Connect

EP100: Lessons Learned After 100 Interviews with 8, 9 and 10-Figure Founders and Experts on Scaling


100th episode!

Today I reveal my 6 biggest takeaways from 100 interviews with successful Founders and experts on scaling. And a little update on my crazy move to Europe.

Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcast
Watch on YouTube

After 2 years of speaking to successful Founders, experts on many aspects of business you need to master to scale, we have finally reached the 100th episode! (woop woop).

This week, I summarise my 6 biggest takeaways from the first 100 episodes.

Whether you’re a regular listener or new to the ScaleHQ Podcast, this is one you won’t want to miss this very special episode if you want to scale to 8 figures + .

Oh.. and I add a few special updates on new episode formats for 2024 AND an update on my recent crazy, life-changing move to Europe.

WATCH SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS WEEK'S EPISODE ON YOUTUBE:

đź”— 03:22 Takeaway #1 - Develop a clear growth strategy to develop competitive advantage.

đź”—
05:08 Takeaway #2 - Always build with an exit in mind (whether you plan to exit or not)

đź”—
06:30 Takeaway #3 - Level up a few key roles as early as possible.

đź”—
09:17 Takeaway #4 - Don’t write off acquisitions because you’re afraid of them (I’ll explain why)

đź”—
10:49 Takeaway #5 - You’ll have to listen to find out!

đź”—
13:36 Takeaway #6 - You’ll have to listen to find out!

đź”—
19:41 - The future of the ScaleHQ podcast in 2024.

đź”—
21:48 - My family’s recent crazy move to Europe - how to follow the journey.

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: G'day everybody, and welcome to the ScaleHQ Podcast. Welcome to episode 100. I can't believe we're at a hundred episodes. I really can't. So, today it's a bit of a special episode. It's just me. There's going to be no guests, but I wanted to talk to you about three things.

[00:00:47] First of all, I wanted to share with you my six biggest takeaways from the first hundred episodes of all the interviews, all the lessons that I'm taking out of that for seven-figure Founders on your behalf, I'm curating the six biggest takeaways I think you need to understand if you're a seven-figure Founder and you want to scale to eight-figures plus, and you want to keep scaling sustainably. I've got six big takeaways from you of things that I've learned, and I'm going to give you the reference episodes so you can go back and listen to those if you would like. 

Second, we're going to talk to you about, , some potential new episode styles in 2024, because this is the last episode for 2023. 

And finally, I'm going to give you a little insight into the crazy life of Sean Steele and the Steeles. – How I've uprooted my life in Australia. I've moved to Europe with my wife. My sons are now spread between Australia and the UK and we're in Cyprus. And I'm going to talk to you a bit about that, but also how you can keep up to date on how that unfolds, if you would like to.


[00:01:42]
So episode 100, that means I've done a hundred episodes, which have been either interviews with Founders who scaled and some who are still scaling to inspire you, and also to give you practical wisdom from people who are in the top 5% of Founders. Like in Australia, once you pass a million dollars, you're already in the top 10%. And once you pass 10 million, you're in the top 5%. So, these are people who know what they're doing. Experts, I've done a whole bunch of interviews with experts on a whole range of areas like, strategy and marketing and sales and acquisitions and capital raising and leadership and culture and exits and all sorts of stuff, relating to scaling and the areas that I think you need to master if you're going to scale successfully. And then finally, I did a bunch of episodes, solo episodes for me, kind of tutorial style, and I tried to create a balance in the last 100 episodes. Yeah, I did 20% of the episodes as me, just talking to you directly. 40% of the episodes, were with the experts and 40% of the episodes were with the Founders, you know, the majority between 50 and 500 million in terms of the size of their businesses and some also sub 50 million still kicking ass and growing well. So, without further ado, let's get into the takeaways first.


