Season 1 | Episode 57: Your Business Has No Value If You Are the Business How to Build a Company You Can Actually Sell
Show Notes:
What if the thing that's quietly killing your business growth is you? In this episode, Heather sits down with Chris Burke and they dive into exactly what separates businesses that scale from ones that stall, and the moves that most founders wait too long to make.Serial entrepreneur Chris Burke built two companies across 25 years. A global consultancy that did a quarter billion in sales with zero funding, and a SaaS platform now live in 40 countries, and the hardest lesson he kept learning was that the founder is almost always the bottleneck.
Bio:
I'm an Australian entrepreneur who's spent the last 25 years in London building businesses — not studying them, not advising from the sidelines, actually inside the machine.
The first was a global consulting firm called Brickendon. We worked with the world's biggest banks — JPMorgan, Citi, UBS — delivering the kind of programmes where failure genuinely wasn't an option. Regulatory deadlines, credit risk systems or rescuing programmes that had gone off track. Sixteen years of that.
At the same time, I co-founded a software business called Hybrid Hero — a workplace platform that's now live in 40 countries, clients like Dyson, BMW, Pepsi. Built it before COVID validated the thesis, which I'm quietly proud of.
But here's what those 25 years actually taught me: the thing that breaks most businesses isn't a bad idea or a bad market. It's that the systems, the structure, the people architecture — none of it keeps pace with the growth. The founder who got you to ten million is often the exact bottleneck that stops you reaching fifty million. And most of them don't see it, because they're too close to it.
That pattern kept showing up — in my own businesses, in the businesses around me. And I kept finding myself at dinners, on calls, sketching out what needed to change. People would come back months later and say: we followed that conversation, and it worked.
At some point you have to decide whether to keep doing that informally or build something real around it. That's Aduvo. We work inside founder-led businesses doing five to fifty million — not handing them a report, but actually getting in there with a full team and building what comes next
To connect with our guest, click on the links below:
https://www.instagram.com/aduvo.dk/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-parsons-cfo/
https://heatherparsons.com/links
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