This week Oliver Cummings , CEO of Nurole, came and had a chat with me on the pod. 60,000 board level experts on his network. Host of Enter The Boardroom podcast. Before that, 10 years in private equity, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and then a partnership at BXR.
He started by testing me. Riddle me this. If you get 1% better every day for a year, how many times better are you at the end of it?
I said 300%. Wrong. You’ll be wrong too, and Oliver knows it, because he asks candidates the same thing and they all miss it. We’re hopeless at seeing things that move slowly. We’re just as hopeless at seeing the thing that’s been sat in front of us for years.
Ask Nick Jenkins Moonpig was about to go bust when one board member asked him about a number he’d built the whole business on top of. That question sent Moonpig on its way to being worth £1 billion.
So where does a founder find a question like that? Oliver doesn’t wait for a board meeting.He needed expert challenge on a launch. So he found 5 people who’d already done it, put them in a room for 2 hours, then let them get on with their lives.
Getting 5 strangers of that calibre into a room is the part that made me curious. I can just about manage to get 5 people to agree on a bloody lunch venue.
None of this happened quickly by the way. His own verdict: “It’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would.”
Find out how Oliver went from 4 people burning cash to an empire of 60,000.
Somebody could ask you the Moonpig question.
Worth working out who that is, and what the question might be.
In Partnership with CEOfriend
Nobody gets disrupted by something they couldn’t see. They get disrupted by something they didn’t look at. I’ve sat with founders who knew their market was moving and kept their heads down anyway, because there was always something more urgent that week, and by the time they looked up someone else had taken the ground.
That isn’t bad luck, it’s a data problem. CEOfriend runs analyst-grade market trend reports on your sector. You give the team of advisors: your market and your competitors, and it tells you what’s moving and where the gap is while you can still do something about it.
You don’t need a £15k consultant report to stay ahead. You need to look up. Run yours free. First months free with my code STWTRIAL
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers scaling in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room and every episode of the podcast first..