S Brian Smith 🪜

I free founders from ops, sales, & management | Founder @ Strategy Ladders | Coached 1000s of B2B and Agency owners | Stop struggling, start enjoying business ownership 🏖️

Most founders of 7-figure B2B service companies reach a point where growth plateaus—and freedom remains a mirage.

They’re still in sales calls. Still solving client fires. Still holding the business together.

That’s where we come in.

At Strategy Ladders, we help founder-led B2B service businesses—agencies, development shops, consulting firms, and more—scale from $2M to $30M+ in annual revenue while removing the founder from daily operations.

We don’t do theory. We do results.

Every advisor on our team has built and scaled 8-figure businesses. We’ve been in your seat, broken through the same ceilings, and led teams to the next level.

What We Deliver:
Strategic clarity with a customized roadmap to scale

Execution firepower through world-class experts and operators

Freedom for founders through strong systems, teams, and leadership

We don’t stop at advice. We help you implement.

Whether it’s building out your sales infrastructure, overhauling project management, optimizing financials, or replacing yourself as CEO—our team has done it before and does it with you.

Services We Integrate Into Our Work:
LATAM recruiting (our secret weapon)

Full-stack B2B marketing through our in-house agency, B2B Labs

Project management systems & leadership

Financial management—without a bloated CFO title

HubSpot CRM buildouts & automation

And more—all tailored for service businesses

We’ve helped clients:
✅ Scale from $150k to $4M ARR in under a year
✅ Slash founder hours by over 40%
✅ Grow recurring revenue from 2% to 50%
✅ Land Fortune 100 clients
✅ Build 65-person teams in two years
✅ Exit profitably and on their terms

We're not a coaching business.

We're not your podcast hero.

We're the serious team for founders ready to win.

If you’re running a 7-figure business and ready to scale to 8+—without grinding yourself into the ground—we should talk.


🪜 www.strategyladders.com

Founder & Head of Strategy

The Strategy Ladder Program delivers MASSIVE results to agencies, consultancies, and service businesses.

If your business is 25-85 employees, partially or fully remote, and you're stuck trying to "level-up," I will transform it with you.

The Strategy Ladder System will get you UNSTUCK. You'll develop a bullet-proof strategy that grows with your business, streamlines operations, scales your revenue, and sets your business up to continue to grow without you.

The Strategy Ladder System doesn't just change your business. It will transform YOU. You'll undergo a mental reset that frees you from the anxiety and beliefs that tie you to the day-to-day in your business. You're the leader of your business - if you don't change, your business never will.

The Strategy Ladder System has worked for over 400 entrepreneurs, delivering & implementing strategies that have:

💥 Scaled an agency from $150k to $4mil ARR in 10 months

💥 Increased a digital marketing agency’s productivity levels by over 450%, dramatically increasing profitability

💥 Streamlined a SaaS product’s roadmap, reducing development costs by 45% while increasing execution speed by over 25%.

💥 Developed and executing a repositioning strategy that landed a web development agency a long-term contract with a Fortune 100 company

💥 Repositioned of an app development agency that grew recurring revenue from 2% to over 50% of total revenue within three month

💥 Built a sales organization of 65 sales people in two years

💥 Orchestrated & executed a legal & and business strategy that lead to a sale of key assets of a SaaS platform for a significant premium over the market value of the company

Most founders hit the same wall. (and how to break through it in 90 days  🚀)

Revenue’s up. Team’s bigger.
And somehow… you’re working more.

Every decision runs through you.
Your calendar is a hostage situation.
And that “vacation”? You spent half of it on Slack.

Here’s what I’ve learned after helping 400+ B2B service founders break the cycle:

The problem isn’t your team. It’s your operating system AND decision delegation.

One client had 80+ employees… and the founder was still spending 6–10 hours/week reviewing dashboards, reports, and funneling decisions through himself.

Not leading. Not strategizing.
Just… reviewing.

We rebuilt their operating rhythm & assigned decision ownership.

