ï»ż00:00 - Introduction to the Creative Business Podcast
Ken Thomas: Small business owners and even scale-ups don't have time to invest in people who are just interested. It's the biggest mistake I see. People wonder why they get ghosted. That fundamentally is why they get ghosted.
Brad Eather: Hello and welcome to the second season of the newly rebranded Creative Business Podcast, a show exploring creativity's role in sales, leadership, and business. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a marketing and communications consultant delivering strategic workshops that bring a consistent message to your market.
One of the biggest traps in business is being too good at what you do. For many small business owners, the very skills that help build their company eventually become the bottleneck that stops it from growing. The secret sauce lives entirely in their own heads. They might be excellent at what they do, but what they aren't excellent at is being teachers. They often struggle to delegate tasks because there's no blueprint to take them forward.
01:44 - What is Revenue Architecture in B2B Sales?
Brad Eather: My next guest argues that the path to true scale isn't just hiring more people and hoping for the best, but building revenue architecture. Ken Thomas is an MBA-qualified growth specialist and the founder of TenClub. He's spent years helping businesses move from the chaos of ad-hoc closing to a structured system where marketing, sales, and customer success act as one cohesive flywheel. He calls this "revenue independence"âthe point where a business generates revenue by choice rather than founder obligation.
Today, we're going to look past the tech buzzwords to redefine what a go-to-market strategy actually is, why it's essential for established businesses (not just startups), and how a documented playbook can turn a new hire into a top performer in just a matter of weeks. Welcome to the show, Ken.
Ken Thomas: Thanks for having me, Brad. I appreciate the introductionâthat's better than the introductions I give myself when I'm meeting new people. Thanks very much for the invitation.
Brad Eather: No problems at all. Well, you're going to have an opportunity to introduce yourself now. You've lived the full cycle of selling, from field sales to customer service. You've now got an MBA and you're building revenue engines for others. So how did you get here? Why are you the person sitting across from me today talking about go-to-market?
Ken Thomas: Getting to know the Australian sales landscape and revenue generation, I realized that my experience is quite unique because the first decade of my career wasn't in sales. It was serving people. I went along the management route at Woolworths Supermarkets, starting on registers and working my way up. I never realized just how important those skills were going to be for today, particularly about serving your customer, understanding what they want and need, and the psychology of what makes people buy.
From there, I went into field sales at Kimberly-Clark. Initially, I didn't want to do the role; I never wanted to be in sales. My impression of sales was the greasy real estate agent or the dodgy used car salesman. I didn't realize that sales is just about solving the problem for the person in front of you. When that switch flicked, everything changed for me.
I went from Kimberly-Clark to being the first sales hire at a high-end fabrication company before completing my MBA, shifting into FinTech, and learning everything there was to know about B2B payments. Having been across all of these different industries, I picked up a few things along the way.
When I made the decision to start TenClub, it was with a core belief that founders just needed a little bit of helpâin particular, actually getting deals across the line because they didn't have enough time. While I started TenClub as an outsourced closing business, I quickly realized this was a systems and architecture problem, not a follow-up problem at all.
05:48 - Common Go-To-Market Strategy Misconceptions
Ken Thomas: I started dabbling in building basic elements of the sales engine for these businesses. The more I did that, the more I saw them succeed and grow. It really turned for me when I built my first full-blown playbook for a business and saw the flow-on effects. That business in particular went from two to six salespeople. We brought a new salesperson into the business who had no prior industry experience, and they closed 18 deals in their first 10 weeks. They just followed the system; that's all they did.
They understood the mission, vision, and values of the business. We knew how they positioned themselves in the market, exactly who their target audience was, and what their problems and pain points were. They knew exactly how to qualify and disqualify through the methodology we put in place, and we set up a clear structure for how to do triage and discovery.
Brad Eather: We're going to get into the "how" of this process in a moment. But what I want to do is bring it back and talk about go-to-market misconceptions. Obviously, there's a lot of hype around tech stacks, automation, and AI. What are the misconceptions you find most business owners and founders have about what a go-to-market strategy actually means?
Ken Thomas: Firstly, a new tool will not solve your problem. I'm going to put that out there and make it really clear. You can have a CRM that's fully spec'd out and all the different automation tools, but if you don't know what you stand for as a business, where you're positioned in the market, the problem that you solve, and who is actually going to buy, the tools are irrelevant. It actually doesn't matter. You've got to do that foundational work first.
