The Messy Middle of Growth How Founders Can Stop Being the Bottleneck with Brad Poulos

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. And we'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Brad Poulos. Now, Brad is an entrepreneur, educator, and advisor who has spent 40-plus years branding, scaling, and studying small businesses from the inside out. Over that time, he's held corporate roles, scaled a startup to number 8 on the Profit 100 list, taken a company public, and helped launch and grow multiple ventures as a founder, investor, and advisor across telecom, software, and even the cannabis industries. Today, Brad teaches entrepreneurship, small business management, and strategy at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he created Canada's first university-level cannabis business course. His students and clients know him as Canada's Small Business Professor, a title that reflects his rare combination of real operating experience and the ability to teach it very clearly. He's the author of The Small Business Operator's Manual and Most Problems Solve Themselves, as well as co-author of From Pitch to Payoff: A Founder's Guide to Finance. His writing, teaching, and consulting all draw from the same well— hard-won lessons from running actual companies, not frameworks invented in a faculty lounge. He's also the founder of The Confident Operator, where he helps owners of 5 million to $50 million businesses trade chaos and gut instinct for systems that make their companies profitable, focused, and built to last. So, Brad, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Nice intro.

We've got some fun topics set up for us to talk about, but before we jump in on some of those, why don't you, you know, tell your story a little bit to our audience? Give them a sense of the twists and turns that brought you to where you are today.

Sure. Okay. So, I normally divide my career when I'm telling the story into sort of 3 main buckets. That would not include the little business I started when I was 14.

Okay.

But post-graduating from tech school, I worked for Canada's satellite company, Telesat Canada for 15 years. Started out as a techie. Kind of worked my way up through the management ranks, and about halfway through that 15 years, I switched over to sales and marketing. Got an MBA along the way, and when I left Telesat, I was running about half the company's book. At the time, it was around about a $75 million business, and I had about 45 salespeople and engineers primarily, and project managers and a few folks like that. Jumped out of that company into a little company my brother had actually started a couple of years prior. And it was so small that he didn't even work in it. So, it was 4 people that essentially, 4 salespeople. It was a pure sales company.

Uh-huh.

Selling to a market that really doesn't even exist in Canada any longer. But at the time, there was a really robust microwave um, communications equipment manufacturing industry here in Canada.

Okay.

So that was our, that was our market. We sold test equipment and components and that sort of thing to these manufacturers mostly. And at the time, the digital licenses for cellular were just being let. So this is the late, mid to late '90s. And so I suggested to my brother that I jump into this company and that we kind of move it toward wireless, not so much away from microwave communication, although that happened naturally as the industry died. But to take advantage of the cellular build overlay that was going to happen. And it was massive, of course, because when we switched from analog to digital, it was basically a duplication of the whole network.

Yeah.

So gazillions of dollars being spent. And that's exactly what we did. And we grew that company over around 10 years to, uh, from essentially zero to $17 million and then went public. And so then we were part of a— we did a reverse takeover essentially. So my brother and I ended up in charge and I was the CEO of the public company that bought us.

Okay.

Um, got it up to around $30 million or so. And, you know, it's interesting because, um, when I was, when I was doing my MBA, I had a goal to to be president of a Fortune 500 company by the time I was 45.

Okay.

And interestingly, one of my profs said to me, thank you very much, Joseph. Gee, Brad, shouldn't you set a more realistic goal? And like, oh boy, that's the fire I needed put lit under my butt to get going. So anyway, 5 days before that magical day, I sold my company to a publicly traded company for It was absolutely not on the Fortune 500. But I went like, check. Good enough, right? And that's one of the things I feel about goals is— and I know we're going to talk about it. But close enough is often good enough, right?

That's right.

And so anyway, interestingly, I didn't like it. I did not enjoy being a CEO. I've figured out since then I have a character flaw and it is that I don't like having bosses.

Okay.

