Joshua Stylianou

Joshua StylianouSep 11, 2026

I haven’t posted in 32 days. Time to come out of retirement. Quick reintroduction… I’m Josh 👋 Based in St Albans, just outside of London Married with two kids Scaling Styfinity for two years now When I’m not working, you can find me with family or at the gym. Being healthy, present, and spiritually aligned is important to me. My three biggest hacks for life & business: 1. Speed wins 2. Failing is the key to success 3. Get comfortable being uncomfortable Now as for the reason I’m posting on LinkedIn again… Content gives me an opportunity to share my journey as I scale. And I want to add value for all of you. Just like I’ve gotten so much value from the people before me! Excited to meet all of you and grow together! Cheers 🥂

Joshua StylianouSep 14, 2026

A pattern I’ve seen while working with 80 companies is the thing that got them to $3M is usually the thing stopping them from hitting $10M. If growth has stalled and you say “we need more leads,” you may start buying more leads, but this is usually the wrong response. ”We need more leads” isn’t a complete diagnosis. It could mean: - ”Nobody outside our referral network knows we exist.” - “I’m still doing the delivery myself.” - “Every decision in this business waits on me.” - “My team hands the hard problems back to me and I figure it out.” - “I don’t trust anyone else to do it the way I do it.” Those are five completely different problems, and only one of them is solved by more leads. So instead of buying traffic, ask yourself: ”When I say more leads, do I mean nobody can find us, or do I mean nothing in this business moves without me moving it?” Then go and look. Your job is to find the real constraint before you spend money on the wrong one. If the honest answer is that you’re still in delivery, get out of delivery. That’s the one I see the most. It’s also the one that turns things around fastest. Almost every time I’ve taken a founder out of delivery, the business started winning and the clients got a better outcome. But it’s also the hardest thing to remove them from. Because founders believe nobody can do it like they can, and they have years of evidence that says they’re right. Yes, someone else will do it differently and some might even fail. But that belief is your ceiling. If your team hands you a hard problem, stop being first into the escalation. You think you’re being “on top of it,” but what’s actually happening is you’re making your good people quiet. Why would anyone sweat a problem they know you’ll handle? You cannot expect someone to reach their full potential while you keep taking difficult items off their desk. It’s a “need for control” problem. My exec coach, Bill Critchley, has an ethos that it isn’t about the individual, it’s about the ecosystem you create. There’s always a need to feel like you’re the centre of the wheel. While in reality, you might just be the cog.

Joshua StylianouSep 17, 2026

When I work with clients, we never throw $10K+ at growth until we’ve figure out what’s broken… Here’s how: 1) Start with the P&L Depending on the size of the business, a good P&L tells you almost everything you need to know. What’s the pipeline? How much is a client worth? What’s the profitability per client? Do you have unprofitable clients? Which service makes the most money? Once you know which work is profitable, you can do more of that work. But if the P&L can’t tell you any of that, you’ve found the constraint because you can’t fix a business you can’t see inside of. 2) Look at your top ten clients How much are they worth and what are you doing for them? Do all of them look the same? If yes, your job is to find more of those exact people. If not, you don’t have an ICP yet, only a collection of customers. Until you figure this out, there’s no point in doing loads of outbound. 3) Get clear on ICP and messaging Your ICP has a shape: founder-led, x size, growing, stuck on a specific problem, etc. Once you can describe the shape properly, your messaging can be aimed at those exact people, which means you can test and learn what works. The usual problem I see with businesses… They start with messaging, nothing works, then go for higher volume. But it’s a waste of time until you have a clear picture of who you’re talking to. 4) Check whether delivery is systems-led or hero-led If the work only comes out right when one specific person does it, then your livelihood depends on that one person. What you want is to find a highly capable individual with their own system of delivery, who hits the outcome every time, and acts in the business’s best interest. Then find more people like that. This way the system is repeatable without being a limiting SOP. 5) Look at the founder There’s been several times at Styfinity where I was the bottleneck. Whether it be my own marketing, looking for external reasons our growth had stalled, or not admitting I was doing something wrong. And this has taught me a huge lesson… As founders, sometimes we have to be willing to check our own egos and make sure our “growth” problem isn’t really an “us” problem. Because that’s a fundamental issue that has to be fixed before anything else. The best way to grow a company is learning how to get out of your own way.