08:50 - Fixing the Founder Bottleneck in Sales Scaling
Ken Thomas: Once you have those fundamentals, then you can start looking at how to automate things in the backend to make the business more efficient. Go-to-market really starts with understanding the pain. It's knowing whether you're a distinct business that can command value pricing because you're playing in a blue ocean, or whether you're a commodity business playing in a highly competitive market where your margin structure determines whether you win. Once you know that, you systemize so others can execute. For me, that's what go-to-market should be. It's not tools, it's not tech, it's not RevOpsâit's how you actually take people along the journey to buy.
Brad Eather: Which is a sales process, right? Run me through quickly: the types of businesses that you're working with, where are they at scaling-wise?
Ken Thomas: The majority of businesses I'm working with right now are varied. I've got one professional services business that has just ticked over a quarter-million dollars in revenue, but the founder is the one doing all the delivery. We've built the playbook, and they're now testing and validating it with a view of bringing a sales resource into the business so we can ensure the process works. That's one example on the smaller end of the scale.
On the other end of the scale, we've got a global prop-tech business that has sales resources all around the world. Yet, the founder is still the primary salespersonâthey generated 80% of the logos for that business and are still the best salesperson. We're working on creating something repeatable and scalable so new salespeople can come into the organization and hit the ground running. It's very broad, but ultimately, the founder is the bottleneck. They're the best salesperson, and others can't execute like them.
11:56 - Uncovering Customer Value & Your Ideal Client Profile
Brad Eather: I touched on that at the beginningâthe idea of the founder being the secret sauce. They have the lived experience from day-one inception through first customer acquisition, next acquisition, and closing deals. They have the system in their head, but they're not necessarily the ones able to teach that to somebody else, maybe due to time restrictions. Is that where you've found your business evolvingâsolving a process problem that lies in the founder's head, and figuring out how to get it out?
Ken Thomas: Yes, and it comes down to revenue independence. If the business is dependent on you as the primary source of revenue generation, you will never be able to scale. I have a core belief that while you're in that startup or scale-up phaseâand even as you push into mid-market and enterpriseâyou have to capture the essence of how the founder grew the business. You document that as a process and a system, blending it with best-practice expertise on what makes a good sales process. But at the heart of it is the essence of the founder. That's what really moves the needle.
Typically, a salesperson will come into an organization with a black book of contacts to work through, but there is a whole bunch of issues that can come with that. There's an expectation from the founder that because they're a "salesperson," they should just be able to sell. But you and I both know you can be the world's best salesperson, but if you don't understand where the product or service sits in the market, who you're supposed to serve, and how they buy, you're really going to struggle. We have to extract that knowledge and create documented processes.
Brad Eather: When you talk about differentiating yourself in the market, to me, that speaks to a conversation about what's actually valuable to your customer. Understanding the founder's story is a way of translating what is actually valuable to the customer, because that is the sales process. You start with a potential client, understand what they find valuable, and then deliver on that value. It all comes down to value. How do you think about uncovering what's actually valuable to their customers from that founder story?
13:13 - Systemizing Sales for Small Business Growth
Ken Thomas: First and foremost, they need to speak to their customers and ask them why they bought. That's always a great place to start. Truly understanding the pain point and the problem the customer was experiencing first is key. The founder started the business because they had a core belief that there was a problem in the market they had a particular way of solving. They then tested and validated it. The business would not have grown if there was no market validation. You have to start directly with the customers who have already bought, and then go out to the wider market to retest that validation and see if that pain is applicable to others.
Brad Eather: If that's your first stepâtalking to customers and getting into the mindset of their problems and resultsâtalk me through the rest of the process. How do you document something from start to finish so a new salesperson can get results in 10 weeks?
Ken Thomas: Again, it comes back to starting with your mission, vision, and values. You need to know what either makes the business better if they're playing in a commodity space, or distinct if they're playing in a blue ocean value space. Once you have that, you define your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). In B2B, this is the exact business that buys, followed by the personaâwho is the decision-maker and who is the champion.
You need to have that really clearly defined. I don't just mean saying, "I want to deal with manufacturers." Okay, what kind of manufacturers? Where are they? How big is the business? How many employees do they have? What is the specific pain point you are solving for them, and why do they need it solved? Get really granular about who that ICP and persona are. For example: "The managing director who works 70 hours a week, doesn't have an assistant, and is caught up in paperwork." Define it clearly so you can test whether their pain point is valid when you go to market to validate your assumptions.
I would also add that you want to understand your competitive landscape really well. Who are you directly and indirectly competing against, and what forces are affecting the market? In the interest of brevity, I won't go into absolute depth, but you have to do those things first.
