Nobody warns founders how hard hiring really is

No, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Yep. Great question. So, about four years ago. So in twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty three, kind of around that time, and basically I had spent my whole career in B2B sales. I'd worked as an individual contributor, I'd worked in strategy, I'd worked in leadership, and I'd always worked for founder led businesses, and seen them grow, you know, to the millions. But re reached a point I was with an ed tech company. we had kind of really successful growth. And I just reached a point where actually I was, if I'm honest, I was got a I got a bit bored. we were in the kind of day-to-day running of the business. and actually what I like is the the growth and the building stages. so I set up my own sales consultancy called Bright Evolve to work with founders and help them grow their business. and we've spent the last four years four years doing that for all manner of businesses in the UK and in the US.

Yeah, our our ideal customer is really a founder, a founder-led business. And it can be a founder or founders, where they have had some success, they have grown a business, they have proven they have a a service or a product offering they can sell, but they're also very happy to admit that they're not the sales or commercial expert. They're happy to hold their hands up and say what they kind of, you know, need some help with. and typically at the point we start working with them, and that can be anything from I don't know, a hundred K turnover all the way through to, you know, five, ten million turnover. but there is a point in their journey where they're scratching their head going, How do I grow this business beyond me and the immediate team we have here?

I think the problem is for founders, there is so much you can do. And the biggest problem I see with founders is this kind of shiny object syndrome, right? So they will rather than doubling down on something they've always done really well, they will actually go after the next exciting thing and the next exciting thing. And partly that's by their very nature, what makes them great. They're entrepreneurs, they're founders, they see the opportunity and they run at it. What we spend a lot of time doing is really working with them to go, right, where are the opportunities in front of you based on what you've already done and how we double down on that? and how do we build a process around that? How do we build the people around that? How do we make that repeatable and scalable so that you as the founder can go off and be the entrepreneur, go and find the next exciting thing, go and do that, but be confident that when you do that, there is a business in place which is there to deliver on what you've already done really well.

Yeah, we well look, we are big advocates of AI. I encourage all the team at Bright Involved to really just kind of, you know, spend a day a week figuring out how you can use AI in your job to make you more effective. and come back to me and report on what you think you should do and whether we should do that across the team. So we are big advocates of it. what's interesting is we use that and I think like a lot of businesses, we're using AI to make ourselves more efficient and more effective. What I'm a big advocate for from the sales perspective is not using it to replace the humans in that kind of sales process, basically. You know, if you think if you are a founder led business, and I've seen unfortunately more than one organization make this mistake, they have all their success with founder led sales, you know, and founder led sales will always be incredibly effective because nobody is going to be as passionate about your business and your product as you, as the founder. But then they want to scale and they want to grow. And hiring salespeople isn't fun, isn't hard. We do a lot of it. It's not that's not kind of most pleasant. but when you find a great one, it's amazing. But the easier route is okay, how do I use AI to automate what I'm doing on a kind of outreach perspective, you know, to capture notes, et cetera, et cetera. And we see people too quick to jump from founder-led sales to that kind of use of AI in the sales process. They lose the human connection. They lose everything that made them effective to begin with. and they have to then kind of try and recover from that. So, you know, I'm definitely a big advocate for AI. I think there's a like some really great, you know, great use cases of it across various industries. But when it comes to sales and commercial growth, you cannot replace the human connection.

Yeah. Yeah. We see that a lot.

Yeah, that's that's exactly what you can call it. And I'm glad that you look at it through the client journey lens, because again, not enough people do that. like any good sales organization, we always go on a period of discovery, basically. So we will work with the founders that contact us, we will ask them discovery questions, and what we're really trying to find out is what is important to them. You know, why why do they want to grow? What does that look like for them? What are they measuring that success on? so that we can really give an honest approach. view on whether we can help them or not basically. Our the from there, the first stage of working with Bright Evolve is we will we will run a sales diagnostic. So that's a paid for activity. And we will run a half day diagnostic with any business that we work with where we will assess your business against six pillars of growth. And for any founders listening, that's a really important thing to think about. We don't just look at can we get more leads and fill the funnel. We look at everything from their customer journey and their internal bro process to really make sure that they're we're taking a holistic view of their sales organization. So before we start working with any client, that that kind of discovery diagnostic is an absolute that's the only bit of our process that we don't budge on. We do that with every client we work with.

