Scale To Win with Dominic Monkhouse

You can run a good business, look after your customers and still find every sale harder than the last.

Your first instinct might be to improve the marketing. More leads. A tighter funnel. A better sales process. But what if the problem is that customers can get something much like your offer almost anywhere?

In this episode of Scale to Win, Dominic Monkhouse talks with Alex MH Smith of Basic Arts about why being competent may no longer be enough. Alex argues that crowded markets are making competitive advantage a necessity for businesses that previously survived quite comfortably without it.

They don’t agree on everything. Dominic challenges Alex on whether successful businesses really need a deliberate strategy, and whether the examples we celebrate tell the whole story. Together, they explore the difference between running your business well and giving customers a compelling reason to choose it.

The practical question running through the conversation: what do you offer that your customers value and your competitors don’t?

In this episode

Why a plan isn’t necessarily a strategy. Allocating people, money and time doesn’t automatically give you an advantage.

Why more leads can leave the real problem untouched. Better marketing can amplify an offer, but it cannot make an interchangeable business distinctive.

Why solving a customer problem isn’t the whole answer. Alex explains why customers also buy things they want, enjoy or aspire to.

What Five Guys reveals about focus. Why Alex sees its limited menu as an advantage rather than a missed opportunity.

What to do when competitors copy you. How a clear position helps you decide which changes strengthen your business and which dilute it.

How to start finding your own advantage. Look for the valuable difference already present in your business, then make deliberate choices around it.

Chapters

00:00 Why average businesses are starting to struggle

01:11 Meet Alex MH Smith

08:57 Strategy versus planning

11:13 What makes a strategy successful?

14:20 Why “average” may no longer be enough

17:02 Competitive advantage and the limits of lead generation

25:12 Do customers only buy solutions to problems?

29:17 Five Guys, focus and differentiation

36:57 What happens when competitors copy you?

41:34 Finding the valuable difference in your business

45:37 Putting strategic thinking into practice

47:48 Where to find Alex

Your next step

Before spending more on lead generation, ask yourself:

If your business disappeared tomorrow, what would your customers struggle to replace?

If the answer is unclear, that deserves your attention before the next marketing campaign.

Links and credits

Guest: Alex MH Smith, Basic Arts

Host: Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company

Podcast: Scale to Win with Dominic Monkhouse

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Steve Sharp has bought 45 accountancy firms in 17 years. His view? The day the deal completes, you're 10% of the way there.
Steve is founder and CEO of Nuvo, the fastest growing firm in the UK accountancy top 100.
£35m revenue, just over 400 people, 149% growth in a single year. It took him 20 years to get to £5m.
It took 3 more to get to £35m.
We get into why buying a business is the easy bit, why he's never made a redundancy in 22 years despite 45 acquisitions, what happened when he moved 100 people onto a four-day week, and the day he went from the biggest fee earner in the business to its biggest overhead.
If your growth plan is "buy a few more of them", watch this before you sign anything.
This episode's in partnership with CEOfriend. Its CFO advisor reads your P&L and your forecast, runs the scenarios and shows you where the cash gap is while you can still close it. First month free with code STWTRIAL:

Leaving Goldman Sachs to join a four-person startup burning cash sounds like delusion. Oliver Cummings did it anyway - and built Nurole into an advisory platform of 60,000 board members that has helped 4,000 organisations hire chairs, trustees and non-executives.

In this conversation, Oliver joins Dominic to unpick why most boards destroy value instead of creating it, why founders overvalue advice and starve themselves of accountability, and what ten years of hiring mistakes taught him about the limits of intellect.

Along the way, Oliver shares the compounding arithmetic that should produce billionaire families (and why almost nobody lets it run), the board question that saved Moonpig from bankruptcy, and the sobering reality of the "18 summers" rule.

The question for every scaling founder: is your board fire insurance that only works when there is no fire, or are they holding you to account on the decisions that actually matter?

In this episode

Leaving Goldman for a four-person startup. Why Oliver walked away from private equity after a decade at Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and BXR, convinced he was "a bit of a fraud as an investor" until he proved he could build something real.

The £72k compounding lesson. £72,565.72 invested at 10% annual compound growth over 100 years becomes £1 billion. Why aren't there billionaire families everywhere? Because almost nobody can stomach leaving compounding alone without cashing out for a kitchen extension.

Overvaluing advice, undervaluing accountability. Why the silver bullet advice founders chase rarely works, and why the discipline of regular accountability - like a personal trainer for your strategy - delivers the real leverage.

The £1 question that saved Moonpig. How a simple pricing question from a board member transformed Nick Jenkins' business when it was on the brink of going bust.

"Turns out no one is any good at hiring." What Oliver learned after getting recruitment wrong left, right and centre - and why candidates who ace cognitive tests can still lack the drive and resilience an early-stage company needs.

The 18 summers rule. Why 96% of the time you will ever spend with your children happens before they turn 18, and what that means for how you allocate your weeks right now.

Chapters

00:07 Why Oliver left private equity for a four-person startup

01:19 Building Nurole: 60,000 experts and 4,000 organisations

03:52 What boards actually do: strategy versus oversight

05:00 Fire insurance that only works when there is no fire

08:14 The power of compounding: why £72k should make a billionaire family

13:00 The advice trap and the £1 question that saved Moonpig

16:56 Leaving Goldman Sachs and overcoming the investor fraud feeling

19:42 From four people to 10,000 invoices: the reality of startup flywheels

36:03 Why everyone is bad at hiring: cognitive ability versus resilience

40:00 Autonomy, mastery and purpose in growing teams

43:06 18 summers: the arithmetic of time with family

Your next step

If you find yourself chasing clever advice rather than sticking to disciplined execution, the problem is rarely strategy. It is accountability. Build the rhythm that forces you to face the numbers every month - whether through a coach, a chair, or a board that actually challenges you.