17:04 - Gathering Market Intelligence to Assess the Battlefield
Ken Thomas: Once you're out in the market, you want to test and validate that pain point. You can look at Clayton Christensen's "jobs to be done" framework for your ICP. You could also look at Daniel Priestley's waitlist conceptâabsolutely brilliant for testing a new product, much like Kickstarter or Tesla's $1,000 deposits. It's the same principle: push something out, spend a little bit of money on ads, and see what comes back.
Another way to do it is by gaining permission to market and cataloging the actual market that exists. Adam Mandarovic from Close Circuit Selling is massive about this, and there's a good reason why. An old mentor of mine, who was a primary sales consultant for KBR and Halliburton back in the '80s, taught me my very first lesson by mapping out four quadrants. You need to know where your total addressable market sits: Who is buying now? Who is buying soon? Who is buying later? And who is never going to buy?
Brad Eather: I'm going to stop you there, because I think the sales role often gets confused. You put someone in the role and they're meant to be doing immediate sales activity. Stopping for a second to go back to the basics and assess market conditions could be perceived by some as ineffectual or not moving the needle because it's not "active" selling. How do you address that mindset where you need to stop, go back to the beginning, and figure out what's actually happening rather than just cold calling to look productive?
Ken Thomas: What do the best military leaders over thousands of years do before they make a decision? They assess the battlefield, the terrain, and the conditions. It is literally no different when you go to market as a business. You need to understand the market, the individuals, the businesses within it, and whether there's a genuine opportunity for them to buy your product or service.
To someone who says, "You've just got to get your head down and get at it"âyes, there is a time for activity, but you need to know who you're talking to first. It's first-principles thinking that has been somewhat lost over the years due to the myth that more activity automatically means more leads and more sales. Noâthe right activity at the right time to the right business individual means more sales. You need to know exactly who you want to talk to and when to talk to them, which means you have to catalog the market.
21:22 - The Psychology of Buying: When Do Customers Say Yes?
Ken Thomas: For me, the best way to catalog the market from a B2B sales perspective is over the phone. It's a call to gain permission to market, deliver something of value, and give first. Once you've given value, you earn the opportunity to ask questions and gather market intelligence.
I put specific frameworks around this. Adam Mandarovic has been really good for this, because my initial thought process around cold calling wasn't as well-formed as his. My initial perception, taught by my old mentor, was simply that you must gather intelligence on every single call; if you aren't gathering intelligence, the call is wasted. An old sales leader of mine had the exact same premise. Mind you, they believed in a one-call close because they were exceptionally skilled at it, but they always gathered intelligence first without fail.
I think this intelligence gathering is really missed now, especially when people are pushing lazy, automated AI DMs and emails. They might look personalized, but there are clear signs that they aren't, or they're just blanket generic crap. It's sending the same generic email to every single person in the market to see which 3% come back. What they don't consider is the other 40% of the market they've just completely turned off. Those people can become loud detractors who influence the rest of the market into never buying from you. We fail to bring things back to first principles. More activity doesn't equal more sales; more activity at the right time to the right person equals more sales.
Brad Eather: What I'm understanding is that this brings it back to your early experience in customer service. Calling to understand the market allows you to have a help-focused mindset rather than a close-focused mindset. Because you're giving first and asking permission, that mindset allows you into the room where you can position your product, gather intel, and prove you can actually help. Is that a fair assessment?
Ken Thomas: Yes, absolutely. I actually think a number of salespeople don't spend enough time looking at brand positioning and marketing strategy because they think it's a waste of time. But first principles dictate that you need to get permission from the market, create a promise around the problem you solve, and then deliver on that promise. Everything revolves around that.
I'll add another thing from John Dean (JD) at Sales Director Central. He made a great point to me recently: customers buy when they are ready. Every salesperson needs to understand that you can try to create urgency and force people to buy, but inevitably, they will buy when they are ready. It's the job of brand, marketing, sales, and customer success to ensure you are enabling that person to understand the pain they're in and how you can solve it. They will only buy when the pain reaches a point where they realize, "This is too much, I have to fix this."
One of my favorite analogies for this is riding a bike when the chain comes off. The first time, it's annoying, you put it back on, and it's fine. The fifth time it happens, you'll probably get the bike serviced and continue on. But it's the one time the chain comes off, you get flung off the bike, and you get injuredâthat's when you say, "Enough is enough, I'm getting a new bike." We often forget that buying psychology when setting up brand positioning, marketing strategies, or executing sales.
24:34 - Permission-Based Sales Approach: Give Before You Ask
Brad Eather: We forget about human behaviors at the core, and what motivates people to do something. As small business owners, we really have to get targeted around this stuff because the sheer volume of things we have to do daily limits our time for outreach. When we do outreach, we need to know exactly what we are doing and why. Tell me a little bit about your experience as a business owner and how that's influenced your thinking about the sales role within a business context.