[00:02:56]
So what are the takeaways that I'm taking out of the first hundred episodes? I mean, if you think about, that's a hundred hours’ worth of content. Like if you did nothing, but listen to this podcast back-to-back, Monday to Friday, 9 till 5 for three weeks straight and did absolutely nothing else other than maybe have some lunch, that's about how much content is in a hundred episodes. So, I'm going to massively condense what I've heard and what I've learned. Because don't forget, when I'm doing these interviews, I'm learning at the same time. I'm reflecting, I'm digesting, and I'm learning on your behalf. First of all, takeaway number one, you have to develop a strategy that helps you get clear about who you are, where you're going, who your customer is, and what you're actually going to double down on to create competitive advantage. Not everything that you're going to do, but what are the couple of things you're going to double down on. I interviewed a couple of experts on strategy specifically. Rishad Tobaccowala, who was the Head of Strategy for Publicist Group, which has more than 80,000 employees around the world. He was episode 12, had some fascinating things to say about strategy and the fact that strategy is medium term competitive advantage. That is what it is. It's about getting clear about what builds medium term competitive advantage. I couldn't agree more. Jamie Christopherson in episode 43 talked about how he actually takes companies through the process around inventing or reinvigorating their strategy. I got introduced to Jamie by Roby, from Hipages, Roby Sharon - Zipser from Hipages in episode 13, who had plateaued at about 25 mil, and had to really rethink strategy. They used Jamie as a consultant in that process and he really helped them unlock their intelligence inside their leadership team and get really clear about who they were, who their customer was, what they needed to double down on. And the next three years, they went from 25 to 50 mil after plateauing for a couple of years. So, it just shows the value of getting strategy right. Ben Thompson from Employment Hero, he was episode 42 and they are now a double unicorn. I noticed that just the other day, they passed 2 billion in valuation. He showed the impact of, again, thinking really clearly about strategy, talks about his sort of master plan that he came up with pretty early. It was simple. That's the idea, but it was also really clear and had some good, robust thinking that went into it. So that's number one. 

Number one - Develop a strategy, gets clear about who you are, where you're going, who your customer is, and what you're going to double down on to create medium term competitive advantage. 

Number two - You should always build with an exit in mind, even if you don't plan to have an exit. So, you want to be thinking about what investors want. What gives them confidence when they're looking at businesses to buy and you want to build those factors into your business so that you have maximum optionality so that you're better set up your, you know, it's easier for you to install management with less risk, it's easier for you to get capital, it's easy for you to get premium multiples if you decide to sell or you decide to take on some investment, you want it to be worth as much as possible to get a return on your effort. And the things they value, they value competitive advantage. They value the strength of your leadership team, your execution system. They value you having a high level of profitability, a scalable sales and marketing system. So, there are a bunch of episodes I've done that give you really good insights into what investors are thinking about when they're looking at businesses to buy. Mark Bryan from Pemba Capital – A private equity firm that does some incredible work in episode 14. Shawn Flynn, investment banker from Silicon Valley, episodes 47 and 52, talked about the M&A process and things to look out for and how to maximise the value of your business when you sell it and Jerome Fogel in episode 54.


[00:06:38]
And yes, by the way, I'm going to put in the show notes, all of these references, so you don't have to write them all down. But Jerome Fogel, who is a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, who talked about some of the things that you can get right and things that you can get wrong that sort of build or destroy value in a sale process. 

So, number two. Build with an exit in mind, always, regardless of whether you intend to exit or not. 

Number three - You have to level up on people. And what do I mean by that? You need at some point, particularly between like 5 and 10 mil, you need to have some people, or at least one high quality leader in your business in a key area that's going to help you level up. Someone who already knows how to get from 5 to 10 mil to 20 or 30, who's been there before, who knows how to do it, who is already self-motivated, who you don't need to manage so closely, who can drive that function, if it's sales and marketing or might be finance or who knows. But you need to find people who are already motivated, you need to enable them to succeed. You need to build your leadership confidence in setting high standards for your team and then being unafraid to challenge them and to inspire them and to enable them to achieve them. When you get one or two of those impact players into your business, they take a huge amount of pressure off you as a Founder. And the test is look around your leaders and look around the people in your business. If you are still the smartest person in the room, in all of the functional areas, and you know more than everybody else does about those areas. You are not going to get to the next stage. I hate to tell you. You are the bottleneck and until you unlock that bottleneck, you will not, you may continue growing nicely and steadily, but actually your job is going to get harder and harder and harder and it only becomes more enjoyable and it only becomes scalable if you get some people who actually know more than you in that functional area and know how to get you in that functional area to the next stage. And so we've had some great episodes on building leadership, building culture, getting the right team in place. Amy Sandler, episode 39, who talked on behalf of Radical Candor, which is a method that helps you build in your kind of cultural DNA, really direct and challenging, but you know, caring leadership conversations so that you can essentially set higher standards and hold people to them. Then I talked to Bryan Watson in episode 44. And one of the things I loved about Bryan's story is he's got a really unique way of thinking, you know, he didn't have a lot of money to go out and get really high level, C level leaders. He built a team of young, ambitious leaders who wanted autonomy and wanted to have a compressed professional development experience. I get 10 years of experience in three years and had them all very clearly aligned on a goal and did an amazing job in creating a 10x outcome in his business in South Africa. Liz Wiseman, in episode 45, she talked about impact players, who are they? What's the characteristics? How do you find them? And then how do you lead them? Because they need different style of leadership than your B players. And then Ben Handler more recently in episode 99 from Buyer's Agent Institute, which got to a million dollars a month in five years. He said very articulately, “B-players will F your business." You can fill in the blanks. B players are going to F your business. They kind of grind everything to a halt. When you are surrounded by B players, you will enjoy your job as CEO less and less and less. You've got to unlock that. You've got to get some A players or impact players, whatever you want to call them. You've got to find some, and that's going to help you unlock scalability. That's number three. 

Number four – In my personal view, acquisitions continue to be an amazing way to create value, and I think they're undervalued. And yes, that might be because you can acquire new capabilities that help serve your customers with new opportunities. It might be that you can cross sell services between these two new entities that you're pulling together. It may be primarily because you're trying to build financial value. And, you know, in the two or three years running up to a sale, you want to build as much value as you can. There is so much value in acquisitions and yes, there's a real art and a real science to selecting them, to getting the transaction right and to integrating them, but they're an amazing way to create greater scalability, greater impact, greater enterprise value. I've had a few conversations around this, but probably not enough. Nicola Fowkes in 58 and Karen Kovaleski. I'm sorry. I don't remember Karen's episode number, but I will put it in the show notes. They both got a lot of experience in doing integration. So, how do you, because all the value you've put in your spreadsheet and all your planning to decide to buy a business, it's all won and lost in the first 100 days based on how you do that integration well or not.

[00:11:13] And it makes me realise I probably need to spend a bit more time on this area, delve maybe a bit deeper into. You know, people who do buy and build strategies, how do they think about which businesses to acquire? How do they think about how to make sure they're complimentary in what ways? So, I think I'll do a bit more on that in 2024, but acquisitions remain an amazing way to create value and they're undervalued. And even if you're scared of them. That doesn't mean that they're a bad idea. It means you probably need to level up your knowledge. I think they're incredibly enjoyable. And if you do them well, incredibly valuable. 

Number five – Build a higher profit business model. And I know that's a bit contentious and you're going, well, surely, I would have already built a higher profit business model if I could, I'm not totally convinced to be frank. And I see a lot of different Founders businesses. I've spent a lot of time doing mergers and acquisitions. I've looked at many, many, many hundreds of deals. And sometimes it just smacks you in the face. Like, how did this person build a 50% EBITDA business, a 55% EBITDA business? A 45%, a 35%, a 30%? And if you have got in your mind that the best your business is going to do is 5%, 10%, 15%, all I can say is when I look at the difference between Founders who have smaller revenues, but higher profits. They're just chalk and cheese in terms of how much they enjoy their business, how relaxed they are, how much better their decision-making is, there's so much less pressure when you only have 5 to 15% of profitability, you have such limited capacity to reinvest in growth, to reinvest in better people, to reinvest in outbidding your competitors in, you know, paid customer acquisition. You've basically got less optionality and you've got more problems. You amplify your people problems, your cash constraints, everything, increases with scale. So, perhaps you've normalised that you've got this sort of 5 to 15 percent business model and you're like, Sean, that is normal in my industry. There's absolutely no way we can get to 30 % or 30 % plus. But, you know, sometimes that's actually just because you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it. You haven't really challenged yourself to think about what else could you add to your business that could be far higher in profitability than your current model. A couple of really interesting episodes on this, Patrick Gaskin from Cardly, Founder of Cardly or co-Founder of Cardly, episode 88, two people in that business, him and his co-Founder doing 3 million in revenue high levels of variable cost and therefore lots of protection on the downside. If the revenue comes off, profitability percentage still stays really strong.

