On Let’s Talk Growth: from sales to running Growth Geyser

Kyle Nelson and Eli Libby had me on Let’s Talk Growth for a conversation about how Growth Geyser came to exist: the move from selling to building the systems salespeople run on, how I decide whether an idea is worth pursuing at all, and where automation genuinely saves time. On air they introduce the show as The Peak Podcast, which is the same programme.

What we talked about

The technical extension of your sales and marketing teams

Kyle opened by asking what we actually do, and the way I put it in the episode is still the way I’d put it. Marketers are good at the creative half: social, design, campaigns. Salespeople are gregarious; they want to talk to people and close. Sitting underneath both of them is a platform of systems: the CRM, the marketing automation, the integrations between them. That layer takes technical skill, and that’s the part we handle. We think of ourselves as the technical extension of those two teams.

It isn’t purely tactical, though. Sometimes it’s a new build, sometimes it’s someone calling with a headache we have to go and fix, and often it’s both: they want something new, but before we build it we go and look at what’s already there and correct what went wrong the first time.

How this started

I was doing sales and business development at an advertising technology company, and the owner had a good problem: leads arriving with no CRM to put them in. He asked me to go and find one. We landed on ActiveCampaign, and setting it up did something I didn’t expect: it did a lot of things I wished I’d had in a business I’d owned and sold back in 2009. I took a liking to the technical side, and with a sales background already there, the two halves fused.

A couple of months later I opened an Upwork profile, really just to see whether anyone would hire me for this. They did. That was 2018, and it’s been full-time ever since.

Charging less while you’re still learning

What made going full-time survivable was accepting that I’d charge a lower rate at the start. I was learning partly on other people’s dime and I said so: look, I’m new at this, I might not get everything right. As long as I was transparent about it, people were fine with it. The knowledge stacked up from there.

The result clients actually report is time

Asked what sticks out from the work, it’s almost always time savings. I’ve dealt with a lot of companies whose systems are simply messy, and what still surprises me is how successful some of them are anyway. You find yourself thinking how much further along they’d be if the operation underneath had been tidier. Most of what we do is streamlining and simplifying, because people like to make things more difficult than they need to be.

That’s not an accident of what I sell. I’m a minimalist and I hate wasting time. Impatience is my actual weakness, so I look at everything, professionally and otherwise, and ask how it could be more streamlined.

Validate before you go all in

The hosts asked what I’d say to someone nervous about taking the leap, and my answer was to dip a toe in first. Don’t dive into something just because you think it’s the greatest idea in the world; test whether it gets any traction at all. I could do what I did because I’d failed at other businesses before, and because putting up a profile for this kind of work got responses almost immediately. That was the signal. Try things, but don’t go all in until you’ve checked there’s demand.

There’s a second half to that which gets missed: it isn’t only whether a market exists, it’s whether it’s saturated. Some types of client go better for us than others, and a good part of that is simply fewer competitors in those corners.

Since then

This was recorded in late 2024, and the part that moved furthest is AI. At the time I was describing something I was only starting to build: a system that could take what was said on a sales call and turn it into the follow-up. That idea now runs on every discovery call I take.

The day-to-day change is bigger than I expected. I said in the episode that I hate creating content, and that editing a first draft is a completely different experience from facing an empty page. I used to block off three hours on a weekend just to work out where to start. That blocker is gone. The same is true of the work itself: data cleanup that used to need a developer and a script is now routine, and the planning conversation takes longer than the execution.

If you run a 10 to 100 person team and the systems have become the bottleneck, here’s how we work.

Watch the episode on YouTube. Thanks to Kyle and Eli for having me on.