So, which is, uh, so, so what I did it for about 2 years and then I jumped out and started doing what I do today, which is a combination of teaching at the university in the entrepreneurship department that takes up a couple days a week and then consulting. I do a fair bit of mentoring as well at local incubators, some of it for free and some of it is, uh, entrepreneur-in-residence type work. And I've been doing that for about, uh, around 15 years. So, that's Wow. Story.

Well, such a rich sort of heritage of experience to pull upon as you're working with companies that are starting and scaling and working with all that stuff. And you and I were talking a little bit before the show around there's this sort of unique space that you work in and I work in a lot, which is, you know, we called it the messy middle. And I think you've called it that before where These companies, they're sort of too big for duct tape, but they're sort of too small for like really big overhead and corporate infrastructure. So we talk about sort of like maybe $5 million a year to $50 million a year in revenues. Like some companies in there, they slow themselves down too much because they put too much infrastructure on. Others sort of stall out and spin their wheels because they don't create enough infrastructure.

Right.

And it tends to be sort of a challenging, sort of growing pains area for a lot of companies. Talk to us a little bit about the work that you do with companies in that phase and how you help them navigate those sort of challenges.

Yeah. So, it's a combination of people and systems, right? And it has to start with the people. So, you've always got a founder at the beginning.

Yeah.

And some founders are able to make the jump from essentially $0 to $50 million. It's not really a jump, of course. It's an evolution. But they're able to make that evolution. They're able to go along for the ride with that evolution and remain in charge and be the right leader for the duration. Some founders aren't, right? There's usually kind of like 3 phases. There's the very early phase where there's really not any management structure at all. And then, there's the phase where you start to bring in a management structure but it's not the one you're going to have when you're $50 million.

Right.

And then, something a little more scientific and rigorous when you start to get up into several tens of millions of dollars. And the founder, sometimes they don't even make that first jump. So, they'll sell out or maybe they'll— doesn't happen that often, but sometimes they'll bring in somebody to be their boss.

Right.

And they'll switch to Chief Technology Officer or maybe they'll— maybe they love sales. Maybe they love— maybe if it's a small manufacturing company, maybe they love like being what I call in the back and making stuff. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, I think it's a really I think it's a really courageous and smart thing to do when, you know, if you can realize that it's time to do that. And then other founders, they'll make it through stage 1 and 2 but they're not the right person for the final stage. And I've even said it about myself. You know, I could probably run a company, you know, getting up close to $100 million. But I'm not a billion-dollar company CEO, and I know that. And I think it's really important, you know, to know your own limitations. So, it starts with the founder and then there's the team around them and it's kind of the same thing. The people that really fit well in a startup, there's a reason why they're in a startup. And a lot of them are like me and they came out of a big company and the last thing they want to do is go work for another big company. So, So, you'll often see changes along the way. Certainly, I've experienced it both with the companies that I've been owned or been in, or ones I've been on the side of. And people just don't make the transition quite often and it's unfortunate. But to take a— to steal a saying from one of the famous Canadian billionaires, Jimmy Paterson, sometimes when we part company, we're doing us both a favor. Because it's really uncomfortable for both parties. And they're probably not having the greatest time either. So, while it's painful in the moment, of course, making these changes is often the best thing for all parties.

Yeah.

So, that's the people. And then, systems. If you have good people, the systems will evolve because part of what you're going to do is make sure that at each stage, you're bringing in people who know how to either run or create the right systems. That's right. Yeah.

So, it's so funny to hear you say that. So, in college, I actually did a paper and this was many, many, many years ago on the difference between leadership and management and how companies need different things at different stages of their growth cycle. Early on, you need a leader that can see the vision that no one else can see, can inspire people to do things.

Right.

You know, sort of march towards a vision that no one else can see and really sort of create a lot of change. And then once a company matures a little more, you need a manager that can keep people operating on the systems that have been designed rather than starting over and defining a new vision and making change every quarter, because those are very different sort of skill sets and the discipline. to be what the organization needs versus maybe what you naturally are or what you prefer to do is one of those challenges I think that oftentimes companies struggle with or the leaders of companies struggle with.

