The show’s guest in this episode is Georgia Thomas. She’s a former corporate lawyer, and she turned into a multi-business founder and CEO. And she has multiple business with her husband Gavin Thomas. And what she does is she helps founders build sustainable businesses that scale without depending entirely on them. So they’re able to stop being overwhelmed operators, which I mean maybe that’s the saying no part, and turning into visionary CEOs that are focused on growth, freedom, and intentional leadership.

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The Hidden Cost of Unclear Expectations with Georgia Thomas

Hello, I’m Melanie Parish. I’m a co-host of the Experimental Leader podcast. I’m a coach. I’m an author. I’m a content creator, and I’m a farmer. I don’t say that one very often, but I’m going to talk about that today.

I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m an academic psychologist. I’m the author of *The Glass Cliff: One Trans Man’s Leadership Odyssey* I’m a coach, and I’m the co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.

I’m thinking about supporting your leader’s vision. So when you get a new leader, often the new leader comes in with their vision. They want to build this, do this, start a new program, and I think that’s most effective as an employee, most effective as an organization to get curious and get behind the new leader and, you know take a minute to see what they’re going to build where they’re going to take you what they’re going to create. The reason I’m thinking about this right now is that my my boss I just got an email from my boss asking me to help co-facilitate a visioning meeting that that he’s hosting, and he asked me to do the same thing in December, and I I helped facilitate that, and he’s asked me again, and we’re going to do it in a couple weeks again.

Cool. I have been thinking about it’s kind of in the vision category, but it’s like sometimes you have to say no, and this is we had someone reach out to us who wanted to use one of our farms. They wanted to graze on our farmland, and they wanted it really bad, and they were really nice. And when I was talking to them, I really wanted to say yes. I wanted to be like, yeah, we can help you because I’m super helpful, and my brother’s super helpful, and we own the farm together. And after I got off when I wasn’t with that person. I realized it was a really bad decision to help that person, or at least it wasn’t the best decision, and I had to say no. And I’m just thinking about how personality can inform both the decisions that I make, like I want to say yes to people, and sometimes I get myself in trouble because I want to say yes. But it’s true of people who work for us too, like who work in organizations. They are sometimes a victim of their personalities. Like they get themselves into yeses that should be no’s. Hard to let people down, and people have feelings, and so I just think that’s all really interesting in leadership, and I think there’s a huge value to just learning how to say no without explanation. No, that’s not going to work for me, and it’s not an easy skill to learn as a leader.

No, I think that’s something we’re all working on. Absolutely. Do we have a guest today?
We do have a guest, and I’m excited about our guest. Our guest is Georgia Thomas. She’s a former corporate lawyer, and she turned into a multi-business founder and CEO. And she has multiple business with her husband Gavin Thomas. And what she does is she helps founders build sustainable businesses that scale without depending entirely on them. So they’re able to stop being overwhelmed operators, which I mean maybe that’s the saying no part, and turning into visionary CEOs that are focused on growth, freedom, and intentional leadership. So it’s going to be great to have her today.

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Georgia. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Melanie. It’s so great to be here with you both.

That’s great to have you.

Welcome.

I’ll kick it off by asking how you are experimenting in your life and work right now.

Yeah. So the conversation you both just had was very fitting to something that we’re currently going through in our business. So one of the things we’ve been working on recently is just like re-outlining for everyone what we’re calling an expectations document, which is almost just to bridge the gap between two people having different expectations and then it causing confusion. So, for example, one of the things we’ve started to notice becoming a little bit of a hick. Sometimes, and it’s not for all, but we’ve realized it would benefit all members of our team. Is that oftentimes, like whether you’re a leader or a founder CEO or just a upper manager, and you’re working with a team, sometimes what can happen is like your team are coming with like their expectation of what they think can could and should happen, and then you, as like the leader or the business owner, have your own expectation. And sometimes the bit in between is just like a lack of communication or like clear expectations being laid out. And we’ve realized sometimes when we face sort of like hiccups or just like moments in business where there are those misaligned expectations, where like the deliverables aren’t as expected, or you’re expecting a different result to what you then receive from your team, we realize that sometimes just like this moment where like they have a different expectation of what they’re supposed to be doing versus like what you’ve expected of them, and sometimes that’s because maybe they’ve been with you a little while, and maybe their role shifted, and their responsibilities have shifted. Or it could just be like people come from like different background, different experiences, whole host of like different leadership styles. So they come and they bring all that expectation with them, and they’re expecting you to maybe behave as their other boss did, and so what we’ve been doing is we’ve been like re outlining for every single team member their like expectations document. So that’s like what they are responsible for and what sits in their lane, and also what definitely does not sit in their lane. Because sometimes like that same thing can happen where like people are jumping on each other’s toes, so we’ve just been testing that out recently and like running that through for every single member of our team. We’ve also been alongside like the expectations document. We’ve just been like reinstilling to every member of our teams like our core values, and it kind of comes to your point about like vision and about this like idea of like having to say no and sometimes reset expectations because I think like what we’ve realized is like it’s important to like reoutline the visions for each company, reoutline the the vision we have as founders, and then make sure that like our team members are all on the same page because I think sometimes like people are coming, they’re working for you. They maybe have had those other experiences working with a completely different kind of founder, and they want to bring that same sort of like vision and energy. But it might not be like completely aligned with what you’re trying to do, which kind of comes back to your like situation with the farm, Melanie. So it’s like you then have to kind of like reset expectations, not necessarily wrong. What they wanted to do, it’s just not right for you as a founder. So that’s just something that we’ve been experimenting with recently, and I feel like it is going really well. Work with organizations- that’s the kind of thing I teach as ways of creating these fundamentally strong teams in an inclusive leadership kind of manner.