Ken Thomas: Every time I mention to small business owners that phone calling should be their primary outbound channel, they immediately throw their hands up and say, "I'm not calling anyone, I hate it when people call me!" But that's because they assume the call is just to sell them something they don't need. So, they take the easy way out and send sloppy, generic messages via LinkedInâwhich I get all the time. I don't have time to interact with people one-on-one like that because I have to focus on my own business development.
25:19 - B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Small Businesses
Ken Thomas: Most B2B businesses need to focus on three core channels to generate leads: outreach, marketing, and partnerships/referrals/networking. Unless you are B2C, if you aren't actively executing at least two of those channels, you are leaving yourself completely exposed.
A lot of businesses rely purely on partnerships, referrals, and networking. For me, that remains my primary channel because it's the nature of how I work, and I spend a lot of time focusing on it. I also spend a lot of time on marketing, positioning, and my brand because I know I can deliver a lot of value that way. Eventually, someone sees that value and says, "I want to have a conversation with Ken."
When it comes to raw outbound leads, I don't do it as much as I probably should because my time is a finite resource and I don't have the capacity to execute it fully. So, I chose the other two. If a business is just doing marketing, they need to find a secondary channel to generate leads. Outbound will get you the fastest results, but it is massively time-intensive for a business owner. This is where having documented systems and processes makes a huge difference.
As a business owner, you have to get super clear on which channels work for you and double down on them. If you rely on word-of-mouth, add networking or partnerships to secure multiple sources from that one channel. If you're doing marketing, maximize your sources from it. You can never rely on just one single thing, or you leave yourself open.
Brad Eather: I agree, and I like how you've delineated that into three distinct topics: marketing, partnerships/referrals, and outbound. As a business owner, I view my communications on LinkedIn as a way to continue the conversation. Having that presence in the market gives you a twofold advantage: you can continue public conversations with people you're already talking to, and you can bring new people in.
28:26 - The Difference Between Triage and Discovery in the Age of AI
Brad Eather: Let's pivot from the top of the funnel and refocus on the discovery phase. Do you have a strong opinion about the importance of discovery, its core nature, how AI has changed it, and where the focus of discovery should be headed?
Ken Thomas: I am incredibly big on the need for human connection. AI is great if you just need a form filled out or generic answers to generic questions. If you're calling a gym, for example, and you just need to know opening times, AI is fine. But if you are trying to understand whether someone is just mildly interested or actually qualified, it requires a human being. I'll hang my hat on that. There may come a time when AI can handle those nuanced discussions, but where we sit right now in 2026, it's just not ready. I've tested a few solutions and none of them cut the mustard or even come close. It still has to be a human.
Discovery is the most important part of your sales processâit informs everything. It comes in two distinct parts: triage and full discovery. Triage is that initial 5-to-10-minute conversation where you make a go or no-go decision on a lead based on very clear questions. Literally anyone in your business should be able to ask these questions and get answers before you progress into full-blown discovery.
To use another analogy, think of the person doing triage as a nurse in an emergency room. You come in, and they ask: "Can you breathe? Where does it hurt?" These simple, basic questions determine whether you need to see a doctor immediately, see a doctor later, or if you can just go home. Every business needs that qualifying criteria to make a go/no-go decision.
Once you get past triage into discovery, if you do it well, you funnel someone down from understanding their motivations to mapping their situation. I use elements of the SPICED methodology here, but you can apply any framework. What is the pain and problem? What impact can you have on their business? When is the critical event? Who is involved in the decision process, and what does it look like?
Through this, you determine if a lead is truly qualified for a pitch, a demo, an evaluation, or a stakeholder meeting. Small business owners and scale-ups do not have time to invest in people who are just interested. It's the biggest mistake I see, hands down. A prospect being interested does not equal them being qualified.
People wonder why they get ghosted. It's because they didn't do triage and they didn't do discovery properly. That fundamentally is why they get ghosted, simple as that. Your proposal isn't the thing that wins you the deal unless you are in a strict RFP/RFQ situation where the document is everything. Even then, there's upfront work you should be doing so they know exactly who you are and what you stand for before the proposal hits their desk. If you aren't an RFP-driven business, your proposal can literally be a five-line email if your discovery process was executed correctly.
Brad Eather: I like how you phrased the two parts of discovery because they require two different skill sets. If you are armed with those defined discovery questions, you can find leads anywhereâat a networking event or even a party. You just ask a couple of questions, say, "Hey, we should talk about this further," and bring them into triage. If you don't have those questions defined, you're setting your people up for failure.