90 days later: the team runs the reviews.
The founder gets a 15-minute summary every day. That’s it.

Here’s what a real 90-day shift looks like:

✅ Days 1–30: Clarity

- Map every decision that “requires you”
- Install a simple rule: reversible decisions don’t climb to the founder
- Assign ONE owner per function (Sales, Delivery, Ops, Finance)

✅ Days 31–60: Cadence

- Weekly leadership rhythm (same agenda, every week)
- Scoreboard + priorities (no vibes, no rambling)
- Problems get solved by owners… not escalated to you

✅ Days 61–90: Accountability

- Public commitments
- Misses get fixed, not explained
- You stop rescuing — and become the strategic leader again

One client went from a $1M to $4.5M run rate during this transition.

Not because they worked harder.
Because they built a business that didn’t need them in every room.

The real question isn’t “Can my team handle it?”
It’s: “Have I given them the system to win without me?”

What’s one decision you made this week that your team should’ve owned?

But be careful with one-size-fits-all approaches. Every operating business starts with its own unique set of challenges.

If you’re serious about getting out of the middle, DM me “90 DAYS” and I’ll send you a business audit to see where you need to focus first.

✌️🧡🌮

The Story Doctor - Speaker & Author

Dr James McCabe is a pioneer in adopting classical story design from the world of arts to commerce. Classical storytellers such as dramatists, novelists and screenwriters are the professionals when it comes to human attention, because narrative is their only intellectual property. As the commercial world learns narrative IP rules in an attention economy, the opportunity exists for replacing rhetorical devices with narrative ones. Where rhetoric seeks to persuade, narrative seeks to involve - a much deeper connection involving not only hearts and minds but - uniquely - both hemispheres of the human brain. Storytellers know how to transform ideas into feelings so they live on in the audience around them. James is a master in transforming the authority, logic and proof of business rhetoric into the universal empathy, suspense and surprise now required to attract customers, investors, employees and the public. Your enterprise and your career exist between human attention and memory - two resources governed by the narrative faculty.

James McCabe

#Storytelling

Dear David,

You didn't miss much in the last decade.

When the roof of Notre Dame collapsed in flames a few years afterwards, I sensed the world was in for a damaging time. It wasn't a disaster, but something deeper. An omen.

So we had the plague and the war, the famine and the death, all four horsemen.

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, as Ovid said. All things change, nothing vanishes.

Ten years on, your changes still ring true, reinvention as a life strategy.

As Auden commemorated Yeats:

"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems."

You disappeared in the dead of winter. The death of the singer was kept from his songs.

Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is not a single epic but a compendium of 250 stories. Like it, your life was not a story but a medley of narratives.

In seven chapters...

The Muse - the story of your influences and who you influenced. From Elvis Presley to Lady Gaga.

The Music - from Sixties music hall to hippiedom, from Seventies glam to electronica, from the bouffant Eighties to the angst-ridden Teens.

The Film - from cinematic aliens to video astronauts.

The Art - the shadow side of your storyworld, sound visualized.

The Voice - From Elephant and Castle to The Thin White Duke.

The Zeitgeist - your eerie predilection for astrolabing the future.

The Books - from the library you carted everywhere to the saga you lived.

From Greenland to the Steppes, from the desert to the jungle, the world's a jittery uncertain space. Your oddity prepped us for that, the slow burn. We could be heroes, but daren't.

You could have lived through it with us, but were better off in astral slumber.

When others sought to dominate the peripheries from the centre - centrifugal command and control - you always came in from the outside, centripetal inspiration and illumination.

Never fix a problem from the inside. Always start from the outside.

Beau geste, brave soul.

Ave atque vale.


-


[Image: The Archer, John Robert Rowlands]

#Storytelling

In Praise of Ghostwriters

Did Sherpa Tenzing reach the summit first?

Whether he was too humble to admit it, or whether he had agreed to give Hilary precedence beforehand, he saved Hillary's life before the conquest and he was roped together a mere six feet away. They conquered Everest "together, as a team."

