On paper, you’re still growing. So why does everything feel five times harder than it was when you were half this size?
When a business moves from Founder-led to System-led, the instinct is usually to crank the volume knob on activity. But if the gears of your business aren’t interlocked, slamming your foot on the accelerator won’t make you go faster – it just creates noise and smoke.
Drawing on a decade spent in the guts of scaling firms, Dave sets the scene for a new way of growing, and building a blueprint that actually does the heavy lifting.
We cover:
How osmosis isn’t a viable approach: Why the intuitive understanding that fuelled your early success evaporates as you grow, leaving everyone drifting.
The 95/5 Rule: Why understanding nuance matters. And why ‘more activity’ is often just a tax on your sales team that aggressively annoys 95% of your market.
How fragile your firm really is: How to identify if your growth is being held hostage by a few superstars who could sink the firm just by leaving.
Three sensible places to start
Find the tailwinds: How to isolate high probability zones – by looking at outlier deals that closed 50% faster than average.
Kill the ‘About Us’ slide: Why you need to put a bullet in your standard deck and start lead with the prospect’s conflict, not your logo wall.
Seek out real Intelligence: Turning your CRM into a source of critical buying signals.
Full episode transcript
Dave Heywood (00:01)
It’s Sunday night. You’ve got your laptop open. You’re looking at the pipeline.
On paper, you’re growing. You might even have had a really good month, but something still doesn’t sit right. Every deal, every hire, every meeting feels five times harder than it was when you were half this size. You’ve probably got one or two individuals who are carrying the entire organization.
But everything else around them just feels a bit stuck in the mud.
The instinct is to do more. To turn the pressure up.
More outreach, more campaigns, more activity, more content, more processes,
But frankly, if things aren’t working together and designed to operate at scale, slamming your foot on the accelerator doesn’t make you go faster. It just creates noise, smoke, and you don’t go anywhere.
This is Scale, An OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood
I’m doing this because I spent the last decade or so in the guts of businesses moving from that startup to scale up and beyond.
I’ve seen it time and time again.
really smart, well-intentioned people coming in. Often from larger legacy firms, bringing some really impressive backgrounds, some really great thinking, but also some quite complex baggage as well.
They often try and implement enterprise style systems built for companies 40 times your size. The business can’t ingest it. It destroys the fabric of what you’ve built. It’s bloody expensive and it pisses everyone off.
So I’m here to share some of my own experiences, perspectives and learnings to help you get into that groove of growth.
Where does this all start? Early on, you survived on instinct, adrenaline, and bit of osmosis. You were in every room. Everyone else was also in every room. That vision and purpose and how you work and get things done, it’s practically in the But that doesn’t scale. As you grow,
That intuitive understanding literally evaporates. And you’re left with some quite distinctive failures.
the entire market is treated as equally winnable
teams spend 70-80 % of their time and energy fighting uphill in segments where you’ve got zero competitive advantage and very few inroads. And actually, you ignore the home turf, that actually pays the bills and can be profitable if grown.
narrative drift sets in.
Once you’re not in every room, that message gets watered down slowly over time. And people retreat into safe language and areas and bits of the business that they know and understand. It often ends up in quite feature-heavy product talk. Quite literally sounds like someone regurgitating a brochure. People stop selling the why and the differentiators and they start sounding like robots.
that tell a slightly different story each time.
and you end up with a business that requires people to be absolute superstars just to get stuff done.
And if your growth requires you to find five more unicorns out there, you don’t have a system that’ll scale.
You’re holding the business hostage to people who are capable of sinking the firm just by leaving.
So let’s do a little maths here.
Conventional wisdom tells us that at any given moment 95 % of the market is out of market but literally can not will not buy from you today.
Our instinct tells us to go out and address everybody until that 5 % answers.
But there’s a little bit of nuance with that maths. If you sell quite high velocity products, let’s say a low cost software solution, that window may be wider. But if you sell something really knotty, quite complex, so six to 12 month deal cycle, that window might only be
1, 2, 3 percent.
But if we get into the mindset of driving more and more activity without that right message, we’re essentially asking our teams to aggressively annoy the percentage of the market who aren’t in buying mode right now. And when we think about mental availability, that moment where somebody enters that percentage of being in market, you want to be the name that gets pulled out of the hat when that buying trigger finally hits.
And if along the way we’ve been… Annoying?
irrelevant, flavourless bit samey, then we’ve just become a noisy interruption in a world of noisy interruptions. We essentially end up charging our sales team a tax, forcing them to work 10 times harder because the rest of our approach isn’t doing any of the heavy lifting
So how can we start to fix that engine?
a few things that I instinctively look at first of all.
I try to seek out the tailwinds. So it’s not just about where we commonly win. I’m interested in the outliers. Which opportunities closed 30 to 50 % faster than average? And I want to know why. What are some of the common denominators? Is it a particular buying trigger, a situation, a particular referrer?
are they using a particular tech stack. Whatever that is,
you’re essentially trying to isolate a high probability zone.
Now, I’m a bit of a cyclist myself, always looking for a good tailwind. This is where winning is just easier. Direct energy there, as that will fuel growth and give you a really, really good solid base to build the rest of the business on.
Number two, I see this in loads and loads of slide decks.
Slides 1, 2, 3, It’s all about us, who we are, who we work with, what we do. Take those slides round the back, put a bullet
Rewrite the narrative here to address the specific challenge of that person sat right in front of you. Signal really early on that I understand your world, you’re in safe hands with me.
within some of the tools, take your CRM. start looking for buying signals within there.
And within the reports that you might get out of your CRM, is that giving you meaningful intelligence? So number of outbound emails or meetings booked is one thing. But if then the notes in the CRM just say, followed up, we’ve essentially got a real intelligence black hole.
So start forcing a capture of that real buying intelligence. Why is that current approach failing? Why have you chosen now to talk to you? That’s the stuff that once you get started to get a real read across time, you can really supercharge the other two elements that I’ve just talked about.
But ultimately, building an approach that scales isn’t an act of willpower. If you’re seeing or feeling diminishing returns here, you’ve just reached the limits of that pure grit determination and more. Because it’s not about more. It’s about faster, more efficient. It’s about scalable. Can 20 people now do what five people did a year previously?
So go back to those fast track deals, find those patterns, really challenge your message and start to get under the skin of and fix those mechanics that serve up nuggets of real critical insights instead of just activity.
I’m Dave Heywood, I’ll see you next time on Scale
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