Yeah, and it's skills but it's also disposition and character and personality.

That's right.

So, in the early days, a generalist is gold because you don't— you just don't have enough money to spread around to have an expert in every single area like a dedicated one, right?

Yeah.

But then, as you get much larger, you need people who have that experience, that deep kind of functional experience. Here's a good example. When I started in my own business with my brother, we had a bookkeeper. She was part-time. She wasn't even an employee. Then eventually, we hired a full-time bookkeeper and then eventually, we hired a controller, a relatively low-level who also did all kinds of other stuff. By the time we went public, we had a real controller and that's all that individual did.

Right.

The moment we went public, we needed a CFO.

That's right.

So, there's definitely an evolution there and the same thing would be true of operations, of sales, marketing, each one, HR for sure. Yeah, the level of complexity gets greater as you get bigger. And so, the level of functional expertise that you need increases.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting in the marketing space. We see that there are sort of very clear-cut, almost inflection points. And this is based on a lot of study of companies that have grown and scaled that around the Around the million-dollar mark, things start to change. Around the $5 million mark, things start to change. There's another sort of inflection point at about $10 million, another one at about $20 million, then the next one's at about $50 million.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting to work with companies that have been sort of bumping along at the sort of $5 million mark. It's because there's certain key things, at least in the marketing and sales realm, Certain key things that they just haven't done yet. And those are almost like the stage gates until you get this right. And oftentimes it's not just product-market fit, but it's go-to-market fit. It's the way that you take your solution to the marketplace and really refining that and getting expert at it. You can't break through to that next layer. You might get close, you know, through grit, determination, and hustle, you might get really close, But until you get some of those sort of fundamental processes and systems in place, it's almost impossible for companies to break through. Do you see that same thing happen? And are they similar kind of inflection points or different inflection points as it pertains to more operations and finance roles within companies?

Sure. And I think the inflection points as well would be different depending on the industry.

That's— yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah. So, some industries scale with the same people a little longer than other ones. do for sure. The other thing is that you'll have founders— like, let's face it, there's, there's 3 levels of ignorance, right? There's the things that we know that we know. There's the things that we know that we don't know. Like, for example, I know there's a thing called molecular biology, but I don't know anything about it.

Uh-huh.

Um, and then there's the worst level of ignorance, which is the things you don't know that you don't know. And a lot of founders are in that position. And until— and that's one of the reasons why I'm a really firm believer as you get into the, you know, handful of millions or up around 10, get some external advisors. You know, set up an advisory board with people who know all kinds of things that you don't know so that, you know, so you can protect yourself from that.

Yeah, it's— I think the technical term is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

That's it.

And I always think of it as people who are confidently incorrect. They're 100% sure that they're not even 1% wrong about this topic because they have so little exposure to it that they just assume that they must be right on it.

Right. Yeah. And we, and we're all guilty of it. And, you know, it's in different domains. So, I can remember times when I argued upside down and sideways that something was true and found out later to my horror that I was wrong. So.

That's right. That's right. So something that you and I are both a big fan of is systems. And, you know, we make a joke around here, systems set you free. And we're a big believer in using systems. And you have made the phrase that, you know, sort of systems beat goals.

Yeah.

And I'd love for you to talk about that. a little bit more and share some of your thinking there?

Sure. So, well, maybe start with on the personal level. Yeah. So, the first time I ever gave a talk around this subject, I was in the process of trying to lose weight.

Okay.

And one of my many character flaws is that I like to protect myself from bad information.

Okay.

So now, as a CEO, I think you got to be very careful about doing that, right? But when it just involves your weight, it's not the end of the world. So, I kind of have this thing where I know if I'm happy or not with my weight because I just have to check my belt.

Sure.

And so, I know I need to lose weight. I know I want to lose weight. I don't know how much I weigh today. I do kind of have a goal of, let's say I'm 5'7-ish. So let's say my goal is like 155 pounds.

