Eight acquisitions, sevenfold growth: the one thing Tom Wood says matters most

On this episode of Brand to Scale, former Rawlings Group CEO Tom Wood talks networks, knowing when to walk away, and why people will always beat technology.

One of the first things Tom Wood did when he joined Rawlings Group was cancel a service contract for a typewriter.

The company was still paying to maintain it, around £60 a year. One person still used the thing. This was 2010, and orders were going out in triplicate. "The early low-hanging fruit was very low-hanging," as Tom puts it.

That was the business he walked into: ten people in one room, one site, somewhere around £5m in revenue. By the time he stepped down as CEO earlier this year, Rawlings was a different animal. Roughly 140 people across five UK sites, £35m in turnover, eight acquisitions and a sevenfold jump in revenue.

So when you ask a man who's done eight deals and grown a business sevenfold what the one ingredient he'd never want to be without is, you might expect something about strategy. Or capital. Or a clever acquisition playbook.

He says the team.

We'll come back to that, because it's the thread running through the whole conversation. But the road there is worth walking.

Networks aren't networking

Tom didn't apply for the Rawlings job in any conventional sense. He heard about it through his own network while he was in Hong Kong, at the end of his rope in a role that wasn't making him happy. If the same opportunity had landed a year earlier or later, he suspects he'd have turned it down.

That's not a throwaway point for him. His advice to founders and leaders is to work their network long before they need it, to spend time in rooms without knowing exactly what the return will be. You're planting seeds, he says, perhaps for some benefit in six or twelve months.

And there's a less obvious reason. The right peer room, to his mind, is a kind of therapy. As an MD or CEO, you can't always be open inside your own business. You've got a role to hold. But put yourself among people who've been where you are, and something shifts. "You can walk in there holding onto stuff you don't even know you're holding onto." Whatever you're going through, someone in that room has probably been through it too, and come out the other side.

Don't mistake polish for capability

Coming from a consulting background, Tom arrived at Rawlings with firm expectations about what "good" looked like, and had to put some of them down fast.

Some of the people he inherited weren't used to one-to-ones, or reviews, or justifying their decisions on paper. A few couldn't fill in a form properly. "But they were bloody good at what they do." It taught him not to judge a book by its cover: there are people quietly holding a business together who simply aren't very good at telling that story. Learning to see them clearly was one of his early, unglamorous wins.

What happens when you outgrow the room

For the first few years, Rawlings didn't have written values or a formal mission. It didn't need them. Everyone was in one room and the understanding was implicit.

Then it grew. Communication that used to happen by osmosis (a quick word across the office, everyone knowing everyone's dog's name) stopped working. It had to be planned. At multi-site scale, you need to know what you're sending out, when, and why. You need scaffolding.

A lot of that scaffolding came from adopting EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (the model Gino Wickman sets out in Traction). Tom is candid that it's "extremely American" and nearly put him off at first. But it gave the business a shared language, especially valuable when you're growing by acquisition and inheriting teams who each assume their own way of doing things is simply "normal".

The bits that stuck: a weekly leadership meeting with a hard 90-minute limit ("on time is late"), a single scorecard, and a one-page plan covering vision, values and where the business is heading. The point of values, he argues, isn't to laminate them and hang them in a corridor. It's to weave them into how you hire, how you run one-to-ones, how you praise people. When that starts happening, he says, it becomes part of the everyday language, and that's how you know it's working.

He's honest that they didn't get it right first time. The early values didn't stick because they were too complicated, too aspirational, or simply didn't feel like the business. Getting them wrong, and fixing them, was part of the process.

Beware the shiny thing

Tom clearly loves the deal side of growth. He calls a good acquisition "transformational". But his warnings are as useful as his enthusiasm.

Doubling the size of a team, in his experience, can multiply your people complexity fourfold. And the biggest risk in chasing growth is taking your eye off the engine: the core products, the key customers, the thing that actually pays the bills. You need a business stable enough, and a leadership team strong enough, to do both at once.

He's also refreshingly human about what a deal feels like from the other side of the table. For most SME owners, selling is a once-in-a-lifetime, deeply emotional decision. They care about the brand, the people, the customers, and what they want out of a deal isn't always just the money. Understanding that, he says, matters as much as the numbers.

Which leads neatly to where he thinks the real opportunity sits for the next few years. Everyone's talking about AI, and Tom doesn't dismiss it. It's a genuine risk and a genuine opportunity, particularly for traditional businesses. But he's wary of what he calls the magpie effect: chasing every shiny new thing while the fundamentals go unfixed. You can have the best technology in the world, he says, but with an unmotivated team who aren't in the right seats, it's pointless.

So, the team

Which brings us back to his one ingredient.

After fourteen years, five sites and eight acquisitions, the lesson Tom keeps landing on is that people are the whole game. His book recommendation puts it neatly: Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which he describes as simple but not simplistic. A great team isn't afraid to challenge each other, and there's no shortage of trust. When it's firing, you sometimes can't even explain why. "Team is everything. It would be my slogan."

For someone now moving into advisory and fractional work (guided, he says, by three personal values of growth, impact and freedom, and already advising fermented-ingredients business Good Culture on its own acquisition strategy), it's a fitting note to leave on. Not the deals. Not the tech. The people.

Real clarity about who you are, what you stand for and who's in the right seat is what lets a business actually grow. That idea is the belief Brand to Scale was built on, and the same thinking that runs through everything we do at Alchemy.

Listen to the full conversation with Tom Wood on Brand to Scale →