Next Generation of Flexible Workspace Gets Right | Alex Passler

          WeWork changed the industry. Then it nearly destroyed it. Alex Passler spent 30 years inside Regus, CBRE, and WeWork — and left to build the thing they all got wrong.

          WeWork changed the flexible workspace industry forever. It made co-working a household concept, built community into the office, and grew faster than almost any real estate business in history. Then it collapsed. Alex Passler watched all of it from the inside — at Regus, CBRE, and WeWork — and in 2021 he walked away from the corporate world to build Valest: a hospitality-driven co-working business that works the way the hotel industry has operated for decades.

          The model is different by design. Instead of signing long leases and betting on arbitrage, Valest partners with landlords on management agreements — sharing upside, removing lease liability, and aligning incentives from day one. It means slower growth than some investors would like. Alex is fine with that.

          In this conversation, Alex breaks down what WeWork genuinely got right (the community model, the cultural shift, the industry legitimacy it created), what it got catastrophically wrong (the lease risk, the growth-at-all-costs mentality), and how he's built Valest to take the good and leave the bad.

          What makes this conversation worth your time is that Alex thinks about growth the way very few founders do. He built his CRM, accounting systems, and tech infrastructure for the company he wants to be in five years — not the company he is today. He turned down deals because they were the wrong landlords. He resisted occupancy targets because launch discounts are almost impossible to unwind. And he hired an operator to run the business the day he admitted he didn't know how to do it himself.

          This is a founder who has watched what happens when you move too fast, and made a deliberate choice to do the opposite.

          Key points from this episode:

          The management agreement model: why aligning with landlords rather than taking lease risk is more resilient in any market downturn, and why very few operators have made the switch.

          Why WeWork was right about community and wrong about leases: the industry needed WeWork to exist. It didn't need to grow the way it did.

          The flight to quality in office space: companies are reducing their footprint but demanding more from what remains. Smaller, better, premium — and a gym is no longer optional.

          Hospitality as a competitive edge: knowing what a client needs before they ask for it. Not coffees and croissants. Actually understanding the person who walks through the door every morning.

          Building infrastructure ahead of growth: why switching CRM systems in a 500-person company is a six-month disruption — and how to avoid ever having to do it.

          The one thing Alex says he got wrong: ignoring marketing until the product was already built. If no one knows about it, it doesn't matter how good it is.

          If you're building something in flexible workspace, commercial real estate, or any capital-intensive business where lease risk and investor pressure are both live problems, this one is worth 30 minutes of your time.

          - CONNECT WITH ALEX -- Website: https://vallist.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexpaessler/ Email: [email protected] -

          - THE GROWTH FOCUS PODCAST -- Hosted by Gary Lafferty | Growth Focus Partnerships Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

          If you want to find out where your revenue gap actually sits get your complimentary Revenue Leak Audit: https://growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

          37 min
        • Why Your Personal Brand Will Outperform Your Business Brand in an AI World | Alex Whitelaw | Growth Focus Podcast

          Richard Branson has millions of personal followers. Virgin has hundreds of thousands. That gap is not a coincidence — and it is sitting between most founders and the growth they want right now.

          Richard Branson's personal following dwarfs his company's. Alex Whitelaw noticed that gap and built his business around it. In this episode, Gary Lafferty sits down with Alex — former construction operations director, now AI consultant and founder — to talk about what it actually takes to grow an SME in a world full of AI-generated noise, fragmented tech stacks, and founders who are still hiding behind their business brand.

          Alex made the move from 25 years in construction operations to partnering with Valenta, a global UiPath automation provider, and now runs AI literacy training and consultancy for SMEs. His argument: the technology is the easy part. The visibility problem is what is actually holding most founders back.

          What you will hear in this episode:

          • Why most businesses do not have a growth problem — they have a fragmentation problem. Different departments running different software that does not talk to each other, and the hidden cost that creates.
          • The authenticity gap. In a world where nobody knows what is real and what is AI-generated, being a genuine human on camera is becoming a competitive advantage — not a nice to have.
          • Personal brand versus business brand. Alex breaks down why your personal following will almost always outperform your company page, and what most founders are getting wrong by staying invisible.
          • What actually happened when Alex stopped posting AI-generated images and started recording himself straight after client meetings. The shift in traction was not gradual.
          • The five-day content plan for founders who know they should be doing video but keep finding reasons not to.
          • Why AI is creating jobs in sectors people assumed it would replace — and the specific work Alex is doing in construction and with job seekers through his Basecamp literacy platform.
          • The seven-touch reality. By the time someone contacts you, they have already watched your content, visited your page, and mostly made up their mind. The question is whether you gave them anything to watch.
          • Key takeaway: Founders who are hiding behind a business logo are becoming invisible at exactly the moment when being visible is cheapest and easiest it has ever been.

