Doing the Opposite: Brendan McGurgan – Transforming and Scaling Businesses through Visionary Leadership

Growing your business is challenging, but scaling your business is in an entirely different ballpark.

?But one person who has plenty of experience in achieving this difficult feat is Brendan McGurgan . Having started his career as an accountant, he used his financial knowledge and entrepreneurial mindset to work his way up the ladder at Sand & Aggregate Producers CDE, progressing from Financial Director to CEO. During his tenure as CEO, he scaled the company from 15 people to almost 700.

Now, he uses his knowledge to help ambitious leaders of global SMEs with his business’s unique scaling framework, ScaleX?.

He shared some of his wisdom with me in the latest episode of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors, which you can watch or listen to now.

Keep reading to discover the key insights he revealed in our conversation.

You can’t scale without tenacity and a clear vision

When he first joined CDE as Financial Director, Brendan focused on proving himself by resolving the business’s overdraft.

“I remember meeting very quickly with the bank manager as the newly appointed FD,” Brendan explained. “One week later, I asked, “Can we extend our overdraft?” He rang the founder and said, ‘Who is this guy? He's already extending the overdraft’”.??

But Brendan knew he was making the right call, and it paid off in spades: “Once I had agreed on that overdraft, we navigated out of it within three or four months and never in our history went back into it again.”

When asked to step up as CEO four years later, he realised that the business needed a clear vision to scale.?

“I've always wanted to understand what the future might look like,” Brendan told me. “What I do is informed by the future I want to create.”

?“So one of the very first things I did as CEO was take the founder and one of the other shareholders into a small country hotel, just local to us. We spent an afternoon aligning on a respective vision for the company, thinking about what ‘great’ would look like.”

Despite not having prior experience scaling a business as CEO, Brendan’s practical knowledge of finance and innate growth mindset helped him craft a clear-cut vision everyone could get on board with and be motivated by.

Customer-centricity is key

To create a scalable and profitable business, the value you deliver to your customers should be at the heart of everything you do.

“I encourage people to stand in your customers’ shoes,” Brendan said. “None of us like being sold to, but we will trust others who have experienced your product or service.”?

If you can’t link every bit of work you do back to how it will benefit your customers, you’ll waste precious time, money, and resources, making it even harder to scale your business.

“I've seen this coming from an engineering environment,” Brendan explained. “We are emotionally involved in developing a widget, which we think is the best widget ever, and it does this and that. And I go, ‘Well, that's all great. But what does that mean for the customer? Why does that matter?’ If you can't articulate the value to your customer, then it's not fair they have to discern that value for themselves.”

Whatever you’re doing or creating, look at it from the lens of the customer. If you can’t articulate how it will reduce pain or bring gains, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

To learn more of Brendan’s expert advice on scaling your business, watch or listen to the newest episode of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors.