Built It. Broke It. Fixed It.
About Built It. Broke It. Fixed It.
So many podcasts focus only on success, but sometimes we learn more from mistakes, failures, and the difficult moments along the way.
Built It. Broke It. Fixed It. is a relaxed podcast about the real side of business, life and everything that comes with trying to build something. Hosted by Chris Carroll, Vladeta Radovanovic and Anthony Leung, this podcast looks at what running a business is really like behind the scenes. Not the polished version.
With over 25 years of combined business experience, they've been through it all, the highs, the lows, building teams, creating culture, defining USPs, marketing, scaling up and everything in between.
Coming from different business and cultural backgrounds, it feels more like sitting down in a coffee shop for an honest chat than a corporate interview. There's humour, different opinions, real stories and plenty of moments most business owners will relate to. We want to keep it lighthearted, but the messages are real.
We talk about the real issues, employing people, leadership, growth, mistakes, failures, setbacks and the things that don't always get spoken about. The aim is simple, to remind you that you are not alone and to keep going.
Because sometimes you build it, sometimes you break it, and sometimes fixing it is where the real growth happens.
Built It. Broke It. Fixed It.
The Real Cost Of Growth
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Growth is often seen as the ultimate goal, but what does it really cost?
In this episode, Chris, Vlad and Ant talk about their staff, the people who have helped them build the business and how important it is to recognise the work that goes on behind the scenes.
They discuss building trust, supporting people properly and creating a workplace where staff feel valued rather than treated as just another number.
We hope we did a good job.
Everybody wants to grow their business, but most of us have no idea what growth will actually cost us. Spoil alert, it's way more than money. Welcome to Built It Broken Fix Day, the podcast for founders by founders on the realities of building a business. We're doing something a little bit different today. Chris, Bland and myself were all taking turns on the hot seat to share honestly about what it actually takes to grow our businesses. We're at very different stages, so whether you're an agency owner working with the biggest names out there, a founder running a small team, or a solopreneur trying to grow your business beyond just a one-person party. So, the question we're all in the hot seat for today is what did growth actually cost you? And before I throw myself under the bus, I'm going to throw Vlad in there first. Vlad, tell us about your business and how did you grow it to what it is today?
SPEAKER_00Hey, I run Presta, a digital product agency out of Belgrade, Serbia, and we build custom apps, e-commerce, and AI products for companies, startups. Some of the names I can mention, you know, the biggest names are Rekit Bankiser, Audi, UNESCO. So to answer your question, biggest cost of growing a business was control. So when you start small, when you start as a solopreneur like you and I was owning every little detail. I was owning the sales, the marketing, the execution, the customer communication, everything. But when you start building a team, that means that you need to let go some of the work. And I knew at the beginning that I was the best person to do that particular work, but you have to learn to let go and to allow your team to learn and allow them to make some mistakes. And that's actually the way you need to proceed in order to grow your business. I don't know what you guys think.
SPEAKER_02I mean, it sounds easy, doesn't it? It's like, hey, just let go of control and let other people do the stuff. I know some people in the food industry who have their own restaurants have the same problems. It's like, hey, I can cook better, I can cut better, everything's faster when I do it. But if they don't let someone else learn how to prep the food ahead of time or let them cook, it's never gonna grow. It's a separation of, I guess, what you see as quality of work and also letting other people in so that it can help you get to this point where you don't have to do everything.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, you have to let people learn, you have to let them make mistakes, and mistakes cost, but that's the only way for your team to grow and for your business to grow.
SPEAKER_01The ultimate thing in making that decision is if you want to have a business that is a job, or you want to have a business that is a business, and not letting go is one of the downfalls of growing a business. You've got to let go, and ultimately you've got to realize that you need to bring in people who are better than yourself, or you need to train people within the business to be better than you, and you've got to let go of that control. And for me, who is a control freak, I fully handed over all operation side of my business, and it's run by better people now. It's run by better people that know what they're doing, and they tell me what they are going forward.
SPEAKER_02Flav, is there one element of control that was the hardest for you to let go of?
SPEAKER_00Maybe that would be the client communication. The moment I allowed my team members, my project manager, even my designer to be in the communication with the client, I would always be CC'd. But I stepped out of you know checking their emails before they send it, or you know, proofreading it, or making sure that the copy the message is right. I would say that was the most difficult part for me.
