Peer Effect
Best way to scale? Your peers have the answers.
This is the podcast for scaleup founders looking for insightful, actionable wisdom from some of the best operators around. Each week we’ll explore one secret that other founders and experts are using right now and how to implement it.
It’s practical wisdom to build the company AND life you want. Hosted by renowned founder coach and advisor James Johnson.
You’ve survived to £1m, now let’s scale to £10m+.
Episodes
212 episodes
Is It Your Plan or Your Execution? | Peer Effect Post Bag
A founder writes in feeling off track and wants to know if the problem is his plan or his execution. James Johnson and Freddie Birley don't let him off with "it's both."They walk through how to tell which one is actually broken, why most...
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Building A Business To Sell With Alex Fenton
Three exits in, Alex Fenton knows exactly what buyers look for, and it's not what most founders think. James and Alex talk through keeping every door open, why a three year plan beats a five year one, and the blunt piece of feedback from a mana...
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Why You Compete With Your Co-Founder
James and Freddie tackle a question most founders won't say out loud: feeling insecure or competitive with your co-founder. They get into what's actually driving it, the conversation that fixes it faster than any amount of self-reflection, and ...
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Antoine Pouppez: The Founder Who Refused to Outsource
Antoine Pouppez co-founded neuroClues six years ago. Today it's raised over £25M and employs 40+ people across Belgium and France, building MedTech that treats neurological disorders through eye tracking.His approach from day one: if it'...
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Your Team Isn't Slow. You're Not Clear.
A founder writes in asking why their team won't move faster. James Johnson and Freddie Birley take the question apart, and the real answer has almost nothing to do with the team.They get into what actually causes execution to stall at Se...
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Why Your Team Hides Problems Until It's Too Late: Ryan Saridar, Elryan.com
Ryan Saridar runs Elryan.com, one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces in Iraq, and he's built a rule that changes how his entire management team handles bad news. Nobody on his team gets to sit on a problem and hope it resolves itself.
The Pattern That Predicts Whether Coaching Actually Works
James Johnson and Freddie Birley answer a listener question on how to actually get value from coaching, not the version you perform for LinkedIn, the version where you say the thing you have been avoiding saying out loud.They cover the l...
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Building Trust With Your Number Two as You Scale
Clare coaches the role nobody talks about: the COO or CFO sat next to a founder CEO, expected to challenge the person who built the company and signs their pay cheque. Most coaches work with the founder. Clare works almost exclusively with the ...
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Keeping a Sense of Self When Everything Feels Uncertain | Peer Effect Post Bag
James and Freddie tackle a question most founders won't admit they're sitting with: when the business is in flux and you're in performance mode around the clock, how do you stay connected to who you actually are?This isn't about rest. It...
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What a Hired Operator Sees That You Can't | Bethany Ayers
Bethany Ayers, CEO of Metomic, has scaled businesses from the inside - as COO, CRO, and now CEO - and she has a very clear view of what founders get wrong when they think they need to hand the keys over. The insight she shares here will make mo...
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How Do You Stabilise Your Team When Nothing Is Certain? | Peer Effect Post Bag
Ben asked how you hold a team together when you can't give them certainty. James and Freddie get into why that framing is already part of the problem - and what good leadership actually looks like when everything is shifting.If you've be...
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How to Know If Your Marketing Is Built on Guesswork | Will Gadsby Peet
Will Gadsby Peet has been a fractional CMO across hundreds of business models. The pattern he keeps coming back to has nothing to do with channels, budgets, or agencies.Most founders lose touch with the one thing that made their early gr...
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Overwhelmed by AI? Here's How Founders Are Actually Dealing With It
Beth asked what most founders are thinking but haven't said aloud: how do you make decisions about the future of your company when AI is making everything feel uncertain?James and Freddie get into what's really sitting underneath that qu...
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What 19 Founders and CEOs Taught Me About Scaling | Season 6 Mid-Season Breakdown
19 founders. Rockets, guinea pigs, co-CEO structures, a community of 200,000 built in two years. Every conversation different. Three patterns kept coming back.James breaks down what's actually moving across Season 6 — why the founders ga...
How Do You Hold Your Co-Founder Accountable? | Peer Effect Post Bag
Anna's question sounds straightforward. It isn't. James and Freddie break down why founders only start asking this question when they already know something is off - and what to actually do about it.One question. Three conversations hidi...
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From VC to Founder: Building RedpineAI and Thinking 100x Bigger | Anders Hammerbäck
What changes when you stop investing in startups and start building one yourself?James Johnson is joined by Anders Hammerbä...
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The Founder Bottleneck: Scaling Without Losing Control
A founder asks:"I want to focus on the future, but I don't trust the present to happen."It's a question that sits at the heart of scaling.As companies grow, founders are asked to spend less time executing and more time lead...
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How Mariane Bekker Built a Global Founder Network of 200K Using Community
Founder community building, startup networking, and viral growth systems are changing how companies are built.Mariane Bekker, founder of Founders Bay, built a 200,000+ founder, investor, and operator network in under two years by rethink...
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Founder Fear: “What If My Company Fails and I’m Unemployable?”
In this episode of The Peer Effect Post Bag, James Johnson and Freddie Birley answer a question many founders quietly carry:...
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NASA Tried This in the 70s. Jasper Deprez's Startup Is Doing It Now.
Jasper Deprez is building TerraSpark, a company focused on space-based solar power - with the goal of delivering commercial energy from space to Earth by 2030.Before this, he spent a decade bootstrapping a startup in employee engagement...
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Will Letting Go of a Senior Hire Destroy Your Team?
Rebecca asks: "If I make a senior change, will it destabilise my team?" James and Freddie break down why this fear keeps founders stuck - and why inaction is almost always the bigger risk. They cover: how to read the rea...
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Why Co-CEOs Can Be a Superpower
What actually makes a co-founder relationship work?In this episode of Peer Effect, James Johnson sits down with Verna co-founders and co-CEOs Rafi Cohen and Dr. Matthew Brown.They unpack why they chose a co-CEO structure, how they...
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Founder Depression: What Nobody Talks About
Founder life isn’t just pressure - it’s pressure plus isolation.In this Peer Effect Post bag, James Johnson and Freddie Birle...
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