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.