SPEAKER_02Was there anything you had to do to separate yourself from that? Did you have to give yourself a pep talk? Or did you read a lot of cell phone books? What was it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I I knew I had to do it. I was aware of that, but I was always pushing it off, I was always postponing it until one day I was, you know, overcrowded with work. I was all over the place, and I just said, okay, just you do it, send an email to the client, let them know what's going on, answer their questions, do it yourself, because I didn't have time to do it. I think that was the breaking point, if you will.
SPEAKER_01A lot of my time within the business is built on processes and spent a lot of time making sure that everybody knows those processes. Because a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, they have everything in the head, and sometimes the things can be a bit ad hoc, so the messages can be unclear to the employees and team members. So making sure those processes are all in place, and sometimes, if not all times, you've got to let people make mistakes, and that's what they learn from. And interestingly enough, about a week ago I was listening to an interview with Toto Wolfov from F1, Mercedes, and he said when people make mistakes, they don't look at the mistakes that the person made, they look at what mistakes were made in the process. So if the process was correct, maybe that mistake wouldn't have been made. And I took a lot of influence from that of making sure that everybody is on the right page. But it it is a hard, very hard thing to do because you've always got the urge to go, I will just do it myself. I can do that quicker, I'll just do it myself. And you've got to have that self-discipline to go, I need to step back here because I can't continue doing and having all the hats on, and I've got to hand it over to people and let them grow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was gonna say we're positioning this as a cost of growing, but yet I think that if we don't do this, the actual cost is to not grow at all, which is interesting.
SPEAKER_01If you're looking at terms of cost per growing, and the major cost of any business is people training them, getting them the right culture. There's challenges in terms of scaling. So when you go to about 15 people within the business, the culture shifts. When you get to the 45 plus, it shifts again. And it's always making sure that culture stays within the business as you grow. And that that can be the real cost sucker out of a business in terms of people, making sure that they are on board with the culture, making sure that they are on board with the processes from day one, but making sure they're getting the right training. Because I see it a lot, and it's certainly happened within my business and other businesses that I work with, where a new employee comes in and they have experience, and you go, there you go, off you go, and you just leave them to the own devices and think they're gonna hit the floor running. Where actually, even though they've got a lot of experience, they need to be nurtured into the business, nurtured into what you do, and by not doing that, you set them up to fail, and you get to two months and you go, This this person isn't working out, and you might make a decision on that basis, and that's a real cost to growth because going through all that process again of advertising, interviews, training, if you had the right training at the beginning, the right expectations in the interview, that can cut out a lot of cost of growth. But team and people for me is the biggest cost and the biggest headache within growing a business.
SPEAKER_00Chris, how do you make sure that people, the new people, fit into the culture? How do you do that?
SPEAKER_01When we look at interviewing someone, we have a minimum of two interviews, sometimes three. And I was always told hire slow, fire fast within there. You've got to make sure that they are the right people. You've got to make sure that they understand who you are, what you do. You know, one of, if not our main core value within the business, is act like the boss, act like the owner. That's what we instill within the business, because then if you act like the the owner, it brings in expectation, it brings in demand, but it brings in responsibility. That is said to any person right at the beginning, this is how we do. But equally, you get the perks of that core value. But to me, it's been upfront right at the start of this is what we want you to do, and this is how we want you to succeed.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned giving people the responsibility. I mean, this ties to what I said earlier that you need to give people, you know, freedom and allow them to do things on their own. And I feel that giving people the responsibility is even you know one step further.
SPEAKER_01You know, it's something that that I've brought in, and it's not right for every business by no means. In terms of my leadership, is I like people to flourish, I like them to be their own person, I like them not to have boundaries, but I also like to instill responsibility. So within our business, for instance, we've got unlimited holidays. We brought that in. You can have whenever you want off within that. That's part of the core value of act like the owner, act like the boss, you get the time flexibility. But what that also does in there is if you have got something on and pressing, and you can't have time off, you have got to have the responsibility to deliver that.
