The inspiration behind “Scaling Up”
Scaling a business is hard. Very few succeed to even navigate their way through startup land, and many that do hit a wall at some stage. Some companies though, find a way to continue to grow year on year, and in doing so become incredibly successful and durable businesses
I set out on a mission with this podcast to discover what the secret sauce was of these successful founders and CEOs who have built these incredible businesses with the purpose to hopefully inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.
What became apparent to me though when recording the podcast, the more I realised the lessons drawn from their experiences were far more reaching than just the business community — they were lessons in belief, resilience and the power of great teams. I felt like they were living in my previous world of high performance sport as I was now theirs.
Investing and entrepreneurship had always been a huge passion of mine — I bought my first shares at 9, grew up in a family that would fight over the business section of the newspaper (which also contained the sport on the back so was in very high demand!!) and in a sense I lived in a parallel universe of sport and business. This led me after my time in sport came to an end to begin a new career at TDM Growth Partners, who have kindly let me explore this podcast project.
My time in elite sport above all else gave me a deep domain expertise into the psychology of performance and the more and more I am immersed in the business world and spend time with amazing founders and executives, the more I have realised they are too playing a form of elite team sport, and the winning cultures they are building are akin to a sports team building a dynasty — their team’s culture is often their most durable competitive advantage. Sporting team’s unlike businesses have such turnover of ‘staff’ week in and week out, the overarching mission and values of the team has to speak for itself, the players young and old are deeply reliant on each other to deliver consistent results.
I hope you enjoy listening to some of Australia’s and the world’s best and brightest give an insight into their success.
The whole podcast can be found on all podcast platforms including Spotify (below is my favourite episode of Series 2, Rick Stollmeyer) and Apple Podcasts.