In my experience, ghostwriters are some of the humblest and ablest of story professionals on the planet, and your bookshop would be very depleted indeed if every ghostwritten volume were removed from it. So would your bookshelves at home.

Once a dirty secret, ghostwriters are coming it into the open today, and it is a development I celebrate. The world has changed, changed utterly, it's 2026 already and there will be a huge demand for new interpretations, fictional as well as non-fictional. That distinction, by the way, is fictive in itself. Fiction is Latin for "shaping", and everything is shaped, for good or ill.

The book you are admiring within your mind is a Mount Everest you have no idea of climbing. The ghostwriter is your first reader. They read your mind. In fact, they read the book before it even existed. Every dollar you expend on their survival is money in your bank, year on year, decade on decade.

They are the sherpas. They know the terrain. They've climbed this peak before. They will save your life as you fall into the clefts of delusion and despair. They will get to the summit first but let you claim the crown.

Pay their mortgages. You are multiplying your own property portfolio.


-

#Storytelling

"Is it true?"

The most often asked question of my former child self upon watching anything on television or reading anything in a book. The same question could be asked a millionfold today among a proliferation of screens - desktopped, laptopped and palmed off in the hand.

The question is ultimate and refers to reality. Note that reality does not equate to factuality. "Is it true?" does not mean "Did this actually happen?" It means "Could this be true?"

That is the nature of story. Not the distinction between so-called fiction and non-fiction, but the gulf between human credibility and incredulousness.

This is my whole beef with so-called GenAI, which is more degenerative than generative. Now I know that so-called GenAI is not Artificial Intelligence (itself a tragic oxymoron) and that so-called Artificial Intelligence has many unguessed applications across industry, healthcare, traffic management and other vital infrastructures. But let's be extremely clear here - Generative Artificial Intelligence in the expressive space of the arts and media is not and cannot by its very nature be true or real.

GenAI in writing is the equivalent of CGI in film, a habit which exploded just as cinema audiences everywhere tailed off and vanished. Was there a connection? Yes, of course there was. At the very moment it became possible to visualize absolutely anything on screen at the click of a mouse, nobody gave a shit anymore. Because the stuntmen weren't stunting and the actors were greenscreening and everyone was merely phoning it in.

Your story isn't real if you asked the bot for ideas to begin with. That's called musing. That's called inspiration. Like a lazy fart you short-circuited it because you couldn't be arsed. Your story isn't real when your first draft is guessworked together by an algorithm stealing intellectual property from others, burning down the planet and building in as much hallucination, cultural bias and entshittification as it can. That's not a true story. You are unreal. 

It makes no difference if this is short or long form, fiction or so-called non-fiction. You phoned it in. Why don't you just stop watching Netflix and just download the summaries? Why listen to Queen or The Beatles when the bot can summarize the experience for you? I'll tell you why. Because you are still greedily lapping up the human experience for yourself. The one you're now denying the plebeians who are your employees, your customers and your readers. 

Yes, you are fast and efficient. Yes, you are modern. No, you're not true. No, you're not real. You lack reality. Pretty soon you'll lack the cinema audience too.


-

#Storytelling

Join us this Wednesday 21st January between 4 and 6 pm for the ninetieth Story Parlour. People often shy off because they don't have two full hours on a Wednesday morning or afternoon - the reason it is two hours is because you can catch some of it, come and go as you please, this isn't Skool...

The word Parlour is Latin in origin and, in the thirteenth century, referred to a room in a monastery where monks could speak with visitors. Parlour, Parler, geddit? By the high Renaissance, parlours had evolved into guest spaces in domestic residences for conversational exchange. How many educated conversations have you had this week with a non-work acquaintance or non-family member? Not many, I take it.

Attendees get to learn the story art, craft and trade conversationally, in exchange with yours truly as your tutor and your international peers as fellow travellers. The art involves the principles, chief among which remains novelty. The craft implies models, chiefly of which involves the sonata sequence of beginning, middle and ending. The trade means you can complete a story in any medium or genre and distribute it to the world.