[00:13:42] Ben Handler, same deal, episode 99, really high profit. A fast- growing business is using external experts to drive sales and marketing funds, and actually that business has lots of variable costs in it. Again, protects the profitability regardless of what's happening with revenue. Next a queue, I interviewed Paul and Anita, Panabianco, a previous client of mine, who, when they had their exit, the business was five years old, they got a $20 million pay check with a seven times EBITDA multiple. It was a high profit business. It was a solid growth business. It was north of 30%, and it's an impressive business. And again, plenty of money to reinvest in growth. So, I really think there's an opportunity for you to challenge yourself to think about how do I build a higher profit business model than the one I’m running today. If you got a really high level of fixed costs and very few variable costs, and you constantly have to add fixed costs to grow your revenue, there are some real challenges for you to build your business model in the current way and get real scalability, you're going to run out of cash probably pretty quickly.

[00:14:50] Okay. That's number five profitability. 

Number six - You may get, and I know lots of Founders who do an incredible job of getting to 5 to maybe 10, 11 million, something like that with relatively unsophisticated or no scalability or predictability in their customer acquisition systems, having a scalable sales and marketing system to acquire customers that's predictable, that's scalable, that you can pull levers, you can invest more money in it and know that there's going to be an outcome on the other side until you have that in place, you are not going to get to 20 million, 30 million, 50 million, whatever your goals might be. And maybe your goals aren't that big, but you know what? It's a completely underrated resource. If you've never seen a really truly scalable one, sometimes it's hard to understand, but that's an opportunity for you to get experts or consultants or an advisory board or lots of different ways to help you find those skill sets without having to go and pay 300,000 marketing lead up.

[00:15:50] So we spent a bit of time on that. We talked about sales practices in episode 29 with Tony Hughes, who is the number one guy on sales in LinkedIn and in episode 72 with Luigi Preston Enzi, who was a co-Founder of SalesIQ, and is now running the growth forum. They've got a lot of great detail in those episodes about actually like practical, how you reach out, how you engage with people, how you do particularly B2B business development for sales. Then more recently, I did three episodes with Talila Croy from Empel and their businesses all built around seven figure Founder businesses and building sales capability, how to build a sales team, how to get your sales process right. In 92, in 94 and 98, she's the first person I've ever had on three times, but it's so important when you think of… the reason I'm talking sales first is you need to get your conversion rates right first with the leads that you've got first and make sure that you have the environment set up before you start adding more salespeople, before you start pouring fuel on the marketing fire to increase your lead volume, you don't want to be spending money on more leads if you're not doing a good job of converting the ones that are already coming across your table and as you scale more leads, you're probably going to get lower lead quality than the maybe referrals you might be used to. And therefore, you have to have a really good conversion system because the leads are going to be harder to convert than everybody just referring people to you. So, you've got to get your sales right. 