SPEAKER_00If you're a boss, you can't go. I mean, if you are really an owner, you can't go, and you will not go because you have the responsibility.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And with my team, is because with what we do, we can be remote. Sometimes my team says, you know, I've got something on at half past three today, I want to leave, I'm gonna leave for that, but I'm gonna I'm gonna come back online and I'm gonna get these things done. However, with with if something happens on a weekend, my guys are perfectly happy to jump on it or jump on a call because they've got that flexibility of well, I leave at five o'clock, you don't hear me now until Monday. Yeah. Now, I don't insist on that, I don't say you've got to do that, but that's the mentality that my team's got is we're available if we need because we get it back as well. We get the flexibility back. And what I like to do within the business is treat everybody like adults. The main thing is with the people that we work with is that is your team, they're the people that is gonna be building your business, or they're the people that does build your businesses. As a business owner, you're there to steer the ship, but it's them that's gonna build the business. So instilling into them that ambition, that expectation, that real drive in them is gonna allow you to build a better business. 100%.
SPEAKER_02On that note, Chris, you're up. Tell us about your business and how did you grow into what it is today?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I'm the founder of Resolved in the UK based in Hartlepool, and I coach business owners on how to scale, build better teams, develop leaders, and take themselves out the day-to-day so businesses can grow without everything depending on them. And the real cost of businesses, like we've just talked about within there, is building a team, building that team and building the right team. And you can go through a lot of people to get this right. You know, it's not a proven science, but as you get more experience on interviews and training and procedures in coming in, you build up a good strategy on how to bring good people into the business, and that's the danger a lot of the time where when things don't work out on that, you can revert back to I'll just do it myself. You know, that I'm sure you've had times where you've had a designer come in, that the portfolio looked fantastic, and then when they come in and start delivering, it's uh this is not the standard we're wanting to do, and we will do it, we will get somebody else to do it, or well, I'll do it my myself, you know. And that's where the real cost is because that's where you start going backwards. You start to get in the thoughts of in your entrepreneurial mind of do you know what is this all worth it? Do I just go back? Do I scale back the stress, the day-to-day pressure? Yeah, this time it hasn't worked out, or if it's a second or third person that hasn't worked out. Maybe I'm not cut out for this, and I'll just go back to building a lifestyle business or going back into my comfort zone. And this is where you've got to have some resilience and say, and the next time learn and make sure that you do your due diligence, but make sure it is completely understood when people come in, what you want them to do, what you want them to achieve. But on the flip side, as a business owner, understanding what that person wants to achieve as well. So understanding what are their aspirations, where do they want to be. I've got team members here, very valuable team members, where I say to them, where do you want to be? And they say, I want your job. I want to run the business. And I find that fantastic.
SPEAKER_02For me, a hallmark of a good boss, a good business owner is when you can cultivate an environment where everybody is not only their best, but also aspires to be more than what they are now. Aspires to do something on their own. And I think you know, there's a real separation of thinking, hey, I'm gonna hire this person, they're gonna be with us forever, which is impossible. But what you want to do is create an environment where everybody is just so relaxed and so energized that they want to be the best version of themselves and go beyond this. That that's the mark of a good business owner.
SPEAKER_00Chris, I've heard a few occasions where people actually fired their employees because they had the aspiration of, you know, running the business. They were scared of investing in them, giving them the opportunity because they would feel that this person would eventually leave their business, which is inevitable. That's going to happen. Nobody's going to work in your agency for you know their whole life. But you know, when somebody has this kind of aspiration, I think that's the best thing to have, and you should let them, you know, grow.
SPEAKER_02I want to go back to what you said, Chris, about hiring slow and firing fast. Firing was something I never learned how to do, but I look back at my career and I go, man, I wish I learned how to do that. I didn't have the experience, you know, as a business owner, but leading in social media where I was building a team. I had the dream team for about six, six to nine months, and then hired somebody that I thought was a good fit but wasn't a good fit. And there were signs early on, and I should have listened to those signs, but I didn't. And it costed the team the internal culture that made it so good, and also the outputs because of it. So I guess my question to you is from your experience, and we're talking about the cost of growing, what does the inability to fire somebody cost you at the end?
