Time's Top 100 Influential Voice in AI, Benjamin Rosman, returns to Beyond Insights to discuss the latest trends, efficiencies, and decisions in the world of artificial intelligence.

In this episode, we are joined by Steven Werley, Owner of Closable.ai, to discuss how AI can serve as your silent business partner - handling repetitive tasks, client communication and more.

Rapid-fire recommendations:

• Software: GoHighLevel, a marketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) combination that allows users to manage their entire sales pipeline, call bookings, and create marketing pages.
• Best podcast: The best SEO podcast.
• Most valuable lesson about building a business: Execute and don't make it perfect; "done is better than perfect".
• Key takeaway: Don't "sleep on AI" and don't view it as a "big horrible terrible thing". There are many ways to use AI, even to help with simple tasks, and it can serve as a "silent business partner". If you haven't started using AI, "just start now".

Learn more about Steven and his business at: https://closable.ai/

In this episode, we explores why Japan has over 33,000 companies that have endured for more than a century. Our guest is Angad Soin, the Managing Director of ANZ and Global Chief Strategy Officer at Xero. Soin helps lead global strategy for the fintech platform and oversees operations across Australia and New Zealand.

The discussion focuses on six Zen-inspired business principles that promote longevity. The core takeaway from these principles is the importance of reinvention.

The Six Zen-Inspired Business Principles

1. Sharing Your Vision and Priorities: It's important to couple a vision with underlying values that provide "actionability" and guide employee behavior. For instance, Nintendo's vision of providing entertainment allowed them to evolve from a card trading company to a digital games and merchandising giant.

2. Having a Long-Term Vision: A vision should be enduring, actionable, and tangible. A long-term vision guides investments and choices over many years, enduring through multiple strategy cycles. For founders who want a lasting legacy, their vision should initially seem unachievable.

3. Your Employees and Your Customers Come First: The treatment of customers and employees must align with the long-term vision. Small business owners should build in time—quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly—to reflect on their written purpose and strategy to ensure their hiring and client choices are aligned. Course correction can involve difficult decisions, such as parting ways with a long-term employee no longer aligned with future goals.

4. The Harmony of Tradition and Innovation: This principle involves balancing a company’s original successful elements (tradition) with the need to evolve (innovation). The core promise—such as value, quality, or differentiation—should remain consistent even as the product changes.

5. Being Frugal: Frugality is not about not spending, but about allocating capital and time wisely. It also means maintaining cash reserves to have flexibility and "optionality" to make the right decisions during challenging times.

6. Building a System for Succession of Culture: For a lasting legacy, the company's operating principles must be systematized and passed down. This system must be built into the company's behaviors and systems, not relying on a single individual or just saying the words. New employees should be able to understand why things are done a certain way, not just that "we've always done it that way".

Rapid-Fire Recommendations

• Choose the Right Investors: Businesses should select investors who are committed to the long-term vision and strategy, even if it means losing money along the way. This ensures alignment and minimizes surprises.

• The Accountant's Role: Accountants and bookkeepers play an important role in advising clients on these principles. By asking clients about their "why" (e.g., whether they want a quick exit, a sale, or to hand the business down), they can tailor advice on entity structure and capital.

This episode features Steven Puri, a speaker and serial entrepreneur, who is the CEO of The Sukha Company, a flow state app. Steven has a unique background, having been a senior executive at film studios, running tech companies, and raising over $20 million in venture capital. Steven discusses what makes remote work successful and shares insights on achieving focus, mindset, and intentionality for knowledge work in a world full of distractions. He explains how to apply high-performance patterns from film and business to daily work life.

Rapid-Fire Recommendations:

• Software : The Sukha Company app.
• Best Lesson on Building a Business: Respect your natural rhythms.
• One Key Takeaway: Begin your day with intention.

In this episode of "Beyond Insights," we discuss how to appreciate customer feedback and respond in a way that benefits your business, customers, and teams. We are joined by Melanie Fischer, the Customer Experience Director at Xero in the UK, who has over 20 years of experience in embedding cultures of continuous improvement. Melanie shares insights on how to handle difficult feedback, the importance of "voice of the customer," and strategies for building customer loyalty.

