The Founder Files

You can have the best offering and thousands of ideas for the future, but it isn’t worth much without backing your objectives with relevant data.So, how can you measure success for your business? How do you plan your next tangible milestones to reach? How do you keep track of your progress?Ayanda Mtanyana, CEO and Co-founder of Data Innovators, explains how to use human-centric data science to create meaningful insights for the scalability of your business.Learn about how he’s been leveraging Data-Driven Decision Making to grow his Pan-African business and serve a greater purpose within the South African education system.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Once you’ve enjoyed the episode, support the podcast for FREE:Follow The Founder Files 🔔Leave a review on Apple PodcastShare it on Linkedin--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

You can have the best quality product, the best packaged service, the greatest idea ever, it isn’t worth much without people ready to buy it.So, how do you plant your flag in your target market’s mind? How do you elevate your brand to become top of mind? How do you create demand for your offering?Ditch your marketing hacks now and listen to the pieces of advice Ross Munro Williams, CEO of Inversion Agency, has for you today.Learn about how he’s doubled his business’s growth and preserved his mental health after defining what his market actually needs and who he wanted to work with.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Once you’ve enjoyed the episode, support the podcast for FREE:Follow The Founder Files 🔔Leave a review on Apple PodcastShare it on Linkedin--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Change is uncomfortable, especially when it’s imposed on you.The pandemic has drastically changed our ways to socialise, share experiences and consume. How does a business adapt itself to this new landscape? How to engage with your audience when in-person events have become difficult to run?To answer our questions, we invited Dillon Jearey, the Founder of Kilowatt. Kilowatt is a South African specialist in technical equipment to revolutionise the event industry into powerful and unique experiences, both online and in-person.As the founder of a scaling business, Dillon shares his journey from starting a company with a terrible business plan to successfully adapting its offer to a changing market post-pandemic.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Once you’ve enjoyed the episode, support the podcast for FREE:Follow The Founder Files 🔔Leave a review on Apple PodcastShare it on Linkedin--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

When working from the office or from home, we develop sedentary behaviour that leads to many health issues, impacts our productivity and decreases our overall well-being. In South Africa, most employees don’t meet the WHO recommended activity guidelines of 150 minutes of exercise per week. How to approach health and well-being in the workplace? To answer our questions, we invited Chris Brucchausen, the CEO and Founder of Strove. Strove is an employee well-being platform with a primary focus on helping companies improve the physical and mental health of their workforce.As an athlete and founder of a scaling business, Chris shares his own lessons about defining and showing resilience, enhancing social inclusion and creating a healthier society from home to the office.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Once you’ve enjoyed the episode, support the podcast for FREE:Follow The Founder Files 🔔Leave a review on Apple PodcastShare it on LinkedinThis episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Market Positioning, Competitive Advantages and Customer Experience - and in that order. These are the three pillars that make generating and converting leads significantly easier, which in turn provides the engine for your scalability. This week we speak to Brett Perlstein, the CEO and Founder of SearchKings Africa. SearchKings is a Premier Google Partner that specialises in Google Ads and their main value proposition is to help businesses generate more revenue with a focus on generating greater quantities of leads of a higher quality. Combining Brett's expertise as a Chartered Accountant, a Google Ads expert and the Founder of a scaling business, he provides practical insight into how his own lessons about defining the identity of his business have led to better returns for himself, his team and his clients.Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Working on your culture is not the same as doing team-building events or social engagements like after-work drinks. These are connected, but culture is truly the collective behaviour of the people within your organisation. Now this is an inherently intangible topic and can be really complex or even "impractical" for certain people, but the simplest way to understand and unpack culture is to focus on two main things: values and behaviour. The most important point though is that if it's not translated into behaviour, then it's just talking and not culture. These are the insights discussed with Helene Smuts, the Founder of Credo Growth, a people development company that helps entrepreneurs define their values and operationalise them in their teams to create real culture development. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Building a business is more complex than just having and selling a product or service. The first step towards having a business is to make sure that you're well positioned in the market so that your target customers know that you can address their need(s) and/or solve their problem(s). The simplest way to do this is to find out why your target customers DON'T want to buy from you so you can understand their perspectives, objections and real needs in more detail.This simple yet profound piece of advice comes from Elan Lea, the Founder and CEO of TechZoo Corporation, a company that has brought Nagging Panda to the market. Nagging Panda is a B2B offering that automatically follows up on quotes and debt collection for you, so you don't have to worry about it. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to follow and rate the podcast!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

What does scaling a business actually mean? How do you know that your business is getting ready to scale and you're not just on a growth curve? These are questions we ponder with Rob Nichol, the Founder and CEO of Centr. (an off-site monitoring and surveillance company). The difference for him is that he can see a "hockey-stick" effect in his revenue growth. He's also confident he has problem-solution fit within his current market and he's looking to expand into new markets. The other main indicator is that the oscillation of sales one week and operations the next (a common problem for many start-ups) is starting to flatten out. Right now, his priorities are simplifying communication, creating useful feedback loops for information in the business and empowering his management team to start taking on more responsibility. If you want a practical case of what scaling looks like, then this is the episode for you.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This podcast is brought to you by Metavolve. We help entrepreneurs structure their businesses for growth. We take the chaos out of scaling businesses by turning entrepreneurial intuition into aligned and committed leadership teams with clear strategic direction. We optimise the execution of strategy by helping people adapt to the inevitable change that strategy creates. Working with us to define or execute your strategy means you get access to experienced experts in business strategy and organisational psychology. You get the benefit of a blend of people-centric and commercial perspectives that can understand your context from every angle. And you get the benefit of not being dependent on us for the long term because we share our knowledge and tools with your people to improve their ability to solve future problems. To get in touch with one of our experts, head over to our website. If you would like to get in touch with our host, Cameron Coutts, then you can connect with him on LinkedIn.This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!

Why should the Founder of a B2B business care about their personal brand on LinkedIn? Surely the brand of the company is more important than the brand of the Founder?Yes and no. The yes part is that you want the company brand to become bigger and more encompassing than your personal brand within your target market, but that's relevant when you're a scale-up not a start-up. When you're a start-up, most people don't contact "your business" they contact you. This means that the more powerful your personal brand is, the more your key stakeholders know who you are, what you do, what you don't do and what they're talking to you about. It makes your sales cycles shorter and increases the likelihood of closing deals. This is incredibly useful when you're still working in the business and it helps achieve the main goals of a start-up - getting enough cash to survive and enough market fit to grow. These are the realisations we had with Jason Luboyera - the Founder and CEO of 360 DigiSales. 360 DigiSales specialises in personal branding and content creation for the Founders of B2B businesses with the main goal of helping to generate inbound leads.Tune in to find out more about personal branding; don't forget to subscribe and enjoy!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by Metavolve. Metavolve is a team of focused experts who want scaling entrepreneurs like you to succeed 👉 contact our team Do you have a scaling business and valuable insights about your industry? Be our next guest!