            Connect with Alex Whitelaw:

            LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nexusmind-ai-consultancy/

            About Growth Focus Partnerships:

            Gary Lafferty works with MSP owners, VAR and IT leaders, and B2B tech companies whose revenue should be further ahead than it is. The Revenue Leak Audit is a 30-minute no-pitch conversation.

            Book it at https://growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

            TIMESTAMPS

            00:00 — Introduction and Alex's background: from apprentice to board-level in construction

            01:44 — Why operations experience translates across every industry

            02:35 — The moment Alex decided to leave construction and move into tech and AI

            04:32 — Why AI feels complicated when it does not have to be

            05:12 — The hardest personal shift when moving into entrepreneurship

            07:19 — What founders actually come to Alex with when they first reach out

            10:26 — What is working for Alex right now to generate leads and conversations

            13:42 — The authenticity gap on LinkedIn and why AI slop is making it worse

            15:30 — What Alex tried that did not work: magazine advertising, static images, and the lessons

            17:13 — Why video content has replaced thousands of pounds of production cost

            18:28 — How to stand out when everyone is producing the same content

            19:50 — How Alex converted his scrolling time into learning time

            21:51 — Where AI adoption actually sits on the curve right now

            22:39 — Practical advice for founders who want to do video but keep avoiding it

            24:43 — Quick-fire round: five questions

            25:35 — The biggest myth about growing a business with AI

            27:16 — AI literacy for job seekers: the Basecamp project

            28:02 — What founders consistently underestimate about business growth

            29:05 — The one growth channel that deserves more attention

            29:57 — The one growth tactic founders should probably stop doing

            31:01 — Final takeaway: be original, tell your story, put yourself out there

            37 min
          • Private AI Agents, Regulated Industries, and the Desktop Revolution | Mark Heynen, Knapsack

            Most businesses are jumping between 15 open tabs, uploading their most sensitive data into three different AI platforms, and wondering why nothing sticks. Mark Heynen built Knapsack to solve exactly that — private, compliant AI agents for financial services, running on your machine, leaving no trace.

            Mark is a five-time founder with two exits. His most recent company before Knapsack was Payjoy, a device financing firm. When Payjoy tried to implement AI and ran into data security walls, Mark saw the gap — and built the solution.

            In this episode we cover what it actually means to run AI agents privately in a regulated industry, how Mark validated the financial advisor ICP, and what desktop agents doing half your workday looks like in practice.

            Key points from this conversation:

            Financial advisors carry 120 clients on average, buried in fragmented tools, under heavy regulatory scrutiny — and increasingly open to change. That made them a sharp early ICP: acute pain, ability to buy independently, and a behaviour shift already underway.

            Most businesses fragmenting their AI context across OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini are solving the wrong problem. Context is the most valuable asset. It should travel with you, not with the platform.

            The desktop app runs agents locally, leaves no cloud trace, and has since been open-sourced — for security transparency and to let enterprise clients build custom versions.

            On growth: podcasting works. LinkedIn cold outreach is declining. As AI-generated noise floods inboxes, the premium on a specific, authentic, technically hard-to-replicate message increases.

            Closing advice for founders: AI has created an abundance of capacity. The question is no longer how to focus — it's whether you're optimising a local maxima when you should be thinking about your global one.

            00:00 Introduction 00:58 Origin story: building private AI from a compliance problem 03:00 Financial advisor ICP validation 05:46 Making privacy a commercial differentiator 08:33 Context as the most valuable business asset 09:31 Selling into a conservative industry 13:00 Desktop agents in practice 17:32 What's worked for growth 20:38 What hasn't worked 22:10 Authenticity in an AI-slop world 25:02 2026 focus: enterprise and open-source desktop 28:02 Closing advice for founders

            Mark Heynen | knapsack.ai | https://www.linkedin.com/in/markheynen/

            Find out where your revenue gap actually sits. The Revenue Leak Audit is a 30-minute no-pitch conversation with Gary Lafferty. Book at https://growthfocus.io/revenue_leak_audit

            32 min

          About The Growth Focus Podcast

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          The Growth Focus Podcast Channel is your premier destination for insights into Tech business, with a special emphasis on Business Growth and Scalability. Each episode we dive deep into conversations with industry leaders to uncover the strategies, challenges, and innovations propelling tech companies forward.