Rapid-Fire Recommendations:

• Software: Gemini.
• Best Podcast: Women in Travel.
• Best Lesson on Building a Business: Balance the three elements of the business: customer, people, and profit.
• One Key Takeaway: Listen to your customers.

Many business owners may see compliance as a grudge expense – something they have to spend on but would rather not think about. But ensuring compliance is not only essential for business it also helps them grow faster and make better decisions. To join us in considering its importance, we are joined by Simon Magner, the Managing Director of Iridium Business Solutions.

Rapid-fire recommendations

• Software: Xero.

• Best book or podcast:

• • Book: The Nike book, Shoe Dog.

  • Podcast: A podcast with John Sanei and Erik Kruger called The Expansive.

• Most valuable lesson learned about building a business or businesses: Communicate more than you think you need to, and as early as you can in any situation.

• Key takeaway: If you own a company and are working with a professional service provider, understand their responsibilities and how you know they are properly supporting you.

In this episode, we talk about scaling businesses with Malcolm Box, the GM of Engineering for Xero in the UK. Box has experience in software development management at Amazon Web Services, Amazon, and other companies, and co-founded his own company, Tellybug, which created TV companion apps and a scalable back-end platform for shows like X Factor and Got Talent.

Key Principles of Scalability

Some of the key principles we cover include the following:

• Identify and Parallelize Bottlenecks: To achieve technical scalability, it's essential to understand "where the bottlenecks are" and "what's the rate limiting step". The way to scale a bottleneck is to "split that work out and parallelize it," similar to how a supermarket adds more checkouts.

• Simplicity and Managing Complexity: As systems scale, they get more complicated with more code and technology. Simplicity is essential, and one must "be always trying to find ways to... rein in the complexity, rein in the chaos". This applies to business processes too; a simple process with "well-defined stages" is better than relying on one person ("Brenda") who knows everything.

• Building for the Future (The Three Fs): When building for the future, the speaker focuses on three things:

• Fundamentals: Identify the fundamental things that will always be true about the business, such as Amazon customers always wanting things faster.

• Flexibility: Build flexibility in, and make things "easy to change," by designing systems in small, simple, well-understood parts that can be "mix[ed] and match[ed]".

• Foundations: Get the critical decisions right from day one, such as how data is managed to keep it "secure and private".

• Speed vs. Sustainability (One-Way and Two-Way Doors): The risk of not changing and getting left behind is the "worst risk of all". The difference between a one-way and a two-way door, which is an "Amazon thing," is a useful mental model for decisions.

• Two-way doors are easy to go through and come back out of if the decision is wrong. The goal is to turn one-way door decisions into two-way door decisions and go through two-way doors "really quickly".

• One-way doors are irreversible, so you need to "spend more time there" and be more careful.

• The Role of Data: Data is critical because it helps in making "decisions based on evidence". The speaker advises combining aggregate data with "anecdotes" like customer comments, as these provide concrete information for improvement.

Rapid fire

• Book/Podcast Recommendation: The Curious Cases podcast, a science show.

• Best Piece of Software: "Things," a to-do list app that runs on a phone and laptop.

• One Valuable Lesson Learned About Building a Business: It is always about the people; they matter more than anything else.

• One Key Message to Take Away: AI has made new things possible; experiment with it and use it to help things scale. Also, always test whatever you are scaling, because it will break in unexpected ways.
  

Taking risks is part of every entrepreneur’s journey — but not all risks are created equal. In this episode, we explore how business owners can take smarter risks — the kind that fuel growth, not failure.

Joining us is Ian Phillips, Head of Partner Sales at Xero in the UK. Ian has seen firsthand how bold decisions, backed by data and strategy, can transform a business.

Rapid-fire recommendations

• Software: Gemini

• Podcast: The Rest is Money podcast

• The most important lesson learned about building a business: To understand the need to alter the balance between speed and quality of execution. In the early stages, speed is vital. However, as you grow, in order to scale, quality becomes more important.

• Key takeaway: Build a cadence for reviewing for KPIs, probably for a weekly basis but at least on a monthly basis. If you’re a business owner, ask your accountant to build you this and if you’re an accountant, this is the great value you can provide to your client.