Then comes Marketing. And I've done some episodes on marketing and sort of lead generation and so on. Tim Reed, who runs the Small Business, Big Marketing Podcast, was episode 37. Lots of marketing ideas and gold in there. I really enjoy, I love Tim's podcast. Definitely have a listen to it if you're looking for kind of weekly marketing inspiration, got some great and practical stuff, particularly for SMEs. John James, who was a Marketing Consultant, in episode 48, really talked about marketing positioning and how do you position your business and your offer to get cut through? I interviewed Cham Tang in episode 83 and he talked, what I really liked, he had a really simple sort of Scalable marketing system methodology, which you just called MAP, meet your ideal client, ask for their time, present your offer – MAP. That seems so simple, right? And it is simple. And that's the beauty of it is actually how do you generate opportunities to meet the ideal clients for your product? How do you ask for their time in an appropriate way that gets them interested in wanting to do so? And then how do you present them with an offer once you've understood their needs? And if there's a solution, great. You know, once you can scale that system, it seems simple, but it is simple. Then you've got something that's actually going to work for scalability. Then I interviewed Morgan Ingram, episode 95 on particularly events and video, but mostly events about how do you use events? How do you do a better job and a more unique job of events if you've got a highly face to face business development kind of industry. Now, I clearly haven't scratched the surface here on how to generate more leads. There are so many ways to do that. I'm going to have a, I think I've spent a bit more time on that in 2024 for people who want to learn more about that. 

So those are my six big takeaways for you. Let me replay those for you. And again, I'll put them in the show notes. Number one, develop a strategy that gets clear about who you are, where you're going, who your customer is, and what you're going to double down on to create competitive advantage.

[00:19:15] Number two, build with an exit in mind, always, even if you don't intend to have an exit. 

Number three, level up on people. You've got to get some impactor A players into your leadership team, even one will literally change your life as a Founder. 

Number four, acquisitions. Don't discount acquisitions if you've never done them before. They're an amazing way to create value and they are incredibly undervalued. And if you need help on that, feel free to let me know. I've got a lot of experience there. 

Number five, challenge yourself to build a higher profit business model with a minimum of 30% EBITDA. If it's not 30%, challenge yourself again, you know, think of a way that you can get your business to at least 30% so you have lots of money to reinvest in people and growth and kicking the butt of your competition.

[00:20:00] And then number six, invest the time and money in a scalable sales and marketing system so you can acquire customers in a far more predictable way because without that, no matter how good everything else is, you will really find it very difficult to scale. You have to invest the time and money into doing that at some point.

[00:20:17] Okay. So that's my big six takeaways. I hope you find that valuable. That's my super concentrated summary of a hundred episodes of things that I've learned from listening to all of these experts and Founders. 

So, the second item I had for you today was 2024. What are we going to do differently in 2024?

[00:20:35] I've been running this podcast now for two-and a bit-years, I think. And I just like to change things up. I like adventure. I like change. I don't like things to get boring and sort of grounded in how they already work. So, Let's look at some new episode styles in 2024. I'm keen to make it a bit more interactive. So, I'm thinking, and I'm thinking out loud here with you guys, and I would love your feedback, but perhaps some live advisory. So maybe somebody else does the hosting and I'm one of the advisors and I get some guest advisors, which could be a Founder, it could be an expert, and we've got a Founder who dials in, who's got some questions, and we actually do live advisory with that Founder. Now, perhaps we can make that anonymous to keep their business protected if they don't want to share their details. But that gives you a really interesting opportunity I think to hear rather than just hearing people's experience and hearing people's frameworks and some examples, let's just do it live. Let's make it into a live experience. I would like to know which experts or Founders you would actually like to hear from. So, that will be part of kind of going forward to next year. I'm really keen for you to follow me on LinkedIn because that's how I will be going out and asking people for who they want to hear from.

And I like the idea of maybe somebody else doing some of the hosting. Maybe not all the time, but I've got somebody in mind. I haven't told them yet, hopefully they'll say yes. And we'll perhaps run some live, maybe we'll do LinkedIn lives or we'll do some podcasts live, not just recorded and then published.

[00:22:02] So next year, there might be a few changes in episode style. The goal is going to remain. How do you help seven-figure Founders who haven't scaled before scale to eight-figures plus. By learning from those who've been there, learning from those who've mastered key discipline areas, and learning from me. And I think, you know, we can continue to find a balance, but I would like to innovate the episode styles a little bit. So, I would love to know your thoughts on what you would like to hear about, who you'd like to hear from, you might have been inspired by somebody else's episode styles. Please let me know, send me a direct message on LinkedIn, connect with me and DM me on there, or email me at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. I want to know what you think. 


