You Have a Design Problem. When I sit with business owners in the £1m–£5m range, I tend to hear variations of the same frustrations. They sound different on the surface, but they usually fall into five broad areas. And they all share one missing ingredient. Design. The first is a Read more
Most business owners don’t wake up one day and decide to build a stressful business. It happens gradually. What started as being involved becomes being relied upon.What started as oversight becomes control.What started as pride becomes pressure. And before you realise it, the business still runs — but only because Read more
Most business owners don’t ignore problems. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. When something isn’t working properly, they lean in. They stay closer. They work harder. They take more on themselves until they’re sure it’s fixed. That instinct is understandable — and early on, it often works. The problem is Read more
There’s a point in many businesses that doesn’t get talked about very much. It’s not the startup phase.It’s not crisis.And it’s not failure. It’s the point where the business is working… but it is just harder than it should be. Most owners at this stage are experienced. They’ve made good Read more
I have a lot of conversations with business owners who, on paper, are doing fine. The business is trading.There’s work coming in.The team looks capable. And yet, privately, they’ll say something like: “I don’t know why this feels so hard.” That sentence matters. Because most of the time, the issue Read more
The Most Important Work You’ll Do This Christmas As this year draws to a close and as this is my last article until January, I want to take a moment to wish you a genuinely Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. But more than that, I want to invite Read more
This always confuses me. Yet I hear it all the time. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to get much bigger.”“I don’t want to grow much more.”“We’re fine as we are.” Whenever someone says it, I always pause—because it’s confusing. These are business owners who work incredibly hard. They’ve taken risks, invested Read more
Revenue, Profit and the Reality of Cashflow We’ve all heard the phrase “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cashflow is king.” Most business owners nod along, repeat it to their teams, and then quietly go back to obsessing over the wrong numbers. It’s a great saying, but unless we Read more
What Success Doesn’t Teach People talk about failure like it’s something to avoid at all costs. In business especially, we’re trained to fear it, hide it, deny it, or dress it up as something else. But here’s the truth I’ve learned working with leaders for over two decades: Failure is Read more
And Why Seeing Them That Way Changes Everything One of the most powerful shifts any business owner can make is to stop seeing people as costs and start seeing them as profit centres. And I don’t just mean fee-earners. I mean everyone. Because when you really understand how a business Read more