How Usman Kayani went from managing 400 sales staff to helping founders build sales teams that don’t depend on them

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

After 16 years in sales, from appointment setter to managing teams of up to 400 at Virgin Active, part of the Virgin Group, Usman Kayani built Guided Growth around a problem he kept seeing: founders who grow a sales team but never manage to get themselves out of it.

Usman Kayani was eighteen years old and bad at his job.

He was an appointment setter on a call-centre floor, the bottom rung of the sales ladder.

A good manager changed the trajectory. For the first time, Kayani was being taught sales as something that could be coached, measured and improved. Guided Growth, the previously London-based, now Dubai-based sales consultancy Usman Kayani founded, helps coaches, consultants, and SaaS businesses build sales teams that can run without the founder managing them. It also recruits and places the sales manager who eventually takes the founder’s seat. Often, the work starts by teaching the founder to manage sales properly until the business is ready for that handover. The company serves clients across the United States, the United Kingdom and Dubai. Guided Growth is built around a simple idea: sales management can be taught, measured and improved, yet most online founders were never shown how.

Who is Usman Kayani? From call-centre setter to sales director

Usman Kayani spent sixteen years in sales and sales management before founding Guided Growth. He spent the first twelve years as an employee, working his way through every level of the profession, from appointment setter and closer to team lead, sales manager, and sales director, before leaving to build his own business.

Six of those years were at Virgin Active, part of the Virgin Group, where Kayani ran multiple sales teams, trained the company’s other sales managers, and oversaw as many as 400 representatives at once. Four hundred people is a categorically different problem than four. It takes a system: a hiring process that finds real ability, an onboarding path that gets new hires productive fast, coaching and tracking that catches problems early instead of at quarter close, and a meeting rhythm that turns all of it into better calls.

What problem is guided growth solving?

Early-stage founders usually wear every hat, including salesperson and sales manager. The problem comes when the company grows, but those jobs never leave the founder’s desk. Guided Growth helps build the team, management and systems needed for that handover to happen. “Most founders are stuck in one of two places,” Kayani said. “They’re still doing the selling themselves, or they’ve built a sales team, and somehow they’re still the person managing it every day. That can work for a while. It becomes a problem when you want to build a company that can grow without everything running through you.”

The insight, according to Kayani, is that hiring good salespeople and managing a sales team are two separate skills, and most founders were never taught either. Many operators in this space didn’t come from sales; they learned to sell by selling, which works for them but rarely transfers. Ask a self-taught closer what makes their calls work, and the answer is usually rapport, energy, reading the room. True, but not something you can teach. So the founder hands a new hire a recording of their best call and can’t understand why it doesn’t land the same way.

Inside Usman Kayani’s sales leaders OS

The Sales Leaders OS is the nine-part sales management framework Kayani developed and teaches through the Sales Leaders Academy. It covers everything from lead conversion and performance tracking to hiring, onboarding and team accountability, with a 30-day ramp-up designed to get new hires to full performance fast. The framework alone isn’t the differentiator, though. Guided Growth also recruits and installs the sales manager who runs it, with the goal of getting the founder out of the sales function entirely.

Guided growth, by the numbers

Guided Growth has now coached more than 300 businesses through its programme, including at least 20 client companies operating at eight-figure annual revenue.

“After 16 years of working in sales and sales management,” said Usman Kayani, “this is the only system I have found that works consistently. This is not something I learnt in a course; our system is something I’ve perfected over years of trial and error and, more importantly, from working with the top one percent of online businesses.”

The idea behind Guided Growth is ultimately the same one Kayani learned at eighteen: the right management can change what a salesperson, and eventually an entire sales team, is capable of.