So with your alignment documents, what’s being measured, and how will you know if the alignment is working?

Yeah. So I think what we’re what we’re doing is we’re doing it as like a three sort of stage approach. We’re making sure that first of all, everyone’s roles and responsibilities are up to date with like if their roles shifted or their roles have changed, and we’re for anyone who needs them to be resent out, we’re resending those out. Then we’re making sure that the expectation document like aligns with their role, and then what we’re doing to kind of make sure that people are on the same page is we’re just getting them to kind of like have a meeting, agree that those are the expectations are placed on them, make sure that they’re aligned, that those are the expectations, and sometimes it might be a simple case of someone. Just like, oh, I didn’t realize that because I did that one time, you’re now expecting me to do that on an ongoing basis. So, like, we’re having those kind of conversations with different people, and then with our core values document that is also being circulated, that’s with the view of like helping people see that where their role fits into like the wider company vision, and so it’s not about just like them playing their part, but also them playing their part as part of the wider team. And so, like I suppose, what’s in every document we’ve got like a whole section on what does success look like, and so then it creates like room for like when we’re doing like our team like our review periods, which we always do at the end of the year, to like refer back to that, and it it gives us an opportunity to have conversations that are good, which is like, hey, you’ve like done an amazing job. You’ve like met all the expectations placed on you. You’re you’re you’re fulfilling exactly what we’re requiring of you, and give them like like like the tools to be able to continue in that path, but if like for whatever reason there isn’t that being met, it gives us the opportunity to say, okay, well, why is that happening? Is it because they’re lacking training? Is it that they’re lacking tools, or is it simply that we need to like support them in a different way by like creating room for them to understand deeper why that expectation is not being met, and it creates then the opportunity to have those like deeper conversations, and that’s kind of why we wanted to have this in place because I think if you haven’t got this sort of infrastructure, which I think a lot of businesses when you’re starting out, like you’re kind of like you don’t think about this stuff as like the first things that you need. Yeah, you might have a contract, but you don’t necessarily think, “Oh, I need to have like all this detail. And I think it is important because it helps people really know how they can succeed, and if they can succeed in their jobs, they can succeed for you, and you can grow your business how you’re trying to grow it. Whereas, like if that’s not there, it can make it really tricky sometimes for you to like push forward with your vision because everyone’s like you’re kind of heading in one direction. Everyone else is kind of doing different things, so it’s it’s more about just aligning everyone. I think it’s not as easy just to say like it’s like a black and white. Here’s how it works. I think it’s like very gray in the sense that it’s going to be nuance for every single team member, but at the same time, by having like a centralized system and a centralized way of doing it, I think it just means that we’re holding everyone to the same standard. So it’s not like anyone’s being treated differently. We’ve got like one central way that we’re we’re defining what success looks like for every team member.

And where can people find you, Georgia?

So you can find me at with Georgia Thomas, which is my Instagram page, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And my name is Georgia Thomas, so you can just search me there.

Thank you so much for being with us here today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Georgia.

Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, Mel.

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Well, it’s interesting to think about how you thread expectations down through an organization.

Yeah, and I was thinking about from the experimental point of view as an experimental leader, as an experimental psychologist. I just love situations where the leader’s collecting data, and then you can see if you’re learning something, and you can readjust and reiterate and try again and collect more data.

Yeah, and I, you know, I always worry about the thing where a leader becomes the boss of all the work, and and so I I think it’s really important that those be super like two way conversations, like that you’re forming a thing together about what the expectations are, rather than a top down. Here’s my expectations. Let’s make sure I’m very clear with you. Sort of conversation. I just think it’s so important that the leader leave themselves lots of opportunities to get something they didn’t expect, something, and that they can hire people smarter than them and better at different parts of their world than they are. Like it, it. I. I think that that you and I have talked about this on other shows too about accountability, and I’m always so wary of accountability, where you’re holding someone holding something too tightly as a leader, and I think all the Japanese efficiency stuff really talks about making work visible, and so they’re they’re sort of two sides. One is, are you making the work visible so that people know what you’re doing? And are you leaving enough flexibility in the work so that it flows in a way better than you could prescribe?

Interesting.

 

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Georgia Thomas

Georgia Thomas is a former corporate lawyer turned multi-business founder, CEO, and full-time mum. She co-founded e!studios, a social media agency she scaled to run without her daily involvement. Georgia also leads the Venture Haus Group, an eight-figure portfolio of creative, technology, and e-commerce ventures that she co-founded alongside her husband and business partner, Gavin Thomas. Within a year of leaving her legal career, Georgia reshaped her role from operator to true CEO, building a company that thrives even when she steps away.

Today, Georgia teaches founders how to design businesses that don’t rely on them — companies built for freedom as much as for growth. Through her frameworks, she helps leaders transition from overworked operators into visionary CEOs who can scale sustainably while reclaiming their time.

Her journey from the legal world to entrepreneurship was fueled by a desire for freedom, clarity, and impact. Now, beyond leading her agency and group of ventures, Georgia is building her personal brand as a thought leader in sustainable business growth, intentional leadership, and work-life balance. She shows founders how to step out of the weeds and create companies that thrive without them — so they can focus on vision, impact, and life beyond work.

Through her frameworks, Georgia provides tools that empower entrepreneurs to delegate effectively, streamline operations, and embrace leadership with intention. A devoted mum to her daughter, Thea, she blends hard-won business expertise with real-life experience, making her a relatable voice for founders seeking both growth and freedom.

Georgia is the host of her agency’s Social Edge Podcast and has an upcoming appearance on The Jen Gottlieb Show. She is on a mission to help ambitious, purpose-led founders redefine success and build businesses designed to last.

 

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