SPEAKER_01It costs a lot, and I always look to go with my gut feeling. I mean, you know fairly early on whether someone's gonna work out or not. But I also look at is have we done everything we can to support this person to get them to do what we want them to do? And that is sometimes the case where they have been expected to just instantly get into the job. But from my experience, and don't know about you guys, is when I've had conversations about letting people go, there's a big percentage where they've actually said, Yes, I I understand, I'm not hitting what I need to do. And that happens more than often. So you can sit there and you can think and you're having it going in your mind all the time, I need to let them go, I need to let them go. And all these thoughts come into your head, well, I know them well, or you know, the I know the family well, and so on within there. But when you actually sit down and you go, I need to have a discussion going forward, this isn't what's working. The majority of the times that person's turned around and said, I agree with you. I'm not happy, I'd be better off going somewhere else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100%. I mean, I've had one or two situations where, and we've talked about the culture, and I ask you how you bring people into the culture because I've had, I think, two occasions where we brought somebody, they just didn't fit into the culture. And I actually had to let them go because they didn't share the values of the team, they didn't fit into the culture, and that the team just didn't, you know, didn't allow them to grow. And we had this discussion, and I said, look, this isn't working out, and as you said, they agreed 100%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and the the culture thing is hugely important because especially as you grow in numbers, one person in terms of toxic culture that can spread rapidly.
SPEAKER_00And I think you're next. What's the cost of growing a business for you?
SPEAKER_02Well, first, I run B Very Hook, a boutique agency based in London that turns a founders pitch into a 60-second video so clear it opens doors to investors and clients. For me, the real cost of growth is well, you gotta give yourself a budget to fail. I think when I first started, you know, doing my own business, being a solopreneur, I tied the revenue of the business into my direct salary or my direct worth. And the idea of needing to spend money on a thing that didn't work absolutely killed me. I felt shameful, I felt like a failure. But the longer I'm in this game, the longer I realize that hey, this is the cost of doing business. This is the cost of lessons. It's like the privilege of going into a school, but you kind of have to pay for the tuition. And I had to separate my mind so that I'm not tied to that number anymore so much as okay, you know what, this is what it cost me to learn this lesson. We need to move on. But without giving yourself permission to fail or to spend that money onto things that you have to learn, that was a lesson I had to learn.
SPEAKER_00For me, I would add to that there is a lot of uncertainty. I mean, it's okay if you invest some money and if you fail, but there is no certainty that, you know, spending more money or doing different things is going to bring some results. It's, you know, running through the dark. You don't know where you're going to hit the light.
SPEAKER_02Agreed. I mean, there was one point on my journey where I felt so desperate to need to act on something. I felt like I needed to do anything to move the needle a little bit. And I invested in a program that I really shouldn't have. And I think that even though I look back at it and go, man, I really shouldn't have done that. The lessons I've learned later on that has told me what not to invest in and what people not to look out for, has really driven my business forward in a place where I think has been the core zone of success.
SPEAKER_01I tell you something interesting that I was someone once said to me, which I think is really relevant and I keep it in my head, is you've got to be like a sniper rather than a machine gun. Have a target what you want to do and concentrate on that as a sniper. As soon as you start doing the machine gun and you're firing everywhere, and you've got all these ideas and you're doing loads of things, you end up doing, you know, 20% of a lot of things rather than 100% of one. And it's something I thought was so powerful.
SPEAKER_00I think it's inevitable as an entrepreneur, you have to move fast, you have to try different things, especially in startups. You have to be able to quickly move to pivot if needed and to try different things and see what works. And then when you find something that works, then you're a sniper.
SPEAKER_02Agreed. Yeah, I think that as you're looking for that one thing though, it's I've tried two ways of building this business. The first is having an end goal of like selling it for like X amount of money. And that for me never worked out well because it just felt like I was trying to chase the bag with no actual tangible value to offer to someone else. Whereas I then stopped pressuring myself to build something I could sell and started going backwards and trying to understand the need of a group of people that I can really serve that no one else can do. And I started to find more success as I discovered how I can be more helpful to these people. The conversations come more naturally, the work becomes better because there's a deeper understanding of what it takes to help them succeed. And when there's that kind of relationship, I think that makes both sides better.
SPEAKER_00And that brings the value, the core value you bring to people.
SPEAKER_02And that's what people are looking for. I think that there are so many people that are out there with these, again, these silver bullet programs that are like, hey, I if you follow my nine-step program, you'll do this. What that tends to do is appeal to a need that we have. Yet the the real need really is is is more than that. It's more than just a quick fix. It's somebody that is able to understand what where you're trying to take your business, is where you're trying to be helpful and to to help you to get there rather than here's a quick fix and something that will get you from A to B in no time.
