Scale To Win with Dominic Monkhouse

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:

In this episode, James shares his challenging beliefs about sales (selling is service, not commission-driven), hiring (fire high performers who are dickheads), business problems (everything is connected—you might think you have a sales problem when it's really a marketing problem), and alignment (you've got to be aligned with your significant other first, or you can't build the life you want). He also reveals his journey from being an "accidental diminisher" of his team to understanding that his need for significance was making him the bottleneck, uses his grandmother's fruitcake recipe as a metaphor for why business owners don't delegate, explains the difference between paying for performance (waiters and tips—doesn't work) vs paying good salary (the restaurant owner who tips upfront gets great service), and shares why Mark Garwood's 10-year journey to a £5M contract that doubled to £10M annually proves that sales without commission works.

What you'll learn:

💼 Selling is in the service of others (be willing to say "don't buy from us")

💰 Don't pay sales commission (85% of salespeople don't hit quota anyway—data shows it doesn't work)

🔥 Sack the dickheads, even high performers (they'll poison your culture regardless of numbers)

📊 Everything in business is connected (sales problem might be a marketing or business development problem)

🧠 The accidental diminisher (you're scoring highly on all six ways to diminish your team)

👵 Your grandmother's fruitcake (why business owners won't delegate—need for significance)

🎯 Set the standards, inspect what you expect (granular playbooks + inspection processes)

📞 Mark Garwood's 10-year deal (best salesman he knows, took decade to land £5M contract, doubled to £10M in 2 years)

Book recommendations:

Multipliers (Accidental Diminishers) - Liz Wiseman - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multipliers-Best-Leaders-People-Think/dp/0061766879

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0062390007

The Four Agreements - Miguel Ruiz - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Agreements-Practical-Guide-Personal-Freedom/dp/1878424319

James Ashford is an entrepreneur, consultant, and speaker who failed many times before building a software business that ran without him and sold to Sage for an eight-figure exit within five years of starting. His "Go Proposal" software was designed to solve a specific problem he saw in sales: the proposal sitting in the client's inbox, disappearing, never being reviewed. He built it so proposals could be created, accepted, and paid for during the meeting itself. That business took him through a rigorous exit process and gave him the clarity he needed to step back from being the constant rescuer and bottleneck in his own business.

Now he works with business owners and consults on the psychological and operational foundations of sustainable businesses. He's most known for his contrarian beliefs about commission, culture, and what actually drives business growth—which is rarely what people think.

Business leaders need the greatest awareness of themselves. Your belief system shapes everything. The psychology underneath is what actually drives business success, not the tactics or strategies.

Connect with James Ashford - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesashford/

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
01:14 James Ashford introduces his entrepreneurial journey
02:38 Importance of firing disruptive high performers
04:11 Alignment with significant other crucial for peace
07:54 Balancing love for business with family expectations
10:58 Cultural norms and their influence on business
13:45 Overcoming limiting beliefs in scaling a business
19:10 Questioning the effectiveness of sales commissions
21:09 Rethinking sales strategies and customer trust
25:18 Avoiding accidental diminishment of the team
32:28 Importance of radical truthfulness in high-performance teams
37:45 Building trust through honesty and psychological safety
41:51 Handling resistance to change and truthfulness in business
44:28 Recommendations on business books and personal development

In this episode, Nikola reveals his contrarian belief that AI can be better than humans at customer service (not instead of humans, they'll do very different work), why he spent two hours on the phone with Vodafone when he got their confirmation email with someone else's name on it (and why that's not really about AI or humans), why they built a "token leaderboard" internally to track which AI tools they're using most, why junior developers will definitely beat senior ones at learning these tools (plasticity just goes down as you age), how AI gives him superpowers as a CEO (a chief of staff reminding him he promised something 4 days ago), and why their business model is "Rolls Royce for large enterprises, BMW for everyone else." He also shares his journey from a Serbian family to the University of Cambridge, how his PhD supervisor convinced him not to do a PowerPoint job at McKinsey, and why he ended up founding a voice AI company instead of working in finance (he wanted to be "a proper monkey" as well as a PowerPoint monkey, in his words).

What you'll learn:

🤖 AI can be substantially better at customer service (humans already lost their role long ago in most companies)

📞 The Vodafone example: edge cases, six different humans bouncing you around, why most companies lack taxonomy of failures

💼 Rolls Royce + BMW model (premium high-touch implementation + self-serve platform for SMBs)

🧠 Plasticity matters: junior devs will beat senior ones at learning AI tools (nature's law—ability to learn new things decreases with age)

⚡ AI superpowers for CEOs (chief of staff reminding you of commitments, transcription of meetings, Slack tracking)

🎯 Why Google can't compete (they care about ads and compute use, not customer service—you go down their priority list)

📊 "Token leaderboard" to track which AI tools you're using most

🏢 From consulting motion + tech to becoming a platform business

About the Guest:

Nikola Mrkšić is CEO and co-founder of Poly AI, a Series D company building voice AI agents for enterprise customer service. The company is a spin-out from the University of Cambridge where Nikola met his co-founders and the whole senior research team. They'd all worked on building really good voice agents for their professional and academic lives. The business started with an idea to prove voice technology can be a good thing in people's lives, not just "that pesky thing that gets you to not speak to a human when you really want to speak to a human."

Connect with Nikola Mrkšić - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-mrksic/

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Sign up to receive our weekly Scale To Win newsletter:

https://subscribe.monkhouseandcompany.com

Follow Dominic on LinkedIn:

https://linkedin.com/in/dominicmonkhouse

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction
01:17 Series D company background and voice technology focus
02:33 AI surpassing human customer service capabilities
05:18 Personal story of frustration with customer service
08:07 Successful AI implementations in hospitality and finance
10:58 AI handling sensitive customer service cases
13:16 Broad societal changes due to AI integration
15:00 Impact of AI on workplace efficiency and team dynamics
19:30 Young people naturally adapting to AI tools
23:30 Discussion on younger generations and AI fluency
24:46 AI improving individual weaknesses in the workplace
29:10 Transition of Poly.ai to a more platform-based model
33:01 Challenges of scaling B2B SaaS in different markets
36:01 Immigrant perspective in building successful companies
40:08 Nikola's educational journey and serendipitous career path
48:21 Competitive position against major tech companies