Show notes
This ScaleUp Radio episode is a ScaleUp Club special — recorded live in February — and it’s packed with practical ideas you can apply immediately.
Kevin Brent opens with the month’s theme: gaining control of your week, moving away from reactive firefighting and towards deliberate, high-value leadership time. You’ll hear a simple framework to help you protect the work that really moves the business forward, rather than letting your diary become “a democracy”.
Then we switch gears into a short AI Pulse update from Paul Rhodes, founder of Green Gorilla Software, who shares a genuinely useful productivity shift: stop typing and start talking. Paul explains why AI needs context, why dictation creates richer prompts, and how tools like Granola and WhisperFlow can turn messy spoken thoughts into structured, usable output.
Finally, we move into a live Q&A session with Ryan Slaney, Managing Director of iLockerz, who shares the realities of scaling a product business — including the mistake that “nearly killed” them: trying to build the perfect product from day one. Ryan talks candidly about payroll reality, customer-led development, the value of weekly all-hands alignment, and spotting issues early through “Potential Red Flags”.
You’ll hear:
- How to redesign your week around green time (strategic), red time (operational) and grey time (low value)
- Why you must put the rocks in first (or the sand will swallow your week)
- Paul’s AI Pulse: why dictation creates better prompts and faster output
- Ryan’s hard-won lesson: MVP, revenue and feedback loops beat perfection
- A simple scaling discipline: weekly all-hands, shared visibility and “PRFs” before they become fires
Quick heads-up — we’re looking for a handful of founders to test our new AI-powered Smart90 Lite app. It’s built to help you stay accountable and actually deliver on your goals — in just a few minutes a day. It’s free while we’re in testing, and your feedback will directly shape the final version. You can get access by emailing kevin@biz-smart.co.uk.
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For now, continue listening for the full discussion with Ryan.
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Most founders I speak to feel busy but stuck; plenty happening, but not always clear on what genuinely matters most this quarter. If that’s you, the G90 Summit is worth a look. A structured half-day where we work through everything competing for your attention, get clear on the three to five things that must happen in the next 90 days, then commit to them and build the system to make sure they actually happen. Quarterly, virtual, £97 a seat.
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