SPEAKER_00A magic bullet. Is it safe to say then chasing or building a business that you want to sell is actually cost of growth?
SPEAKER_02For me it was, because it put me in a position where my mindset went from, hey, I need to be helpful, I need to create something that's useful, to I wonder what people want to buy with the most money. And that for me just took me to a place where I was helpful to no one. And that's the real cost is when I'm helpful to no one and nobody understands what I can bring to the table, and nobody wants what I have. That's a cost.
SPEAKER_00That's a machine gun.
SPEAKER_02That's a machine gun right there.
SPEAKER_01Spray and pray, baby. I think there's the phrase, you know, don't chase the money. And that's something that I try and do, and we call back to value all the time. You chase the money, you have different relationships with people. I personally believe that every business. Should build their business no matter how big or small, of what does it look like when I move away? What does it look like if I sell this? Whether you want to go in that direction, whether you want to sell your business, then that's a totally different thing. But if you're building a business in order to sell, it means you're building a business that is worth something. And it allows you to get into that mindset where you've got a clear structure and clear targets of where you got, I love spreadsheets, I love plans in place. I've got a five-year plan within the business of this is what I want the business to be worth after five years. Now that doesn't mean to say after the five years I'm going to be looking at selling the business. It's just so I'm on track in terms of my personal goals of where I want to be. But in that, then that then is formulated to this is where I want the business to be, this is where I want the team to be, this is where financially we want to be as well. So it's having that that that plan. So I always think when you're building a business, is have a plan. What does the business look like when you are going to sell it and follow that? But it doesn't mean that you want to sell it. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So is it safe to say that not having a plan is the cost of your business growing?
SPEAKER_01100%. Always have a plan. Can I knock that down to 99%?
SPEAKER_00I agree with this 100%.
SPEAKER_02I think it's 99%. Because here's the thing for me is that when I had what I thought was a plan, the values were wrong. It's important to have a plan, but the plan doesn't necessarily have to be numbers. The plan doesn't necessarily have spreadsheet. I am the opposite of numbers in spreadsheet cat, despite being Asian. I'm terrible with spreadsheets of math. But I'm a feeler kind of guy. And I need to know that there's for me, the plan, the goal is tied towards the success my clients are getting, the value that they're receiving. And my plan is to create something that is so useful and so helpful that it grows on its own. That I don't have a choice but to grow it. It's not something where, you know, I guess traditionally someone can put into a plant and go on Dragon's Den and you know pitch it that way. But for me, that kind of positioning that way in my mind has helped me move away from chasing something that is not based on anything realistic. But now we're gonna do something that's actually going to be not just helpful, but something that people want, people look out for.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but having a plan isn't always financial. And you know, talk talking earlier about policies, talking about procedures. I always look to when putting procedures in place is have we got procedures in place where we are now? But if then we scaled by another 50 people, for instance, would those procedures still hold up? So I always look at what is our end goal, not in turnover in year five, but how many people will we have to supplement that turnover? And then I look at is the procedures we've got in place or we're putting in place now, would they be flexible enough to accommodate that that growth? Because if we go back to the cost of business as well, is as you grow, you want to make sure that all that training you've done, all that policies, all that culture with people, it's flexible enough to grow and you're not having to do it all over again. So, in terms of having a plan and growth, it isn't always well, in year five, I want to sell it for X. It sometimes is well, in year five, I want the business to be this. I want it to be wanting to be working with this amount of clients, or I want to be working with bigger clients. This is the team that or the team members we'd need around that. Is what we've got as a business sustainable as we we go forward in terms of the the procedures. And you know, through these conversations, you'll know that I'm a very prestigious person, understanding of where everybody's got a firm understanding with it. So I personally, for me, it's not always financially where you want to be, but it's always, you know, what does a business look like in three years?
SPEAKER_02That was a great conversation on the cost of growth. I hope the listeners all get something out of this. If you guys have any questions, feel free to drop us a comment in our LinkedIn or in the comments on the podcast. Building a business is hard. And the more we know what other founders are going through, the more it helps us all. That's it for another episode of Built It, Broke It, Fixed It. Or Ant, Vlad, and Chris. We'll see you next time, guys.