Finally today,
the third item, an update on Cyprus. So, I'm going to give you like a short version. I'm going to explain how I'm going to sort of unpack this journey. Why Cyprus? Why am I in Europe all of a sudden? And how does this work? Well, I am wired for adventure. It is in my DNA. I grew up in a family that travelled quite a lot. We lived in Argentina and Switzerland. I got to travel a lot, you know, Europe in particular as a kid. And then, you know, you build your life, and as an adult, I got stuck into building a life. You know, I got married at 26-27, actually no, 27 was our first child. So, I guess I got married in 26, to the beautiful Anna Steele. We had kids probably earlier than most, you know, first child I was 27 and my second child I was 30. So, at 45, I've now got an 18 year old and a 15 year old, and we're heading towards the empty nesting stage. And I always knew that by 50, I wanted to be traveling Europe, and the world more frequently. And, you know, when you travel from Australia, it's not like you can't do it, but you often have to make them like two-week trips and three-week trips and six-week trips and eight-week trips because it's a big amount of travel. It's long flights and I want it to be able to pop. I want to be able to hop around, you know, and do four-day weekends and three-day weekends and week-long trips and be able to work out of different countries and spend time in those countries and learn different languages far more fluently. And I knew I always wanted to do that once my boys were up and out of home. And once they were both past the age of 18. However, 18 months ago in the middle of 2022, my oldest son, Lockie, who's 18 now was thinking he was going to go and do his university study in Germany. And I thought, huh, that's interesting. And my 15-year-old son, Sebastian went on holiday to the UK with his mom, Anna. And he came back and told us that he was really keen to go to boarding school in the UK. Why? Well, both he and Lockie are British citizens, he's probably got an unexpressed sort of English part of him. We've got family there, Anna’s parents, you know, brothers, cousins. And we thought, well, if he wants to go to boarding school, and we thought actually it would be a good schooling environment for him, well that means we could accelerate the Europe plans. So, you know, as the Steeles typically do, we explore the idea, we decided it was possible. Six weeks later, we did a six week trip to Europe, we did a bit of a reconnaissance trip. We spent time six weeks in Cyprus. We came back and went – yep, we can do this. It's going to work. So, we literally came home late in late in 2022, rehomed the dog, sold the house, sold the investment properties, sold the furniture, sold everything, wrapped up the companies, and literally ended up one week ago from, oh, maybe a week and a half ago from now with 90 kilos of luggage, like that's literally all we had left. Everything was gone, 90 kilos of luggage between Anna and I, and we're now rebuilding a new home in Cyprus. And why Cyprus? Everyone goes – Well, why Cyprus?

[00:25:46] And that's a completely fair question. It's not a place that typically Aussies go very often, but it has lots of great reasons. There are heaps of expats and digital nomads here. Lots of people who come to Cyprus. Why? Because it's got the best, the greatest amount of sunshine in Europe. It's a warm place. It's English speaking. It's close to everything in Europe. It's part of the EU. It's got a good path to residency and potentially a second citizenship. If we wanted to, it's got great food. It's got a great tax environment for company owners. It's easy to travel to the UK. We liked the people. It was easy to make friends. It's got a good time zone for my advisory boards with Founders that I support in Australia. So it was kind of why not, and you know, some think that we're absolutely crazy and they're probably right, but here we are, one week in, getting our feet on the ground, you know, found a place to live, got an office set up in a great environment and I haven't quite figured out, I mean, I have lots of people wanting to sort of stay on this journey with us because of course, for some people it's a bit mad, you know, you're moving halfway across the other side of the world. There are hardly any Aussies here. And we're just building this new life in this amazing new place. , and lots of people are interested in that journey. Maybe they've thought about doing something like that in their lives. Wondering how you do it. How does that work from a company perspective? How does it work from a personal perspective? How do you make friends? All that sort of stuff. What are all the pros and cons? Because there's not all going to be pros. There's always going to be cons. So, what I decided to do, having gone out on Facebook and people telling me they'd love to follow along with a blog or something, I'm going to build a sub stack. If you haven't heard of sub stack, it's basically a blog, you just sign up with your email. And every time I do a post, it lets you know. And on that, I can do audio and video and pictures and whatever. So, I think probably that's the way I'm going to share it. I'm sort of kind of talking live here. What I'd suggest you do, if you would like to follow along with that journey, please follow me on LinkedIn. I will let people know the Substack, you know, every time I do a post, I'll probably pop that on LinkedIn as well and just provide a link back to Substack. And then you can just follow me on Substack and it will sign your email up. And every time I post, it will just let you know. So, if you'd like to follow along with that journey, then please join me on Substack or join me on LinkedIn and I'll let you know when Substack is up and running sometime in December, 23.

