Why Business Growth Starts With the Founder – An Interview with Ben Robins

Ben Robins is a life and executive coach and keynote speaker who spent over a decade in leadership, including running EMEA for a global consultancy with clients such as Google and Meta. He knows firsthand what he now sees consistently in his clients, the limitation isn't capability or discipline, but what people believed they needed to succeed. His approach starts by removing rather than adding. Once what's blocking them is cleared, clients can see what's actually possible and start building intentionally across everything that matters, not just their careers. Ben works with clients across London, Dubai, Singapore, and the US.

Ben Robins, Business & Leadership Coach

Who is Ben Robins? Introduce yourself, your hobbies, your favourites, you at home and in business. Tell us something interesting about yourself.

At 22, I worked on a cattle station in the outback of Australia. On a particularly sweltering day, I passed the wrong tool to my boss, and he exploded in rage. This happened most days. But what I could never quite understand was that he would almost always come and apologise afterwards.

He knew what kind of leader he wanted to be. He just often fell short of it.

That question became the central premise of a lot of my coaching, "Why do we know what kind of business owner or leader we want to be, but sometimes fall short of it? And what does it take to actually change that?"

From that cattle station, I motorbiked through Vietnam, spent several months in India, and taught English to children in South Korea whose language I could barely speak. Eventually, I made my way into boardrooms in London, Amsterdam and Seattle, leading Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for a global e-commerce consultancy, growing the division to around £15 million in revenue and a team of more than 20, working with brands like Google and Meta.

Now I’m a London-based business and leadership coach, working with established founders and business owners internationally. The thread I first noticed on that cattle station is still the one I'm pulling on, the business and the person running it are inextricably linked.

My partner and I split the year between London and somewhere sunny. We travel a lot, eat our way around wherever we happen to be, and are ideally never too far from the sea.

What inspired you to become a coach, and what problem do you feel most called to help people solve?

I don't really think of it as becoming a coach. Looking back, much of what I had always valued most in leadership was already coaching, understanding what somebody actually wanted, what was really motivating them, what was behind what they were saying, and how to help them move forward. That was the part of building businesses I found most interesting.

Eventually, I realised I could do it much more directly, without a specific industry being at the centre of the conversation.

What I'm most interested in is helping business owners solve the problems they've struggled to solve themselves and build the business in a way that works better for them too. Very often, that starts with seeing the problem differently. A founder says they have a hiring problem, a delegation problem, or a growth problem. But when you keep asking questions and get underneath it, the real constraint becomes much easier to see. When that happens, the beauty is that what looked like a constraint often starts to look more like an opportunity.

That's what I'm interested in, coaching that changes what a founder actually does next in their business.

How would you describe your coaching approach, and what makes it different from others in your field?

My coaching sits between business strategy and the person making the decision. I don’t see the two as separate because, in my experience, the biggest impact comes from addressing both at the same time.

I usually start with the business problem the owner thinks they have. I take that seriously, but I don’t automatically assume it’s the problem we actually need to solve. I’m listening for the question behind the question.

Why do you want the business to grow? What would that give you? What are you assuming to be true? What are you worried would happen if you made the obvious change? And is that risk actually real, or has it grown larger in your head than it is in reality?

Because usually there is something deeper than the presenting problem. These types of questions allow me to understand what the business means to the owner, what fears sit alongside the decision, or perhaps what they are too close to see for themselves.

As I see it, strategy and psychology are happening at the same time. So sometimes the answer we need is a better business decision. Other times, it might be understanding why that decision has been so difficult to make in the first place. My role is to work out which one needs attention and how the two are affecting each other.

One of the business owners I coached on my Owner’s Block podcast put it better than I could. He said most coaches and consultants snorkel, whereas I scuba dive.

He came in thinking he had a recruitment problem. But within 90 minutes, we had challenged several assumptions he was treating as facts and realised that one of his strongest recruitment advantages, the mission behind his company, was barely showing up in his hiring process. Once we were able to see that, it wasn’t only about recruitment. It had implications for retention and even how potential clients connected with the business.

A conversation focused only on recruitment tactics or onboarding strategy would never have got us there.

Who are your ideal clients, and what challenges are they usually facing when they come to you?

My ideal clients are founders and business owners who have already built established businesses but have reached a point where some of the things that got them here are starting to get in the way of what they want next.

What they want is someone who can get to grips with it quickly, speak their language, and challenge the thinking behind the decisions they’re making. They know a good strategy is important, but they also recognise that they’re part of whether that strategy works or not.

What they come to me with varies. For one person, it might be that they are still too involved and have become the bottleneck and don't quite know how to pull themselves out. For someone else, it might be hiring, a difficult decision they finally want to make, or why the business has become more challenging to run as it has grown, rather than less challenging as they’d hoped.

We often come back to where their time is going, how much real control they have over the business, and how they can keep growing without just adding more complexity or making everything even more dependent on them.

The people I work best with are willing to look at themselves as part of the equation. They’re not just looking for another set of tactics. They’re open to the possibility that part of what needs to change might be how they’re thinking, deciding or leading.

Why can growing a successful business sometimes create more pressure and fewer options for the owner?

Because growth tends to magnify everything that already exists in the business and in the person building it.

