What should a scaling business look for in a coach?

Five takeaways from the episode

1. Scaling isn’t a part-time interest. Stuart’s first test is whether you’re 100% committed, because that commitment reshapes your family, your health and your friendships. Interested isn’t the same as committed. Interested finds excuses.
2. The hardest shift is letting go. In the early days you do everything: the sales, the HR, servicing customers, setting up the systems. Scaling means stopping that and trusting the team around you. Stuart frames it through Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers: you move from a diminisher who controls and micromanages to a multiplier who grows other people.
3. Swap your to-do list for a to-stop list. Run it every day for two weeks. It exposes what you should be delegating so you can spend your time on the highest-value work only you can do.
4. Manage your energy, not just your time. Top performers train and recover most of the time and perform in short bursts. You invert it. Build in the 90-minute recovery cycle, protect your sleep, and keep moving.
5. Audit who you spend time with. Stuart puts everyone, family included, on a two-by-two of givers versus takers and positive versus negative. Keep the positive givers, the energisers who back where you want to go. Cut the negative takers, the sappers.

Snippets from the episode transcript

This short excerpt shows one of the episode’s most practical points in Stuart’s own words.

“So one of the things I get them to do on a daily basis is instead of doing a to-do list, get them to do, produce a to-stop list. I get them to do that for two weeks.”

Stuart’s point is that a good scale-up coach doesn’t add more to your plate. He forces you to find the work you should stop doing, so the highest-value activity gets your attention instead.

About the guest

Stuart Ross is the founder of High Growth, a coaching and consulting firm he launched in 2012 that helps companies scale. He is the author of The Scale Up Leader. Before coaching, he spent a career in retail: a buyer at Burton and the Arcadia Group, then a run of innovations at Boots, where he launched their first website, launched the meal deal, and worked on the Advantage card. He later scaled and sold a joint venture for British Land and coached its board. Stuart has worked with around 500 companies over roughly 14 years and says he exited about seven companies in the last year alone. He has been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph and by the BBC on what it takes to build a scale-up business.

Frequently asked questions

How is coaching for a scaling company different from ordinary business coaching?

Ordinary business coaching often loads you with more frameworks and content. Coaching for a scaling company works on you as the leader first. Stuart’s argument on this episode is that the frameworks are rarely the blocker. Your readiness, your habits and your willingness to let go are what decide whether the business scales, so a scale-up coach starts there.

How do you know if a founder is actually ready to scale?

You look at commitment and the size of the reason why. Stuart judges readiness by whether you’re 100% committed rather than just interested, and how strong your emotional reason for scaling is. A weak reason produces excuses. A strong one carries a leader through the struggles that scaling always brings.

What practical tools should a scale-up coach give you?

Expect concrete habits, not just theory. On this episode Stuart uses a to-stop list run over two weeks, energy management built around 90-minute recovery cycles, and a givers-and-takers matrix for the people in your life. The conversation also covers diary colour-coding, separating admin, revenue and strategy time so you can see where your week actually goes.

Should you look for a UK coach with firsthand scaling experience?

Yes. You want someone who has operated and exited businesses, not only read about them. Stuart has worked with around 500 companies and exited roughly seven in a single year, so the advice comes from patterns he has watched play out. If you want to find a business coach built for scaling companies, firsthand track record is the filter that matters most.

Where Monkhouse & Company fits

Stuart has watched the letting-go struggle play out across around 500 companies. Dominic Monkhouse does the same work with founder-CEOs: building a leadership team you can trust, getting you out of the day-to-day, and changing who you are as a leader so the business can scale past you. If that’s the stage you’re at, explore business coaching at Monkhouse & Company.