We Have A Meeting

Can humour be learned, or are middle managers doomed? Renée Shaw is a writer, comedian and the brand and social brain behind tl;dv. She built a following on LinkedIn by being, in her words, an “unhinged goblin”. In this episode, Jack and Zac ask her the questions nobody else will. What KPI measures emotional availability? Should redundancies be announced via carousel? Has anyone ever really been “humbled to announce”? It’s daft. It’s also a proper lesson in standing out in a feed full of beige. Renée explains why funny content cuts through, how to be yourself online without losing your job, and what “personal brand” actually means once the follower count goes up. If you’ve ever cried choosing between “Agree?” and “Thoughts?”, this one’s for you. In this episode: 👉 Why humour beats “grateful for this journey” 👉 Being authentic online and still paying the rent 👉 What makes a post go viral, and what’s just a VP of Sales liking it 👉 Whether a horse could succeed in B2B SaaS ⏱️ Chapters Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome to the Show: Meet Renee Shaw, Synergy Expert and Corporate Satirist 00:00:52 Shareholder Value and the Glass of Water: Strong Arms in Corporate Environments 00:01:43 The Price of Going Too Far: LinkedIn Followers and Personal Brands 00:03:06 Bears vs Sharks and Corporate Discourse: The Mr. Ed Economy 00:10:24 Corporate Sentences for First Dates: Shipping Features and Circling Back 00:12:13 The Sam Altman Connection: GPT-1, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and Platonic Tension 00:14:49 Layoffs and Lay-Ons: Bringing Humanity to Performance Issues 00:17:27 Meet Todd the Puppet: The Best Right-Hand Man with Cluster B Tendencies 00:25:09 Tasmania, IBM, and Selling Your Skin: Monitor Lizards and Jensen Huang's Next Jacket 00:28:34 Business Ideas and Byzantine Empires: Airbnb for Divorce and Euthanasia Wordplay 00:30:15 The Future: AI Chickens, Large Language Beings, and Why Everyone Should Be Pretty 00:32:20 The Final Riff: Polly Fockett, Uncomfortable Shoes, and Not Belonging 🔗 Follow Renée LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/ Website: https://reneeshaw.co/ Newsletter (Unsupervised): https://unsupervisednewsletter.substack.com YouTube: https://youtube.com/@pollyfockit TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pollyfockit X: https://x.com/pollyfockit 🔗 We Have A Meeting Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wehaveameetingpodcast/ State of Sales newsletter: https://stateofsales.co.uk 📘 Sales Is Therapy by Jack Frimston & Zac Thompson: [ADD LINK] WHAM: https://wehaveameeting.com 🎧 Subscribe for weekly conversations with founders, operators and big personalities on business and everything around it. #WeHaveAMeeting #LinkedIn #PersonalBrand #ContentCreation #BusinessPodcast

The last time the world changed this much, we swapped feudalism for factories and rewrote the rules of money, work and power. Daniel Priestley thinks it’s happening again, right now. In his view AI isn’t just another tech trend. It sits with the printing press, the railways and electricity. That means a new political system is coming, then a new monetary system, then a completely different idea of what a life and a career can look like. And if it sounds far-fetched, Britain has been here before. Between 1825 and 1835 we had a banking crisis, a pandemic, a game-changing new technology, a debate about wealth inequality, and six prime ministers in ten years. Sound familiar? Daniel has spent 25 years building companies. He’s started them, scaled them, sold them, bought them and invested in them. He sold an IT services company to a publicly listed company in New York, spun out ScoreApp, and recently sold one of his publishing companies to Forbes Books. He also wrote the foreword to Sales Is Therapy, so he is legally obliged to come back. He rejoins hosts Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson three years after they last sat down in Wandsworth. He explains what founders should be doing before the shift lands, why every copywriter needs to stop competing with the calculator, and why half the business value on your street is sitting with someone aged 62 to 80 who wants to sell. His numbers are specific. The world watches 500 billion short-form videos a day, roughly 100 per person with internet. LinkedIn views halved this year while