If the founder is still central to the important decisions, client relationships and quality control, adding more revenue doesn't automatically reduce that dependence, it can simply scale the chaos. The volume of what needs their attention increases, but the number of hours they can feasibly work doesn’t.

It doesn’t, of course, happen overnight. As the founder, you check a piece of work one evening because you care about the standards. You don’t just do it once, so the team knows that whatever they produce is probably going to come back through you anyway, which means they naturally stop taking quite as much ownership.

That same thing happens with clients. You are involved in everything because, particularly in the early days, it was probably one of the reasons the business did well. But it also trains those clients to expect that you will always be there and that they will have direct access to you. When a problem comes up, you know you can probably solve it faster than anyone else, so you just do it.

Again, none of these decisions in isolation are wrong, but there does come a point where the behaviours that get you to one stage can become exactly the behaviours that stop you getting to the next.

The irony is that, from the outside, everything can look better. More clients, more revenue, a bigger team. But you can actually have fewer options than when the business was smaller. Taking time off becomes harder, and stepping back becomes harder because more and more of the business now depends on you.

"If this business doubles, what else doubles with it?" If the answer is your workload, that is worth addressing before simply trying to make the business bigger.

What are the most common patterns or blocks you see holding founders back from real progress?

Four come up again and again, and they all have something in common, they look like one thing but are actually another.

Founder dependency disguised as high standards. The founder stays involved in everything because they care about quality. Over time, the team learns not to take ownership because the founder will always check anyway. "It's faster if I just do it" is one of the most common things I hear. Usually true in the short term, but costly in the longer term.

Sometimes what looks like high standards is actually perfectionism. The difference is that high standards are about the work, whereas perfectionism becomes about the person. Until you understand why everything needs to be perfect, it can keep pulling the founder back into things they should no longer need to own.

Avoided decisions disguised as needing more information. There is always another book, another conversation, or another quarter to wait and see. But in many cases, owners already have enough information to act on. What they often need is to get comfortable with making a decision and adjusting as new information comes in.

Complexity disguised as ambition. Launching a new product or channel can feel like the obvious next move. But in many cases, the founders with the strongest businesses are ruthless about focus. Often, the answer is doing fewer things really well rather than lots of things adequately. That’s the basis of what I call the Subtraction Method, before adding something new, ask what you could stop, simplify or do less of first.

Delegation without authority. The owner hands something over, it doesn't work out, and they conclude the team can't handle it. But the key part, the ownership, wasn't passed on, just the task. They remain the bottleneck, frustrated that everything comes back to them, even if the work itself is done by someone else.

Beneath a lot of this, there is often a fear, assumption or old belief that hasn't really been questioned. So a lot of the time, it's about challenging that, testing whether it's actually true, and then deciding what to do next.

What kind of transformations do clients typically experience through working with you?

The transformations show up in the business and in the owner, but they can ripple out much further than I ever see, to family members, employees and beyond.

I've seen a client go from working 12 to 14-hour days to working four or five-hour days. Another tripled their revenue over the time we worked together. One went from overthinking decisions and watching opportunities pass by to growing his property portfolio, improving returns from his existing assets, and feeling in control of his business rather than controlled by it.

Then there are the outcomes that probably don’t make the headlines but can be just as significant. Spending more time with family, being more present, taking a few weeks off without stressing, or not spending their time at home thinking about work and their time at work thinking about home. Putting far more focus into what they are uniquely able to do.

Over time, they get better at catching themselves too. They start recognising their own patterns earlier, questioning assumptions they might previously have treated as fact, and seeing what actually needs their attention rather than just reacting to the obvious problem.

There's a phrase you sometimes hear, "chips on shoulders put chips in pockets." My clients can still put the chips in their pockets without needing the chip on their shoulder. They can remain ambitious and driven while becoming clearer on what they actually want, rather than constantly needing to prove something.

How do you help clients create change that is sustainable, not just short-term motivation?

I'm not in the motivation business, as motivation comes and goes. If someone keeps needing to re-motivate themselves to behave differently, something is still making the old behaviour more attractive than the new one.

Most business owners already know the obvious changes they could make. If knowing was enough, they would have made them already.

So when somebody keeps doing something they say they want to change, I'm interested in what they're getting out of it. Staying closely involved might allow a founder to feel significant or to hold onto control that feels important. Until we understand what the behaviour is doing, telling someone to act differently rarely works.

Once we're clear on that, it's about connecting the change to something they really want, rather than something they think they should want, then breaking the next step into something small enough to do on a difficult day. We do that because I'm much more interested in building momentum through consistent action than doing something sporadically.

Then we iterate. It might be that the person you've delegated to does a brilliant job, or maybe they don't. Based on that, we now have actual data from your business to work with. So we adapt based on what has happened and build from there.

For me, sustainable change is when somebody no longer needs to keep motivating themselves because enough of what was driving the old behaviour has changed.

For someone reading this who feels drawn to your work, what's the best next step?

The best place to start is Ben Robins’ business and leadership coaching website. You can read client success stories, watch me coach business owners through real strategy sessions, and get a clear sense of what working together looks like. If what you see resonates, you can book a confidential consultation.

Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more info!

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