What if the biggest barrier to scaling your B2B business wasn’t your operations, market conditions, or even your team, but you, the founder? In this episode of Predictable B2B Success, Vinay Koshy speaks with Brian Smith, founder of Strategy Ladders, serial entrepreneur, and seasoned leadership coach who’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs unlock the next level of growth.
Brian’s journey spans boat-washing on a Florida island to closing multi-million dollar deals, and he’s distilled years of experience into a simple but powerful premise: your offer is your business, and your mindset is the real growth engine. Discover why most strategic frameworks keep you trapped, which common “security blanket” hires are holding you back, and why focusing 100% on sales, especially when juggling firefighting and growth, is the first rule of scaling smartly.
Brian challenges conventional wisdom with thought-provoking insights on operational bottlenecks, founder mindsets, and the art of constructing an offer so compelling that your brand (and business) can scale beyond your personal involvement. Whether you’re stuck at six figures or dreaming of an exit, this conversation is packed with tactical stories and no-nonsense advice you won’t hear anywhere else. Tune in and rethink what’s really driving your B2B success.
Some topics we explore in this episode include:
- Brian’s entrepreneurial background and the creation of Strategy Ladders
- Key challenges in scaling B2B service businesses
- The founder’s role as a growth bottleneck
- Mindset and emotional filters that hinder business progress
- Rapid, high-quality decision making for growth
- The importance of refining business offers and clear positioning
- Strategy Ladders’ unique advisory approach—including expert pairing and mindset coaching
- Examples of overcoming mental roadblocks (sales resistance, undervaluing services)
- Building clarity and authority in business messaging, especially on LinkedIn
- Creating a growth-oriented culture and strategic hiring (“growth hires” vs. “clone hires”)
- And much, much more...
Predictable B2B Success
If you lead a bootstrapped or funded B2B tech company and need revenue to be predictable, not just possible, this podcast was built for you.
Predictable B2B Success is the only show built exclusively for CEOs at seed-to-Series C tech companies who are ready to replace random acts of growth with a scalable, repeatable revenue system from first dollar to $50M+ ARR and beyond.
Each week, host Vinay Koshy sits down with elite revenue operators, GTM leaders, and founders who have solved the hardest problem in funded B2B tech: turning chaotic, unpredictable growth into something structural, a system that holds under investor pressure, market shifts, and scale.
What you will walk away with every episode:
- Operating frameworks for building predictable revenue pipelines
- Real playbooks from founders who have scaled B2B companies from seed to Series C and beyond
- GTM, RevOps, demand generation, and category design insights built for C-suite decisions, not marketing teams
- Strategies that compound across your organisation, not one-off tactics that fade
Why 500+ episodes and a 5.0-star rating?
This is not a show about inspiration. It is a show about operating clarity. Every guest is chosen because they have built systems in sales, content, community, product, or customer success that made revenue predictable. After 500+ episodes, the patterns are unmistakable. This archive is your competitive advantage.
Trusted by founders and CEOs at bootstrapped and funded B2B tech companies across SaaS, cleantech, AI, and enterprise software.
Rated 5.0 stars on Apple Podcasts. Ranked top 5 B2B podcast by Feedspot (2026). 500+ episodes since 2020.
Subscribe now and get a new episode every week, turning your revenue from a moving target into a scalable system.
Show notes, frameworks, and transcripts: sproutworth.com Subscribe to The Inclined, the weekly newsletter for funded B2B tech CEOs: sproutworth.com/newsletter Connect with Vinay Koshy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vinaykoshy