Beyond SEO Season 2 Trailer

The first season was largely about the work: migrations, data, AI search, how agencies and in-house teams actually operate. This season goes a layer behind that, into the people and the businesses doing the growing. Founders, entrepreneurs and business leaders, on what it really takes to build something: the decisions, the trade-offs, the mistakes, and the parts nobody puts on LinkedIn.

Growthack has evolved, and the show has evolved with it.

What’s coming this season

Susan Hallam MBE founded Hallam in 1999, the same year Google was finding its feet, grew it into one of the UK’s best-known digital agencies, and in 2025 sold it into an employee ownership trust that now holds the company on behalf of its staff. She was also my first boss in the agency world, back in 2017.

On what happens to businesses that stand still: “If they’re not going to change, they are going to die.”

And on the hardest part of growing past fifty people: “We did have to go through a process to make me disposable. It’s my baby. It’s my company. It’s my project.”

David and Agate Sawyer built The Cookie Dealer together. They describe going from a single post to a call from Good Morning Britain: “My phone started going ping, ping, ping.” And they are refreshingly blunt about what scaling actually costs, once demand arrives: “Our take on the cookie, to make at scale, it turns out it’s super, super difficult.”

Someone told them they had “managed to do what big companies take three years to do”. The episode is partly about what it is like to then keep up with that, and about the jump from being a local business to getting listed in Aldi, which sounds like a single win and is really a change of company.

Ryan Jones was the first guest this show ever had, back in Season 1 Episode 1, talking about SaaS growth and AI search at SEOTesting.com. He has since moved into something completely different: commercial interiors, at ACI Group. Which is how you end up with a line like “our longest lead time is over 900 days” on a marketing podcast. Planning at that horizon is a different discipline entirely, and it was worth asking what carries across from software and what does not.

Why the change

Season 1 answered a lot of questions about channels and tactics. The more useful conversations kept happening either side of that: how a founder’s role changes as the business grows, what you do when the thing you built no longer needs you, when to specialise and when to stay broad, and what it costs personally.

Those are the conversations this season is for. Some guests are marketers and SEOs, some are founders in businesses with nothing to do with search. The common thread is that they have built something and can say honestly what worked and what did not.

Start here

Season 2 Episode 15 is out now with Susan Hallam MBE.

Part two follows as Episode 16, going deeper into scaling an agency, how a founder’s role changes, and what the future looks like for agencies and the people running them.

New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts: https://linktr.ee/kevinkapezi

Beyond SEO® is hosted by Kevin Kapezi, founder of Growthack.