Okay.

So I, if when I put together a system to get there, it doesn't really matter where I start. I've got this goal of 155 pounds. If I get to 157, am I a failure? Like, is that a failure? if I started out at like 180-ish?

Right.

Obviously not, right? So, first of all, there's that. So, that clearly I think lays out that the system is more important than the goals. But to bring it around to the corporate world, a customer— so, I like the concept of the value chain and how a company adds value at every step of the way. And that value is perceived in the eyes of the customer.

Yeah.

No customer will pay for your goal. They will pay for your system. So, the example that I often use is customer satisfaction. So, we have a customer satisfaction goal of 97.5%. Well, if the customer's in the 2.5%, they don't care about your 97.5%. customer satisfaction goal. But if you're a good CEO and you've got this goal— I'm, by the way, I'm not against goals. I just think that systems are more important. The goal of 97.5%, the only way we're going to get there is if we have a system. And that system, a customer will pay for.

That's right.

They will pay for the result that that system delivers to them. So, so that, yeah, that is why I believe that systems eat goals for breakfast.

I love that. And also, as you were talking, it occurred to me that this also aligns with some sort of mindset things that you hear people say, which is if you really want to be happy in your work, don't be happy with where you're going. Be happy in how you're getting there. And learn to find joy in the process, in the system, in the delivery against the system. Whether you ever reach that 97.5% or not, if you can find joy in the things that will take you to being 97.5%, that's how you find real fulfillment in your work and real passion for your life.

It's true. It's also true in life. So, I happen to practice Zen Buddhism. And so, you know, we're very much about mindfulness and mindfulness has made its way into just the sort of regular, you know, society now. And it's really about being present in the moment and being, yeah, being happy within the moment for sure. That translates, I think, quite nicely between one's personal life and the business, your business life. Yeah.

Absolutely.

I also have a saying though that I use in my personal life. I don't think I would use this in business. But okay, it's an equation and it's happiness equals results minus expectations. So, if you keep your expectations in check.

That's right. Yeah, keep low expectations. It's a lot easier to be happy.

That's it. But I don't suggest the CEO adopt that mentality. But Not everything translates perfectly between personal life and business life.

That's true. That's true. So, this actually sort of aligns with another topic that we talked about, which is sort of this idea of freedom from worry. And we oftentimes aspire to help our clients achieve freedom from worry about hitting sales forecasts or where their pipeline's coming from or things like that in the revenue sphere. But you have a concept of sort of the difference between busy versus in control. Talk to us a little bit about what you mean there and how you help companies see through that lens.

Sure. So, it does work back to systems, right? So, you should be busy working within some kind of a system. And so, and as your people should too.

Sure.

But by doing that, by creating a world that is very highly systems-driven, it allows you to actually step back and to steal a phrase from The E-Myth from Michael Gerber, to work on the business and not in the business. Once a company gets up into the several million dollars range, there should be almost no function that that company does that needs the founder.

Yeah.

The founder should be almost optional at that point, right? My phrase is, if you can't go to Barbados and sit your butt on the beach and be making money, then you don't actually have a business. You just own your job. And owning a job is way better than having one for sure. But you don't own a business until it's making money without you.

Yeah.

And I have a— so my book, Most Problems Solve Themselves, is actually— that's not about that. It's not about that most problems solve themselves. It's actually 52 articles, one of which is about most problems solving themselves. Uh, I just picked the most provocative of the 52 articles and, uh, the title and slapped that on the front. So, but one of the articles in there is what I call the $8 Million Problem. And this is about 15 years old. So, we might have to use inflation and put that up to 10. But the $8 million problem is just simply that if you as the owner want to make every business decision in your company, you can do that if you're happy to be at $8 or $10 million. But at some point, that becomes limiting. And you can no longer— the company can't grow if you have to be You know, a cog in every wheel of the operation of your business. And so, that really requires a couple of things that again, it's pretty courageous sometimes when you do it for the first time. But the first is letting go. So, it's letting your people make decisions and Accepting that they'll probably sometimes make a different decision than you.