Yeah, so what we've designed is we've done designed a series of questions against each pillar and we go through the diagnostic and that's how we determine whether where their kind of hot spots are, but also where their blind spots are as well. the pillars are really straightforward. your go-to-market strategy, your commercial essentials, which is everything around your pricing and how you contract, your processes, your systems and tools, your people and your structure and your culture. and then finally your performance metrics. What are you even measuring basically? and we will basically run through this process where we assess everybody against those six pillars. and that then allows us allows us to build a really holistic plan which says here's where you are now, and in three phases, this is what you need to do. Phase one, here's how you get more profitable, phase two, here's how you make that repeatable, and phase three, here's how you make that scalable.

Yeah, that's a really great question. one that comes up all the time is that organizations aren't clear enough on the problems they solve and for whom they are trying to sell to everybody, right? And the general kind of piece of feedback I I'm always giving to people is just because you could sell to everybody doesn't mean you should. All right. So your product could solve a problem for a bank, a hospital. a a a mechanic, right? It doesn't mean that you should sell to all of them. You need to get really focused and really niche. And just when you think you've got as niche as you can, there's always a step further you can get to from a sales perspective to get really targeted and really focused. that's one of the big bottlenecks we see. The other big bottleneck we see with founders is they are too reluctant or too slow to hire an additional sales resource. They are so stuck in their ways of doing it in their way, that they are too slow to bring in additional resource to help them. And again, back to my point. I get it. Hiring salespeople is challenging. but you need to the quicker you bite that bullet and get on with that, the more success you'll have.

Yeah, this year we've really kicked on and made progress on kind of our our kind of a goals and aspirations. And our strategy has really been threefold. One, to have more experts delivering the work. We got ourselves a little bit stuck, and a lot of consultancy businesses will will recognise this problem. We got a lot ourselves a little bit stuck in only a couple of people actually being ab able to do the client work, myself being one of them. and that's not a scalable business model. So this year we've really invested in other people in the team that can deliver for our clients. we will certainly do more of that in the next 12 and 24 months so that we build a really great pool of permanent and fractional associates in our team. two is our launch and continued development of our online tool, which is called Ascent, which takes that diagnostic. And makes it very accessible for founders who might not be able to afford our consultancy services. and we're continuously developing them that tool. and then the third is an evolution of our onboarding, our hiring and onboarding service. So this is where we've developed the strategy, we've helped deliver some sales results, and then we hire and we onboard your sales hires to actually take that strategy, take that playbook permanently. and run that with our coaching basically. So if we can continue to evolve those three things, then we'll be in a really kind of strong place, I think.

I would do exactly as I've said. I would hire other people to help me quicker. I spent way too long with Bright Evolve basically just being Tom Bright, and maybe a couple of others. and it wasn't until I started to hire some really great people to come and work with us. that A, they bought great ideas, they bought great thinking, and they just bought the capability and to be honest, just made it more fun, you know, just it Not just me kind of constantly delivering and selling and doing everything basically. so that's probably the biggest thing. our messaging to the market, our service offering has evolved over time. I think it takes any business a few years to get clarity on who you actually are. so I'm not sure I changed that because I think we had to go through that process. But I'm really happy now with what we say we do and how we help the clients we work on.

Yeah, probably find me on LinkedIn, Tom Bright Bright Evolve is obviously the the company. or send me an email, Tom at Bright Evolve dot net. But yeah, LinkedIn is where I I spend an unhealthy amount of time, to be honest.

relationships without a doubt. There is no substitute for having the very best relationships. you know, you can have the right people that you are connected with that talk highly about you and they will refer you and they will bring you repeat business. it's, you know, we spend a lot of time doing a lot of work for all of our clients and for ourselves on developing new business. But I know for a fact that for our clients and for Bright Evolve, if I look over the last 12 months, it's those key relationships who have helped us really kind of get us to where we are today.

Thank you.