The Green Room podcast
What separates ambition from impact?
We all have big dreams. What does it take to make yours a reality – and bring others along for the journey?
Beyond the big idea
Your idea is taking off. How far can you carry it alone?
In a small team, being scrappy, fast and instinctive can work to your advantage. Decisions happen quickly, and changing course is easy. But when an idea grows, those same ways of working become harder to sustain. As you scale, you need to build the right teams and processes, while bringing in new perspectives to evolve the idea – without losing what initially made it work.
Dr Somayeh Taheri and Matt Henderson draw on their experiences of growing and advising ambitious businesses to answer our big question: What separates ambition from impact?
How do you turn early momentum into something others can repeat and build on? Are systems and processes as important as the original idea? And how do you give people enough freedom to evolve an idea without losing sight of what made it special in the first place?
Watch below, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Read the transcript here.
What has got you to the position that you're in may not necessarily take you forward to the position that you want to be in.
Matt Henderson – Managing partner, Deloitte Private UK
"Growth was bigger than our capacity.”
For co-founder Somayeh Taheri, bringing UrbanChain’s technology to market took five years. Then, in one year, the business grew tenfold. As she explains, growth wasn’t linear.
This came with a learning about how growth unfolds: building capacity first doesn't always guarantee that opportunity will follow. Instead, scale comes from responding to the opportunity in front of you. Somayeh’s approach is to “build enough to realise the growth you are seeing, and then you go to the next step.”
But scaling also means knowing that what works now might not work at the next stage. “When you create that team to make it repeatable, you should always consider you are still a scale-up company.” Somayeh's own experience wasn't linear, as she moved through rapid growth and setbacks. Each stage asked for something different, requiring “a team which is happy to stretch itself, not to be in the safe zone.”
UrbanChain was the winner of three awards at Deloitte's 2024 UK Technology Fast 50. Discover the 2026 Fast 50 winners on 5 November.
"Everyone needs to know what the bumpers are."
Matt Henderson, managing partner for Deloitte Private UK, compares scaling a business to going bowling with his children. You want to give people the freedom to play, but you still need the bumpers up to stop balls going down the gutter.
He's seen what can happen when boundaries are unclear. Matt shared the story of a business that gave its management team freedom to pursue a new approach to market. The company burned millions of pounds, requiring the founders to step back in and take control.
As Matt notes from the 2026 Scale-Ups Confidence Survey, founders overwhelmingly believe their businesses will grow. But belief alone isn’t enough. Repeatability is the real difference maker. For Matt, that means having "the ability to act responsibly and rapidly to changing regulatory environments, intellectual property challenges, funding crises".
There's a catch, however: maintaining consistency can also make it tempting to keep doing what's already working. As Somayeh Taheri argues, this is where a company's growth might plateau. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to be constantly evolving: "you have to renew what you have created again and again to grow better and better."
Creating new certainty
Somayeh Taheri describes building UrbanChain as “creating new certainty”; persuading others to believe in a future they hadn't yet experienced. “As a founder, you see the future,” she says. But making that future real means bringing others with you.
Hear Matt Henderson and Somayeh's full conversation on what it takes to bring others into your ambition, from building the right team to knowing when a different route might take you further. They identify the difference between repeatability and something that lasts, and ultimately what separates ambition from impact.
Watch below, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Read the transcript here.
"People in this journey, they don't see the whole future you see. They see part of the future and you need to reinvent the whole team."
Somayeh Taheri – CEO and co-founder, UrbanChain
Let’s make this work.
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What does it take to turn ideas into impact?
The future isn’t built by accident. Explore more insights from Series 15, where we learn from the people brave enough to think big, and explore the role we can all play in turning bold ideas into progress.