Yeah.

They sometimes might even make a decision that's like not as good as the decision you would have made.

Right.

And so what? Every decision does not have to be optimized. There's actually a concept we teach in the entrepreneurship department at TMU called Yeah. And that's the notion that good enough is often good enough. And the thing is, there's a trade-off. So, if you're willing to put yourself in that position where you're letting— you're giving people autonomy and you're letting them make decisions, then there's a real payoff there. And it's that one, you get your time back. So, I used to have this parade of people coming through my office asking, wanting me to make decisions. And I would quite often, I'd say, you know, like, hey, last week I was in Mexico City, you know, and what would you have done if it was last Wednesday? And they'd say, well, I don't know, I'd do this. I go, okay, good. Then that's what we're going to do right there. And you're training them now that they have the autonomy, that you trust them and all that. But the other thing and the real second-order impact of that is that it keeps A-players. And it kind of pushes away B players. B players want you to make all the decisions for them. They're afraid to make them. They don't want to get fired and all that sort of stuff. A players, they just eat that up. They want that autonomy. It's one of the key factors that makes people happy in their job is having some autonomy, some say in the way that they go about doing their job, in the how, but even to some degree, the what of their job, right? Like, they're going to do. So yeah.

That's such a great insight again. And, you know, we oftentimes see that, you know, many founders don't even realize that they are that bottleneck in their business keeping it from breaking through that $10 million mark or wherever the mark might be in their company because they just think this is what running a successful business looks like. And it's funny you talked about, you know, Michael Gerber and The E-Myth. Like, I so often blame the popular media, at least in North America, for, you know, sort of lionizing this mythical idea of an entrepreneur who's doing all the sales and doing all the ideas and doing all the innovation and leading the team and everything. And they've got it all perfectly balanced. And it's just an impossibility and really such a, you know, sort of an impossible standard to live up to. And when people can realize that the real test of an entrepreneur is the ability to remove themselves from some of those low-fidelity required decision-making, that's what really creates that opportunity for growth.

Yeah. Yeah. Are you familiar with the EOS system? EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System? Yeah, from the book Traction and all that.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So, that really, I would highly recommend that book to any business owner so that they can figure out whether they're the Integrator, which is the person who touches everything, or whether they're the Visionary. And either one is okay.

That's right.

You know, quite often, the founder will become the Visionary and they'll hire an Integrator, somebody who's maybe run a larger business in the past and can bring those skills skills and can help them make the jump to the next phase. But it might be that you'd hire— I haven't actually seen it happen. But I guess it could happen, bringing in a visionary.

I've actually had clients that have done that as they've gone through their EOS journey as we were working together. And it's always interesting to see too. Well, yeah, Bradley, you're obviously an expert in a ton of super interesting topics and we could talk all day. But I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, like give us the pitch a little bit. Who do you work with and how do you help them?

Sure. So, I help business owners, some normally between kind of $5 to $50 million, up to a couple of dozen employees and help them with a lot of the stuff we talked about today. So, bringing in systems, making sure that we have the right people in the right seats on the bus. That's another concept from, well, from a bunch of places, but certainly it's part of EOS. Yeah. So, the right people, meaning people that align with the values of the company and the founder, and then the right seats, meaning they're in the right job for them.

Yeah.

I also help with sales and marketing. So, creating sales and marketing strategy, new— because I teach entrepreneurship, we spend a lot of time in creating new markets. So especially for companies that want to break into new markets, whether those might be like geographic or just a brand new, you know, a new domain. Yeah. So that's essentially what I do in my time when I'm not teaching.

And what's the best way to get in touch with you?

So I have a website, bradpoulos.com, and I can also be found on LinkedIn. So just, you know, look me up there.

Awesome. Well, Brad, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I learned a lot. I'm sure our audience did too.

Great. That was a lot of fun. Thank you very much.

Talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, And share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.