engagement stayed exactly the same, because the algorithm is now a matchmaker, not a megaphone. Only about 4% of people pay for AI. He spends a couple of hundred grand a month on Meta ads without blinking, then thinks twice about going from the $20 to the $200 ChatGPT plan. Baby boomers hold 50% of all businesses by revenue and valuation, and every one of them needs a buyer. Chapters Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome to the Show: Meet Daniel Priestley, Entrepreneur Navigating the AI Revolution 00:01:32 The Printing Press Moment: Why AI Changes Everything Like the Industrial Age Did 00:03:00 The Resourcefulness Question: Making the Most of Massive Opportunity 00:05:46 The Death of the Technician: Why AI Wants You to Be a Leader, Not a Cog 00:08:16 The Entrepreneurial Skill Set: Six Pillars Every Kid Should Learn 00:10:11 Build to Sell Even If You Never Sell: The Beautiful Business Mindset 00:13:18 Short Form, Long Form, Lead Form: The Path from Attention to Money 00:14:10 The Semantic Algorithm Era: Matchmaking Ideas with the People Who Need Them 00:20:29 Trust is the Premium Product: Why Founder-Led Brands Win in the AI Age 00:24:21 The Hype Cycle Prediction: Boom, Bust, Stagnation, and the Pattern from 1825 00:34:54 The Baby Boomer Business Opportunity: 50% of All Equity Up for Grabs 00:36:26 Passion, Problem, Payment: The Three Pillars Before You Start Anything 00:38:23 Shiny Object Syndrome: Default Yes People Need Default No Friends 00:41:02 Cool vs Fearful Marketing: Which One Has More Longevity? 00:43:38 Rapid Fire: Sales, Assets, and Why Your First Customer is About Data, Not Money Hashtags #DanielPriestley #FundingCircle #BackedByFundingCircle #KeyPersonOfInfluence #ScoreApp #Entrepreneurship #AI #BuildToSell #SmallBusiness #BusinessFinance #ShortFormVideo #StartupFounder #ScalingUp #BusinessPodcast #Manchester #WeHaveAMeeting Connect with Daniel Priestley: Dent Global: https://www.dent.global ScoreApp: https://www.scoreapp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpriestley/ Hear more from the hosts: Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-frimston-5010177b Zac: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-thompson-33a9a39b Brought to you by Funding Circle: business finance that backs you. Fast, flexible loans to help UK small businesses grow. Find out more at https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/ Subscribe to We Have A Meeting: new episodes every week with founders, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who’ve built it from the ground up.

Mark Roberge started out writing code. He studied at MIT, found entrepreneurship at 23, and ran a string of startups, a number of which failed. The last one was HubSpot, where he was the fourth employee and founding CRO, and he took it through IPO. He has taught sales at Harvard Business School for the last 11 years. He is also a deacon at his church, a daily meditator, and a man who reads every spiritual doctrine he can get his hands on. Mark joins hosts Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson to explain why a million in revenue and a hundred customers is not product market fit, why promoting your best rep to manager is one of the most reliably destructive things a founder can do, and why the sales teams winning right now are the ones that can prove how much of the week their reps actually spend talking to buyers. He sits in 40 to 50 board meetings a quarter and has been close to around 500 startups trying to scale. The numbers he gives here are brutally specific: mid-market reps on 50K to 75K ACVs take four to six months to ramp, carry an 800K to 1M quota, cost around 150K, and one in four never makes it. Enterprise reps on 200K to 800K deals can take a year. The industry rep-to-manager ratio is seven to one, and he thinks AI takes it to fifteen. Reps have historically spent about 25% of the week actually selling. He believes today's tools get that to 75%, and that alone is a 3x. Along the way: the 150,000-meeting study on talk time, why the best salesperson you know is a therapist who asks eight questions, the founder who raised eight million and hired 15 reps the next week, Africa skipping fibre and going straight to cell towers, what he'd build if we populated Mars, the five hours a week he blocks out to build Claude skills. Chapters Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome to the Show: Meet Mark Roberge, Harvard Professor and Former HubSpot CRO 00:02:55 The Emergency Room of Founder Problems: What Mark Sees in 50 Board Meetings Every Quarter 00:06:22 The Product Market Fit Trap: Why 100 Customers and 1 Million in Revenue Means Nothing 00:08:51 The Therapy Session Masterclass: Why the Best Salespeople Talk Less Than Half the Time 00:12:56 The AI-First Career Advantage: Why It's the Best Time Ever to Start Your Professional Life 00:14:35 The Cloud Skills Pipeline: How Mark Uses AI to Automate His Entire Professional Workflow 00:18:14 The Buyer Journey Framework: Taking an Outside-In Approach to Building Your Sales Playbook 00:24:18 The 15 Reps in One Week Disaster: Why Founders Scale Sales Like a Factory Making Cookies 00:27:39 The Pace Over Panic Strategy: Establishing a Forever Hiring Rhythm That Actually Works 00:37:47 The Brutal Hiring Truth: Ramp Times, Quotas, and Failure Rates Across SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise 00:44:08 The 75 Percent Selling Time Revolution: How AI Will 3X Sales Productivity This Year 00:48:16 The Leapfrog Opportunity: Why Companies Without CRMs Have the Biggest AI Advantage 00:49:33 The Science of Scaling and Mental Health: How to Find Mark and Support the Mission Hashtags #MarkRoberge #TheScienceOfScaling #HubSpot #Stage2Capital #HarvardBusinessSchool #ProductMarketFit #GoToMarket #SaaS #StartupFounder #SalesLeadership #ScalingRevenue #VentureCapital #AIinSales #B2BSales #SalesPodcast #Manchester #WeHaveAMeeting Connect with Mark Roberge: Stage 2 Capital: https://www.stage2.capital The Science of Scaling: https://www.stage2.capital/science-of-scaling-book LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ Hear more from the hosts: Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-frimston-5010177b Zac: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-thompson-33a9a39b Brought to you by Nooks: the AI-powered platform helping teams automate outbound sales and book more qualified meetings. Learn more at https://www.nooks.ai/wehaveameeting Subscribe to We Have A Meeting: new episodes every week with founders, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who've built it from the ground up.

Geraint Anderson thinks he might be a psychopath. So he got himself tested. He fell into the City by accident, while he was selling trinkets on beaches and smoking weed. He turned up to the interview in a £6 Oxfam suit, and the interview involved four bottles of champagne and a strip club. Nine years later the former intern was running the second-highest ranked team in London. Then he wrote an anonymous column exposing everything he’d seen, which became Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile. It sold over 400,000 copies in seven countries. A forensic psychologist has since told him he’s not a psychopath. She also told him he can turn the dark triad up and down whenever he likes. Geraint joins hosts Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson for the most honest conversation we’ve had about manipulation, in the City and everywhere else. He explains why he kept a spreadsheet of every client’s wife, dog and football team. He explains why he made clients his “best friends” so they’d vote for him in the rankings, and why he grabbed the coattails of the nerdy genius and took the credit. He breaks down what really goes on in the Square Mile. A power station in Utah exploded and he walked onto the trading floor with a nosebleed showing on every screen. His bank lost £1.2 million. He and his team made a sell call against the entire City and it came good. A rival recently messaged him on LinkedIn with just “proper psycho”. He explains why insider trading is stealing from your granny’s pension, and why the bonus system rewards psychopathic behaviour. Along the way: a knife at his neck at 16, hanging off a cliff in Nepal, why not giving a shit is a superpower, why you should invest in your most insecure mate, the Domino’s shares that went up 15 times, Sam Altman, why Silicon Valley’s real psychopaths won’t let their own kids near a screen, a business partner blackmail story that’s hard to believe, and the three questions to ask before you believe anything. Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome to the Show: Meet Geraint Anderson AKA Cityboy, Ex-Banker Turned Bullshit Detector 00:03:45 The Making of a City Manipulator: Spreadsheets, Cocaine, and Madonna Concerts 00:07:55 The Knife to the Throat: Fearlessness, Going Limp, and Psychopathic Traits 00:21:09 The Bloody Nose Disaster: Losing 1.2 Million Quid on Cocaine and Scottish Power 00:24:52 The Superpower of Not Giving a Shit: Imposter Syndrome and Philosophical Detachment 00:28:13 The Conspiracy Theory Takedown: COVID, 9-11, and Why Your Weed-Smoking Mate Is Wrong 00:35:01 The Art of Stealing Thunder: Brown Nosing, Self-Deprecation, and Taking Credit 00:37:27 From Beach Bum to Banker: The Two Year Plan That Became Ten 00:40:45 Silicon Valley Psychopaths: AI, Sam Altman, and the Race to Destroy Humanity 00:49:21 How to Spot a Psychopath: The Yawn Test, Emotional Mirroring, and Business Partner Red Flags 00:52:30 The 21 Percent Problem: Why Business Leaders Are More Psychopathic Than You Think 00:57:13 Ask Yourself This: Are They Lying to Me and Where's the Evidence #GeraintAnderson #Cityboy #HowToConFriends #Psychopath #DarkTriad #Manipulation #TheCity #Banking #TradingFloor #SquareMile #Narcissism #SiliconValley #BusinessPodcast #UKBusiness #Entrepreneur #Sales #WeHaveAMeeting Connect with Geraint Anderson: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cityboygez/?hl=en Book: How to Con Friends and Manipulate People: The Subtle Art of Being a Total Psychopath https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Friends-Manipulate-People-Psychopath/dp/1835984568 Hear more from the hosts: Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-frimston-5010177b Zac: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-thompson-33a9a39b Subscribe to We Have A Meeting: new episodes every week with founders, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who’ve built it from the ground up.

This episode of We Have A Meeting is sponsored by Funding Circle, business finance that backs you. 👉 https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/ Tonia Buxton didn’t know it was impossible. That’s how she did it. She was a primary school teacher in Tottenham with an idea for a TV show nobody was making: food and travel, just Greece and Cyprus. She posted VHS showreels to almost 200 production companies and ran out of companies in London. A company in Birmingham finally said yes. My Greek Kitchen and My Cypriot Kitchen went on to air on Discovery Channel in 37 countries. Tonia joins We Have A Meeting at Ideas Fest for a conversation about joy, tenacity and the choices that shape a life. She explains why joy is a habit you can build. She also talks about why you have to get uncomfortable to find it, and why she forces herself into hip hop classes where she’s the oldest person in the room and can’t remember the steps. She tells the story she never tells: the TV job she was offered years before her own shows. It was a presenting role that made everyone who took it famous, and she said no. She explains why, what her now-husband of 35 years said at the time, and why the man behind the show recently told her it was the best decision she ever made. Along the way: sending a production company a VHS packed with sweets and a hamper of home-cooked Greek food, the one question that changes how people remember you, manifesting with frankincense, what young people lose by never being bored, why people over 45 lose their curiosity (and their youth with it), and why generosity always comes back to you. About our sponsor: Funding Circle Tonia sent out almost 200 showreels before someone backed her idea. Funding Circle backs UK small businesses with fast, flexible finance, so you can spend less time chasing a yes and more time building. Find out more: https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/ #FundingCircle #ToniaBuxton #MyGreekKitchen #IdeasFest #Manifestation #Resilience #Rejection #Joy #Ageless #TVPresenter #FounderMindset #BusinessPodcast #UKBusiness #Entrepreneur #PersonalBrand #WeHaveAMeeting Connect with Tonia Buxton: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toniabuxton/?hl=en Hear more from the hosts: Jack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-frimston-5010177b Zac: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-thompson-33a9a39b Subscribe to We Have A Meeting: new episodes every week with founders, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who’ve built it from the ground up.