When I was 15, armed with a questionable haircut and an always-out-of-tune guitar, I did what many teenagers at the time did: I started a school rock band. Sure, none of us could drive yet, let alone play any instruments, but in our minds, we were destined for stadiums, screaming fans, and maybe—just maybe—a gold record.

I then went on to further terrify my parents by taking a gap year to ‘work’ in a recording studio. Showing an early skill for commerce, I negotiated an hourly wage of exactly £0; but the real benefit was being able to record my own songs on the cheap and meet session musicians who would play for me for the price of a beer, kebab, or sometimes both. It was a plan, and I was convinced I’d nail that record contract within 12 months and bypass the conventional university route completely.

One year later, I was at university. Shock! I opted for a Business and Marketing degree, conceding that maybe that would get me into a record company, and I could send my tapes to myself and sign…me. You always need a backup plan.

Fast forward a couple of reality-laden decades, and while I never did get the record deal, I did end up managing something arguably more complicated: a Go To Market team. As Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) in various B2B SaaS businesses, I slowly realised that my experience managing a band of unruly teenagers wasn’t so different from leading and scaling a global revenue operation. (Fewer guitar solos maybe, but just as many egos.)

What I never anticipated was just how transferable those lessons were. If you’re a founder scaling a business, particularly in B2B tech, let me walk you through how my time as an aspiring rock god prepared me to lead revenue-scaling journeys. And who knows? Maybe it’ll inspire you to pick up an instrument too—after all, we could all use some practice managing chaos.

1. Managing a Band of Misfits: The Original Cross-Functional Team

When you’re 15 and pulling together a band, it’s not like you have the pick of the litter. You’re scraping together whoever can sort of keep time and own an instrument. In my case, we had the cool guy on guitar (who could only play circa three chords but, boy, did he look good doing it), the brooding bassist who never said a word, the hyperactive drummer who once forgot we were supposed to be playing a song, and me—the guy trying to hold it all together.

Sound familiar? As a CRO, managing a revenue team isn’t all that different. You’ve got your star salespeople (the equivalent of your egotistical lead guitarist), your steady but often overlooked rev ops folks (aka the bassist), and the ones who might set everything on fire if left unsupervised (hello, Marketing).

In both cases, the key is harmony (pun very much intended). In a band, everyone has to play their part, otherwise, the song falls apart. In a scale-up, your departments must function together—if Marketing isn’t aligned with Sales, you’ll hear the screeching feedback of poor quality MQLs and missed targets soon thereafter. As a bandleader, you learn early that no matter how good your lead guitarist thinks he is, the show doesn’t go on without everyone working in sync.

Lesson: Leading a band (or a sales team) is about getting a group of wildly different people to play the same tune—and convincing them it was their idea all along. (And no, you can’t fix everything with a well-designed commission plan.)

2. Songwriting vs. Revenue Strategy: Both Are Easy in Theory

When you sit down to write a song, you’ve got this grand idea in your head that it’ll just flow. The reality? After 30 minutes, you’ve come up with a single chord progression that sounds suspiciously like Wonderwall and lyrics that sound like a dodgy limerick. But you must keep pushing through the bad ideas, iterating, hoping to strike gold.

Developing a revenue strategy is surprisingly similar. You start with this brilliant plan: aggressive targets, flawless execution, and world domination. And then reality hits. Maybe your product-market fit wasn’t what you thought, or the market has moved on since your last update. Or your instinct of scaling from the UK into APJ is flawed by an over-competitive market. It’s a constant process of tweaking, refining, and adjusting.

Just like that elusive catchy song, a successful revenue strategy takes time and effort. You don’t just come up with a great idea—you wrestle it into submission. You test it in the real world, refine the pitch, and iterate endlessly. If songwriting taught me anything, it’s that creativity needs structure. And that most of your “brilliant ideas” will end up in the bin—but the few that survive will be worth it.

Lesson: Both songwriting and revenue strategy require more rewriting, tinkering, and facepalms than any CRO would ever want to admit to.

3. Stage Fright and Investor Pitches: Sweaty Palms Are Inevitable

Playing live for the first time as a teenager was an experience of terror. In our case, we were the entertainment interlude at a fashion show. We stepped out on stage, stared out at the crowd (which, in our case, consisted mostly of classmates and their judgmental stares), and realised that everything we’d practised could come crashing down with one wrong note. The stakes felt impossibly high. We were 100% exposed.

As a CRO, I learned that pitching to investors or key clients isn’t all that different. Sure, there’s no electric guitar slung around your neck (unless you’re trying to stand out), but the performance anxiety is the same. Whether you’re pitching a killer product or trying to convince investors to join a Series A or B round, you still need to nail the delivery, read the room, and perform under pressure.

