Scale To Win with Dominic Monkhouse

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...

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 too...

Setting up a business is a major life decision that should not be taken lightly—it is incredibly painful. The ups definitely outweigh the downs, but the downs can be dark. Having a co-founder makes all the difference. Matthew Duhig, CEO and co-founder of FX Digital, started the business at university with his co-founder Tom, to build a website for his sister's bridal shop for free. Fifteen years l...

We will soon trust AI more than people with their own agendas. In 50 years, we'll realise 50%+ tax was madness when 20% could have worked. Digital voting will let people vote on issues, not political parties, and we'll have an executive of 40 people (like Singapore) instead of 1,000 MPs arguing endlessly. And Brexit will be remembered as the best thing that happened—because this entrepreneurial li...

Conflict is not a dirty word. You don't need a trigger warning; you need to know the trigger better. Don't rush to solve the problem. And when you're negotiating, remember it's not about you. Scott Walker is a kidnap-for-ransom and extortion negotiator who's spent 20 years with a ringside seat into what makes human beings think, feel, and act—particularly in times of stress, overwhelm, challenge,...

Failure is a better business school than an MBA. Most agencies will never scale because their founder is the product. Minority investment beats full acquisition. And self-doubt isn't a weakness to overcome—it's the edge that separates high performers from those who are growing. Luke Tobin, entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Unusual Group, has built and sold three companies in three different i...

Most people overcomplicate leadership. They're looking for the next framework, trying to do technical leadership that just doesn't work. Paul Adamson spent 25 years sailing yachts around the world—including two years circumnavigating with Eddie Jordan on an Oyster 885—and he learned that leadership isn't about theory. It's about making decisions without all the information, leading from the front,...

Council estate South London to 30 mergers and acquisitions. No capital, no plan, but always knew wealth was what he wanted. Lee Smith went from DJ to jewellers to law firms to web design and IT—then discovered mergers and acquisitions in 2014 and everything changed. Now he's building two sector groups to £10M in profit, buying businesses at 3-4x multiples and exiting at 7-10x, and he's got some co...

Work-life balance is a complete myth for founders and CEOs. The experience myth keeps people pigeonholed. Goals should force your identity change, not the other way around. Eric Partaker—McKinsey consultant turned Skype early team member turned restaurant chain founder turned CEO coach with 1.2M LinkedIn followers—breaks down why everything you've been told about building a successful career and c...

Formal education is becoming irrelevant. The UK is a great place to build a business. These aren't platitudes—they're battle-tested beliefs from someone who spent 20 years in the military, led the UK's COVID testing programme, and is now co-founding Electric Twin with Ben Warner (the PM's former chief data advisor) to build synthetic audiences that let businesses test decisions in seconds rather t...

Market research used to take four weeks and cost $20,000. Steve Phillips built Zappi to turn that into four hours and $2,000—and he started 12 years ago, long before generative AI made this vision sound obvious. Now, with nearly 300 people and $80 million in revenue, he's challenging his organisation to double revenues in five years without adding headcount by pairing every employee with an AI age...

Companies claim they're too busy for AI, and leadership teams are bloated and ineffective. The UK's productivity crisis won't be solved by working harder. These aren't controversial opinions, they're the reality Gerry Tombs is seeing as he helps businesses navigate the AI transformation after scaling ClearVision from a garage startup to £7 million in revenue and 100 people before a successful exit...

Most people think AI is overhyped. Nick Holzherr thinks it's drastically undervalued. After selling Whisk to Samsung and scaling it from zero to 120 people across eight time zones, he's now building Gitlaw—an AI agent that creates and reviews legal documents for free, making legal services accessible to small businesses that have been priced out of the market. In this episode, Nick breaks down why...

From global finance to eco-cleaning, regenerative farming, and rethinking entire systems — Mark Jankovich doesn’t do incremental change. He believes we’re living through a full-scale reset — and entrepreneurs have a responsibility to lead it. In this episode, Mark shares why climate change isn’t a mass participation problem , why consumers shouldn’t be asked to make hard choices at all, and why so...