[00:27:58] So that is Episode 100. And for those of you who've been listening for a long time, I am massively grateful. I do not do this podcast for me. I originally did it because I wanted my clients in particular to be able to hear the wisdom of other people who've done what they're trying to do from different perspectives, other than mine, Founders who scale, everyone's got different perspectives and it's great to be able to sort of pick and choose the stuff that works best for you and not just to hear it from me. And I've massively enjoyed putting it together, but it does take a lot of work. It does take a lot of work and it's not cheap either. I have a team that are around this podcast. So, I want to say a huge thanks to Dave. Dave is our Production Manager. He does all the audio and video work. He does the little videos on LinkedIn primarily. And Dave, you are just so loyal and so wonderful and you do an excellent job. And if anyone is wanting to do a podcast and need someone to do the audio and video, please let me know. And I'll pass on Dave's details. He'd be happy to take on some more work. It's not a full-time role. Elliot and Seher, who help out on the copywriting, the transcriptions and stuff. I really appreciate your work. You've been supporting me for a really long time now, and that's massively helpful to me. And then finally, yeah, to everybody who's listening to takes the time to dial in. The one thing that you can do to help me, I guess as a kind of reward for me, you know, I put a lot of effort and a lot of time into this podcast, and I hope it really is valuable for you. The best thing you can do for me is to like it and share it, you know, like it on whatever podcast player you're doing, rate it and review it, you know, stick a five-stars or whatever. If you like it or give me less and give me some feedback. If you don't think it's any good and share it. Share any episodes that you like with anyone that you know, because the sharing really drives the algorithms which just helps more people get access to it. You know, I don't do the podcast because it's a commercial entity. There's no payment for the podcast or anything like that. I do it because I actually really enjoy it. And I think it's valuable for community of seven-figure Founders trying to scale to eight plus, I think it's a good and effective mechanism. So, I'm going to keep doing it, but I'm going to change it up a little bit. So, stay tuned for that. This is the last episode for 2023. I'll be back at some point, probably later on in January, 2024. So please, the most important thing you can do is just hit the subscribe button in your podcast player and that way you'll get notified when the next episode comes out and follow me on LinkedIn and anytime I do a post for a podcast, you'll get notified on LinkedIn. Hopefully. Okay, episode 100 – wrapped up and done. Can't wait for holidays. Can't wait to see my 15-year-old son who I haven't seen for three months, and I'm going to see him in a week's time, so I’m very excited about that. Huge thank you to all of you and I will see you in 2024.

About Sean Steele

Sean has led several education businesses through various growth stages including 0-3m, 1-6m, 3-50m and 80m-120m. He's evaluated over 200 M&A deals and integrated or started 7 brands within larger structures since 2012. Sean's experience in building the foundations of organisations to enable scale uniquely positions him to host the ScaleUps podcast.


If you’re enjoying the Scale Ups podcast, subscribe, rate and review.

Listen on Google Podcast
Listen on Apple Podcast
Leave a Review

Follow, Watch or Listen

Terms   Contact    Pod

Privacy   Blog    © ScaleHQ 2023

Terms   Contact   Pod

Privacy   Blog   © ScaleHQ 2023

Follow, Watch or Listen