Making The Grade

Reshaping GTM in the AI Era - Harrison Rose on repeatable GTM and scaling beyond Founder-Led Sales

Harrison Rose has lived the journey most founders only see from the outside. As Co-Founder of Paddle, he helped scale from zero to $100M+ revenue - without the “overnight success” story everyone loves to tell. Now he’s doing it again with GoodFit, turning the market-mapping and ICP systems Paddle built internally into a product built for modern GTM teams. In this episode, Harrison breaks down the real inflexion points that unlocked Paddle’s growth, why founder-led sales is often misunderstood, and how teams get trapped at $2–3M ARR when “founder privilege” masks the lack of a scalable playbook. You’ll also hear Harrison’s clear-eyed take on bootstrapping vs VC, and how AI is moving from “more output” to actually making GTM decisions, including the coming tension over who owns the top of funnel: CRO or CMO. 📚 Episode Chapters 05:15 - When to hire experienced Sales Leaders 08:45 - A focus on cold outbound 11:25 - Seeing ICP as a spectrum19:30 - Building true repeatability  25:15 - Funding & the future of AI  🎧 Continue listening…  Make sure you listen to From Inception to Acquisition: Natasha Ratanshi-Stein on scaling Surfboard, stage-fit hiring and the importance of founder-led sales Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade? If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to... ✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform. ✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at podcast@scalewise.com✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube. See you again next week!

From Inception to Acquisition: Natasha Ratanshi-Stein on scaling Surfboard, stage-fit hiring and the importance of founder-led sales

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein has seen startups from almost every angle, as a VC, Operator, and Founder. After scaling customer service operations at Bulb, she saw firsthand how broken legacy workforce management tooling really was.  That pain became Surfboard, and in today’s Making The Grade episode, Natasha is refreshingly honest about what founders underestimate in the £1 to £10M ARR journey, and her own journey from inception to an acquisition by Dialpad, which was all sparked by an SDR’s mis-targeted outbound message.   📚 Episode Chapters:  02:00 - Building Surfboard from idea to acquisition14:40 - Lessons from selling before a finished product 30:15 - Transitioning out of being a Founder 38:00 - Hiring the right Sales Leaders for growth   44:15 - Navigating funding challenges  🎧 Continue listening…  Make sure you listen to Ego, Cash & GTM Discipline: Paul Fifield’s unfiltered lessons from building scalable businesses  Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade? If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to... ✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform. ✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at podcast@scalewise.com✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube. See you again next week!

Ego, Cash & GTM Discipline: Paul Fifield’s unfiltered lessons from building scalable businesses

What actually breaks a startup between £1m and £10m ARR isn’t usually the thing founders are obsessing over. In this Making the Grade episode, we’re joined by Paul Fifield - one of the UK’s most experienced go-to-market leaders, and someone who’s lived the full spectrum from predictable revenue playbooks, to rocketship growth, brutal crashes, and the rebuild that follows. Paul unpacks two defining failures in his career, and the patterns he now sees repeatedly in early-stage SaaS: messy data, woolly ICPs, uncontrolled SDR targeting, false confidence from renewals, and leadership decisions driven by ego rather than fundamentals. Paul also shares why the GTM playbook is changing fast, what modern CRO capability looks like in 2026, and why AI won’t save teams that haven’t done the foundational work first. If you’re a founder, CRO, VP Sales, or an Operator trying to help a business graduate from Series A to Series B - this one is a masterclass in what to do, what to avoid, and what to take seriously before the market forces you to. 📚 Episode Chapters 03:04 - Lessons from Failures and Successes 24:04 - The impact of ego in leadership28:13 - Scaling strategies from $1M to $10M 35:05 - The evolving role of the CRO   41:06 - Leaning into fractional talent as a startup   🎧 Continue listening…  Make sure you listen to Designing an AI-first Business - Bethany Ayers on hiring stage-fit leaders & the GTM playbooks that actually work in the AI era  Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade? If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to... ✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform. ✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at podcast@scalewise.com✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube. See you again next week!

Designing an AI-first Business - Bethany Ayers on hiring stage-fit leaders & the GTM playbooks that actually work in the AI era

Bethany Ayers isn’t experimenting with AI at the edges of Metomic; she’s using it to redesign how the company operates, with an ambitious goal of becoming an AI-first company. In this episode of Making the Grade, Bethany Ayers, CEO of Metomic, joins us to unpack what it really means to build an AI-first organisation, and how it impacts hiring decisions, GTM design, and leadership accountability. Beth shares why her default is now AI before headcount, how Metomic is using AI coworkers to strip out busy work across SDRs, engineering, marketing, and leadership, and why one SDR can now deliver the output of two to three. But this isn’t an AI hype conversation. Beth is equally candid about the fundamentals that don’t change: why stage-fit exec hiring still breaks scale-ups, why founders step away from sales too early (or not at all), and why clarity on ICP, pipeline targets, and operating rhythm matters more than ever.If you’re rethinking how to scale with fewer people, higher leverage, and sharper focus, this episode offers a clear, practical blueprint, without pretending the trade-offs don’t exist.📚 Episode Chapters: 01:50 - Hiring the right Sales Leadership  03:22 - Evolving GTM Strategies 16:45 - The intersection of Product and Sales 22:04 - Leveraging AI in your Sales Team 30:35 - Future of Work: Balancing AI and People 36:10 - Diversity in Leadership ⛳ Mentioned in today’s episode: Metomic: https://www.metomic.io/ 🎧 Continue listening… Make sure you listen to Building for efficient growth - Pavilion’s honest growth journey & the real problem behind the short CRO tenure with Sam Jacobs Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade? If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to... ✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform. ✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at podcast@scalewise.com✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube. See you again next week!

Building for efficient growth - Pavilion’s honest growth journey & the real problem behind the short CRO tenure with Sam Jacobs

Most growth stories celebrate momentum, but very few actually share the behind-the-scenes of what happens when momentum stalls. In this Making The Grade episode, we’re joined by Sam Jacobs, Founder & CEO of Pavilion - the community built to give in-seat GTM leaders the peers, frameworks, and rooms they need to operate under real pressure. Sam takes us on a journey from the early days of Revenue Collective dinners to Pavilion’s Covid-era surge. But there’s no skipping the hard bits in this episode. Sam shares the painful consequences of growing too fast, loosening ICP, and chasing scale for growth’s sake.This is a rare, unfiltered conversation about what happens when your biggest strength gets diluted, and how you rebuild when churn becomes the signal you can’t ignore.No matter whether you’re a Founder currently building or a GTM Leader facing the various challenges the market throws at you, there’s endless practical advice in this episode, ready for you to apply straight away.  📚 Episode Chapters01:15 - Pavilion’s origin story 09:23 - Scaling mistakes & lost focus 19:08 - The short CRO tenure 22:20 - Building P&L Fluency for Revenue Leaders 29:00 - Sustainable GTM Strategies 39:34 - Planning for a successful exit ⛳ Mentioned in today’s episode: Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/Intro to P&L Fluency: https://www.joinpavilion.com/pavilion-university/intro-to-pl-fluency 🎧 Continue listening… Make sure you listen to What it really takes to win in the US - Honest lessons from Natalie Johnson Enjoyed today's episode of Making The Grade? If you took something valuable from the episode, we'd love for you to... ✔️ Leave us a rating and review on your favourite podcast platform. ✔️ Share your ideas or guest suggestions with us at podcast@scalewise.com✔️ Stay in the loop with the latest from Making The Grade and ScaleWise by following us on LinkedIn or YouTube. See you again next week!