Guests get to spark ideas off each other, compare notes on the narrative voyage, converse with veteran luminaries like Christopher Vogler (of "The Writer's Journey" fame) and Valerie Hemingway (Ernest's confidante and last secretary). Watch other people develop their independent story practices, start and develop their books, discover whole new themes and take executive artistic decisions. It's free so you can be as penniless as pleases. The only house rules are cameras on, no pitching, no flexing, no roadhogging. Invitation in the comments. Don't mention it.

Every Emmy winner was an infant in nappies once. Every Grammy winner was born without a musical clue. Every Oscar winner had to learn how to read and write. Every Tony winner stared at a snow-white blank sheet. Do it.


-

66:99 - Writing Content in Context for Search and Social

Another fascinating and illuminating session in Dr McCabe's Story Parlour yesterday! 


In an age where the big push is on to outsource our human critical and creative thinking to those Large Lying Machines, salvation may be reclaimed in humanity's innate drive for wondrous storytelling. A scribbler's crusade indeed!

Two hours in the company of the excellent James McCabe is a deep-dive into the secret anatomy of the writer's art and a masterclass of erudition and exposition.

Thoroughly recommended for all those writers of all backgrounds and experiences who want to step up their game or simply join a caravanserai of discovery.

#DrMcCabesStoryParlour #storytellerscraft  #writinghumancopy

#Storytelling

Can story structure apply to the real world?

Take the Crusades, for instance, that deeply complex and controversial period of history between 1095 and 1291.

Nine European invasions of the Middle East resulted in four Crusader states lasting well over a century and millions of deaths (estimates vary wildly).

The Crusades sanctioned religious violence, drove apart the three great desert religions and, ironically, brought about the fall of the Roman Empire they were designed to redeem. 

Dramaturge Kenneth Rowe taught Arthur Miller how to write plays and came up with the idiomatic sequence Attack, Complication, Resolution for the three-act structure.

Act I is Attack, when the status quo is pitched on its head and the drama unfolds. Apply it to the Crusades. It's 1054, fifty years before the first Crusade and the Christian world is torn in half by the schism between Catholic West and Orthodox East. At the same time, the Seljuk Turks overtake the Arab Empire in the Middle East. In 1071, they destroy the Eastern Roman army at the Battle of Manzikert. The stage is set for the Crusades. Emperor Alexios appeals to Pope Urban II for help, their historical schism only adding poignancy. The Princes of Europe come to the rescue, slaughtering as they go, commencing with the first great pogrom against the Jews in Europe. They take Antioch by treachery. They storm Jerusalem and bathe it in its own blood. They set up four Crusader states. End of Act I.

Act II complicates the plot as darker motives are revealed. When the Turks retake Edessa in 1144 it sparks a second Crusade from the French and German kings. They fail miserably to capture Damascus. A third Crusade in 1189 attempts to retake Jerusalem but ends in a stand-off truce. This is the most famous Crusade, the one involving Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the one filmed in Ridley Scott's KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (2005). But it is the fourth Crusade in 1202-1204 that steals the show in Act II as the ultimate complication unfolds - to repay their Venetian shipmasters the Crusaders storm fellow Christians in Zara on the Adriatic and finally Constantinople itself, destroying the world's most eminent metropolis in the process. Act II culminates in a very dark place as the Crusaders are excommunicated by the Pope but make their own Latin Empire for what its worth.

Act III resolves the conundra as all future Crusades (fifth, sixth, seventh, eight and ninth between 1217 and 1271) fail in their primary objective to fully recover Jerusalem after Saladin has recouped it. (The German Frederick II manages a partial success in the sixth Crusade with a fifteen-year lease of it.) A Turkish Mamluk by the name of Baibars prises apart the last Crusader castles and strongholds, and the final outpost of Acre crumbles in 1291.

The denouement: religious tensions have not healed a millennium later. Eastern and Western Europe still deeply suspect each other and can still be said to be at war. 


-

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