And let’s face it, whether you’re in a dingy bar playing for ten people or in a boardroom pitching to a group of suited-up VCs, you’re still just hoping for applause (or at least a lack of boos).

Lesson: The healthy fear of public failure never goes away, but once you’ve played a completely off-key rendition of “The Final Countdown” in front of your senior school crush, pitching to investors feels a lot less scary.

4. From Garage Band to Global Expansion: The Dream of “Making It”

Every band starts in a garage, convinced they’re just a few gigs away from their big break. You go from playing at your friend’s birthday party to dreaming of headlining festivals. Turns out, the journey from garage band to global sensation is a lot like scaling a startup. Both involve a whole lot of hustle, a bit of delusion and a series of incremental steps that feel more like giant leaps.

As CROs (and founders), we dream of scaling our businesses from scrappy startups to international powerhouses. Much like a band expanding its fanbase city by city, a B2B company expands region by region, product by product. You start local, figure out your messaging, and your value proposition, and then take it on the road—er, international stage.

The lesson here is that whether you’re playing small-time gigs or entering new markets, you need to know your audience. What works in your home market won’t always translate to the big leagues. Bands learn this quickly when they go on tour—what worked for your die-hard fans might fall flat in another city. Our band once totally silenced a pub in St Austell, Cornwall, discovering it’s just not a place to try Bee Gees songs in their original key. I’ve never seen so many scowls in one room.

Lesson: Whether you’re scaling a startup or playing your first out-of-town gig, adaptability and customer empathy is the name of the game. Oh, and patience. Lots of patience.

5. Band Rehearsals and Team Alignment: Practice Makes Perfect-ish

Band rehearsals are the perfect metaphor for team meetings. Everyone shows up, but half the time, people aren’t fully paying attention. Someone’s distracted (usually the guitarist, trying to show off with a solo), and someone else is late (the drummer—always the drummer). But without these chaotic sessions, the band never gets tight.

Similarly, alignment meetings in the CRO world can feel like pulling teeth. Everyone’s got their agenda—Sales, Marketing, Rev Ops—and it’s your job to make sure the product launches (or the tracks) sound like they came from the same group of people. It’s not easy, but it’s crucial. Because if you don’t get your go-to-market teams singing from the same hymn sheet, your go-to-market strategy will sound more like my band’s notorious fashion show gig: a bit of a mess.

Lesson: Getting people aligned takes more than just meetings—it takes communication, coordination, inclusion, vulnerability, and sometimes a little bribery (doughnuts never hurt).

6. Navigating the Ego Minefield: Rock Stars and Top Salespeople

Let’s talk egos for a minute. In every band, there’s that one person who thinks they are the band. (Usually the lead guitarist. Sorry, lead guitarists.) They demand more solos, want their amp louder, and maybe even suggest renaming the band after themselves. It’s part of the territory, and as the bandleader, you have to manage that without crushing their creativity.

In business, this personality type exists too. You’ve got your rock star salesperson who’s convinced they’re single-handedly keeping the company afloat. And, sometimes they are! But just like in the band, you can’t let one person’s ego derail the entire operation. Keeping egos in check while still fostering individual talent is an art form—whether you’re leading a band or driving revenue growth.

Lesson: Rock stars are great for business—just don’t let them think they’re the whole show. Balance is key.

7. The Encore: Always Be Ready for the Next Set

A successful gig should always end with the crowd demanding an encore. (The fact that my school band was never asked to keep playing was probably a very decent hint I should have paid attention to at the time.) In the business world, it’s much the same: just when you think you’ve nailed the quarter or crushed that product or new market launch, there’s always more work to do.

As CRO, you quickly learn that success is never a destination. Did you hit your revenue targets? Great. Now, do it again—this time with a bigger market, more competitors (and probably fewer resources).

For me, I’m obsessed with the concept of overlapping growth engines. And with global revenue scaling motions not being something you can whip up overnight, you’ll need to stay a couple of steps ahead of yourself and plan well in advance for your next move. New channels, new partnerships, new markets, moving from inbound to outbound, from product-led growth to sales-led growth; start early, test small, have reserve plans lined up, and double down on what works.

Lesson: Whether you’re scaling B2B tech businesses or performing on stage, you’ve got to keep the momentum going. In other words, keep rockin’…

Nowadays, at Think & Grow, I spend most of my time advising tech businesses on how to best unlock growth, be that new products in their home markets or, more often, scaling internationally in the lowest risk, pragmatic manner possible. Proving product-market fit, understanding a new geo and ideally generating some early pipeline before fully committing spend and resources to a new market.

Yes, I often think that I should probably be on stage somewhere smashing guitars; but helping customers to smash targets is a very close second.