From a council estate in Oxford to a £100 million exit by age 37. Andrew Hulbert's journey isn't a polished Silicon Valley success story—it's raw, real, and packed with hard-won lessons about what actually matters when you're building something from nothing. In this episode, Andrew breaks down the decade-long grind of scaling Pareto from his bedroom to a 500-person, £50 million turnover business s...

As 2025 draws to a close, we're replaying some of the show's standout conversations from this year. This episode with James Kerr remains one of the most thought-provoking discussions. Whether you're hearing it for the first time or revisiting the insights, there's plenty here to fuel your leadership thinking as we head into the new year. James Kerr is a writer, coach, and consultant who specialise...

Most service businesses drown in the chaos between what customers ask for and what they actually need. Kit Cox has spent over a decade building Enate to solve exactly that, an orchestration platform that helps B2B service providers cut through vagueness, assemble data, and deliver consistently exceptional service powered by both AI and human workforce. In this episode, Kit breaks down the three st...

Some industries are easy to disrupt. Infrastructure isn’t one of them. But by focusing on adoption over features, clarity over complexity, and tempo over comfort, Shelley Copsey has built FYLD into a company reshaping how frontline operations work. In this episode, she breaks down the real levers of transformation: making work visible, removing friction, earning trust in high-risk environments, an...

Most enterprise AI projects crash long before take-off. Hype, bad data, cultural resistance, and “enterprise chaos” stop even the biggest organisations from getting value. In this episode, Dominic speaks with Steve Salvin , founder & CEO of Aiimi , a data and AI company helping large organisations connect the messy, disconnected worlds of data, content, conversations, and operational history -...

Can optimism really scale a company? In this episode, Dominic chats to Dan Williams , CEO of Orean Personal Care , to explore what it really takes to lead through chaos - from doubling revenue in tough markets to leading with vulnerability, optimism, and Ironman-level discipline. Under Dan’s leadership, Orean has grown from £3M to £30M turnover, becoming one of the UK’s fastest-growing contract ma...

AI hype is everywhere - but most of it is just noise. This episode cuts through it. Dominic digs into what real artificial intelligence actually looks like with Daniel Hulme , Chief AI Officer at WPP and founder of Satalia and Conscium. They explore why most so-called “AI projects” are really just automation in disguise, how to spot where genuine adaptive intelligence can unlock value, and what’s...

Fundraising playbooks often skip the messy middle. This one doesn’t. In this panel episode, three founder–CEOs who actually closed rounds in the last year unpack how fundraising in the UK really works - from brutal pre‑seed rejections to Series A droughts, and everything in between. They break down the tactics that moved term sheets, the traps that wasted weeks, and how to run a tight process: neg...

Aytekin Tank - founder & CEO of Jotform , host of the AI Agents Podcast, and bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork - shares how he grew Jotform from a developer’s pain point into a 700‑person automation company serving 35M+ users. He explains why Jotform chose to replace itself with AI before someone else did, how users steered them from “AI that fills forms” to AI customer‑service agen...

What if the secret to skyrocketing your business lies not just in sales, but in understanding your customers on a deeper level? In this episode of Curious Leadership, Dominic Monkhouse chats with James Peach , award winning speaker, investor and brand marketing expert whose portfolio includes roles at Innocent, Uber, and Vinted, about customer obsession, and how it shapes brand marketing strategie...

What happens when you lead three HR tech brands through growth, acquisition, and the AI revolution? Phil Coxon is in the thick of it. In this episode, Dominic is joined by Phil Coxon, Managing Director of Breathe, Elmo UK, and RotorGeek - three HR and workforce management platforms tackling different ends of the market. Phil shares what he’s learned scaling global businesses like Criteo and Mindbo...