In season 2, episode 7 of Frog’s How to Scale podcast, Senior Partner Mike Reid speaks with Scale-Up CEO, Sebastien Blanc, about the mindset of a company builder.

Sebastien is a two time Software Scale-Up CEO. He is responsible for transforming the performance of two software companies from loss-making to profitability whilst maintaining steady growth. Sebastien was the CEO of Skimlinks, a former Frog Capital portfolio company, where he achieved 100% year on year growth with strong EBITDA margin.

In our conversation we discuss the three elements of company building: the operating system, capital allocation and getting the right team in place, including:

• Growth and customer satisfaction - the value of normalised metrics like net promoter score
• Why a revenue machine is more than a sales team and how to make it repeatable, scalable, predictable
• Great companies have 2 thirds of leads inbound and the importance of a good content strategy
• How outbound go to market strategies can lead to long decision cycle and too much to do by customers
• Product should be a customer facing role, with customer discovery and validation
• Refounding the business when it's time for transformation and when you have the right people the change takes care of itself
• Dynamic capital allocation using early positive and negative signals

We cover these topics and many others extensively in How to Scale, Frog’s library of Scale-Up insights, including further episodes of the podcast and Scale-Up toolkits from our Frog Operating Partners. Subscribe to our podcast or follow us on Linkedin to ensure you never miss a new episode. We welcome all feedback, questions or topic suggestions for us to cover in future episodes, so please email us. We’d love to hear from you.

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