Ken Thomas: I would just add one important distinction very quickly: I mentioned triage should be able to be done by anyone in the business. However, if you don't have that resource yet and you're a founder doing all the selling, you are the only person who can combine triage and discovery into a single conversation. Otherwise, they absolutely need to be two separate conversations.
34:06 - Applying Design Thinking in Business & Sales Architecture
Brad Eather: That's a great point. We're coming to the end of the conversation and we've got a great grasp of go-to-market strategies, where the gaps are, and how you close them using lessons from your own journey. To tie into the theme of the show, what is your definition of creativity?
Ken Thomas: I love this question, Brad. When you're a child, you just make stuff. My son comes home from kinder every day with a drawing or a painting. He's putting things together with no conscious concept that what he's doing is, in its essence, creativity. When I was in primary school, I used to write little books, having no idea that was being creative.
Throughout my teenage years, I actually told myself I wasn't creative. As an aspiring guitarist, I was really good at playing other people's songs, but in my opinion, I was no good at creating my own. I lived with that mindset for a very long timeâbelieving I could copy something, but not create anything.
Everything changed when I did my MBA and took a course on design thinking. The professor, Terry Balter, made everyone realize in the very first session that every single person on this planet is creative; they just don't realize it. The art of making something is creativity. That's it. If you make anything, you are being creative. Even if you are just following a recipe from a book to make a meal, you are going to put your own unique spin on it. I guarantee the meal you make will be different from the meal I make using the same recipe, because our own touch, flavor, and essence go into it. Everyone is creative; you just have to realize it.
Brad Eather: How do you think that realization has served you in navigating your own business journey?
Ken Thomas: Way better now, because I realize that building these playbooks, drawing a line in the sand, testing, validating, and iterating them is my outlet for creativity. The same goes for creating content on LinkedInâtesting things, seeing if they work, and having fun making them. There are times during my day where I get into a complete flow state just making something for the business, and it brings me pure joy. It's something I never would have considered before Terry Balter planted that seed in my head.
40:54 - Embracing Design Thinking and Corporate Creativity
Brad Eather: What I love about your definition of creativity is that it leaves room for reinterpretation. Nothing is fixed; it can always be improved or changed. Having a clear focus or strategy within a structured framework like the one you've presented today, while still maintaining the creative ability to test, trial, and figure out how to do things better, is something people often get bogged down in. They think the system is the system and cannot be improved, whereas thinking laterally can open up a completely new trajectory.
Ken Thomas: Of course it can. Everything can be improved until you get the outcome you desire. A great example of this is David Ogilvy. They ran the exact same Jaguar magazine ad for 20 years because they had tested, validated, and tried all these different things until they found what worked flawlessly. They stuck with it until it didn't work anymore, and then without any ego, they said, "Okay, we need to make something new," and they tested, validated, and created again.
Everything is always changing and we always have to iterate. There is nothing wrong with accepting that something can always be better. Once you achieve the desired outcome, keep riding it. When it stops working, start again, change it, and test it. It's okay to do that.
Brad Eather: For me, that is the absolute essence of strategy: having the overall vision and being able to adapt as you work through it.
Ken Thomas: Strategy is one of the most creative things a person can do, it really is.
Brad Eather: I think so too. The nature of this podcast is really about challenging corporate assumptions that creativity is not something that belongs in the office. As you've outlined, creativity has the potential to help everyone work through their roles, their lives, and self-improvement.
Ken Thomas: If you're working in a mid-market corporate business and you have an idea for how something could be improved, as long as you aren't hurting anyone or causing adverse effects like privacy issues, just go and do it. I was able to completely change the way a previous business I worked for went to market with small businesses simply because I said, "I think this is the way to do it, I'm going to go do it." I made my own proof of concept, showed that it worked, and we made it happen.
Don't sit back and think you aren't allowed to do it. Go do it, get proof of concept and proof of value, and make it happen. It doesn't matter what environment you're in; you can always bring your own taste and flair to things. That's the great thing about being an entrepreneurâyou have no one telling you that you can't be creative. You don't have those restrictions, which is why I love it, and I'm sure it's the same for you. You can just go execute and see what happens. But even if you are inside an organization, just go do it. Make it happen and be creative.
Brad Eather: Ken, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you today on the Creative Business Podcast. Where can people get in touch with you?
Ken Thomas: LinkedIn is always the best channel for me, so check me out there. I am also on Instagram and TikTok as @KenGrowthRef. I'm looking forward to, as you put it, continuing the conversation there.
Brad Eather: No worries, give him a cold call, go for it! Alright mate, thanks for the chat.
Ken Thomas: Thanks Brad, cheers.