Want to build that discipline into your executive habits? Join Dominic's free 33-day email course for scale-up CEOs:

Become a Better Leader in 33 Days

Links and credits

Guest: Oliver Cummings, CEO of Nurole and host of Enter the Boardroom

Host: Dominic Monkhouse

Produced by Monkhouse & Company

You can build the product, raise the money and still spend a decade without the one person who makes customers care.

That is the story behind this episode's title. Hamish Grierson, co-founder of the health-testing company Thriva, joins Dominic to talk about what ten years of running a venture-backed health business actually taught him - including the hire he wishes he had made in year one, and has just made now.

Hamish is candid about the cost of bad fundraising advice (he pitched 123 investors before learning better), why speed is the thing customers thank you for, and why he believes venture capital is quietly killing a whole tier of perfectly good businesses.

The question at the heart of it: have you hired the person whose job is making people feel something about what you built?

In this episode

Why speed beats almost everything else. Thriva doesn't market speed, but it shows up in 90% of customer reviews - because fast results are what relieves the anxiety of waiting.

The "low beams" lesson. Being first meant two years of running through a room of low beams, hitting your head on every one - and that infrastructure became the moat.

Why venture capital is killing innovation. Founders sitting on £5m and £10m turnover opportunities don't start at all, because a VC asks "is this a unicorn?" Hamish calls that tragic.

The £10m maths. Dominic's arithmetic: pay yourself £750,000 a year from 50 to 90 and you need to sell your business for a net £10 million.

Shotgun versus rifle. How to raise money without letting 120 unqualified investors tear your business apart for fun.

The hire itself. A Director of Product Marketing - someone who talks to emotion, not practicality. Mark starts next Monday, ten years late.

Where next. Germany, because North America is saturated and Europe is white space.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

05:00 Speed relieves anxiety - 90% of reviews mention it

07:02 Being first: two years of low beams

08:09 More people in the pub at lunchtime

10:48 Why venture capital is killing innovation

12:05 The unicorn question that stops founders starting

13:30 The £750k-a-year, £10m-exit maths

15:45 Shotgun versus rifle: how not to raise money

19:47 Why "fall in love with the product" is bad advice

22:22 The hire we made 10 years too late

25:13 Director of Product Marketing - what that means

26:20 Next market: Germany and European white space

Your next step

Ask yourself: who in your business is responsible for making customers feel something? If the answer is "the founders, sort of, when they have time", that's the gap Hamish lived with for a decade.

Links and credits

Guest: Hamish Grierson, co-founder of Thriva

Host: Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company

Podcast: Scale to Win with Dominic Monkhouse

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Whenever a struggling founder asks James Ashford for help, he sends back the same voice note: "Who is the high performer you need to fire, and why haven't you?" Invariably, they know exactly who it is.

James built software company GoProposal and led it to an eight-figure sale to Sage. In this punchy, no-holds-barred conversation, he joins Dominic to confront the dirty secrets of scale-up leadership: why founders cling to toxic high performers, why sales commission schemes corrupt good companies, and why so many CEOs secretly want to remain the bottleneck.

Along the way, James reflects on his own journey from "rotten" accidental diminisher to disciplined leader, the reason high-performance sports teams outperform polite corporate families, and the four habits that keep leaders grounded.

The question every scaling CEO must face: who in your business are you protecting right now out of fear, habit or loyalty - and what is that silence costing the rest of your team?

In this episode

"Sack the high-performing dickhead." Why almost every stalled business is harbouring one brilliant individual whose toxic behaviour is quietly destroying culture, trust and momentum.

Why sales bonuses destroy customer trust. The moment you put a commission scheme in place, your sales team starts acting in their own interest instead of the customer's. Why selling must be treated as a service, not a transaction.

The accidental diminisher. What happened when James scored himself against Liz Wiseman's *Multipliers* framework - and realised he was inadvertently diminishing his team across all six leadership disciplines.

Why founders secretly crave being the bottleneck. Delegating sounds great in theory, but many founders resist stepping back because deep down they crave the significance of being needed for every decision.

Why the E-Myth process obsession is nonsense. Why documenting every procedure in your company is a trap, and why you should focus ruthlessly on the single operational constraint holding you back right now.

Radical candour versus polite silence. Why high-performance teams give feedback in the moment - like footballers on the pitch - instead of saving up grievances for annual appraisals.

Chapters

01:05 Failing multiple times before building an eight-figure business

02:29 The question for struggling founders: who do you need to sack?

06:21 Business partner alignment: directional clarity versus identical thinking

17:22 The Theory of Constraints: why process-mapping everything is a trap

21:15 Why commission schemes misalign sales teams and customers

26:01 The accidental diminisher: scoring yourself on the Multipliers framework

30:00 The founder bottleneck: why CEOs resist true delegation

33:05 Radical candour: why high-performing sports teams beat "nice" corporate cultures

42:12 Why your company is a sports team, not a family

47:37 The Four Agreements: self-awareness and leadership discipline

Your next step

Protecting a toxic employee is never an act of kindness. It is an act of avoidance that punishes your best people. If there is a conversation you have been putting off for months, having it this week will immediately lift the energy of your entire executive team.

Ready to build the executive habits that eliminate operational bottlenecks? Join Dominic's free 33-day email course:

Become a Better Leader in 33 Days

Links and credits

Guest: James Ashford, founder of GoProposal and author

Host: Dominic Monkhouse

Produced by Monkhouse & Company