About advisories
Practical advisories for common founder and operator challenges, built with clear actions you can apply immediately.
Showing 16 articles.
Most advice about building a brand assumes you have a marketing team, a content budget, and a few hours a week to dedicate to it. If you have none of those things, this Advisory is for you. It explains what brand actually means for a small or growing business, where it is built most efficiently, and the single most common mistake founders make when they try to build one under constraint.
There is more than one way to deal with underperformance — and which approach is right depends almost entirely on why the person is underperforming. Most founders skip the diagnosis and go straight to an intervention. This Advisory explains how to get the diagnosis right, what each intervention option actually involves, and how to avoid the most common and expensive mistake founders make in this situation.
The question most founders ask is whether their new idea is good. The question that actually tells you whether to proceed is whether someone will pay for it. These are different questions and they have different answers. This Advisory explains how to get to the second answer quickly and cheaply — before you build anything you don't have to.
You already know you need to have this conversation. The fact that you haven't had it yet does not make you a bad manager — almost everyone delays it, and the reasons are understandable. This Advisory explains why the delay is costing you more than you think, how to prepare properly, and what actually makes the conversation go well. Read it, then go have the conversation this week.
The pull of a new market is real — more customers, more revenue, more room to grow. So is the cost of entering the wrong one: months of distraction, resources committed to something that does not return them, and the existing business quietly declining while attention is elsewhere. This Advisory explains how to evaluate a new market honestly, before you have committed anything you cannot recover.
These two problems usually share a root cause, and understanding what connects them changes what you do about them. This Advisory explains how to diagnose whether your problem is structural or operational, why the most common response — trying to grow your way out of it — tends to make things worse, and what to fix first.
Everyone tells you that keeping your best people is one of the most important things you can do. That's true. The part that doesn't get discussed is what happens when you optimise for keeping people without distinguishing which people — and what that eventually does to your team and your business.
The behaviours that got your business to where it is are not the same behaviours that will take it further. Most founders know this in the abstract. What is harder — and what this Advisory addresses — is recognising when the transition is already overdue, what specifically needs to change, and why the hardest part of the whole thing is not redesigning the organisation but changing how you personally operate within it.
The instinct to diversify where your leads come from is usually sound — depending on a single channel for new business is a genuine risk. But how you diversify matters as much as whether you do. This Advisory explains how to assess your current channel mix honestly, what the real options are, and the mistake that wastes the most time and money when founders try to fix a lead problem.
Your buyers treat what you sell as interchangeable with what your competitors sell. They compare on price, take the cheapest quote, and move on. This Advisory explains what is actually producing that dynamic, what your real options are, and the one thing almost every founder who successfully escapes a commodity market does first.
The first two weeks after a key person leaves are the most important. What you do — and do not do — in that window determines how much of the damage is recoverable. This Advisory explains what to prioritise immediately, what the departure has revealed about how your business holds knowledge, and how to make sure the same vulnerability does not rebuild itself quietly over time.
Every growing business faces a version of this question regularly: do we hire for this, bring in an agency or consultant, or invest in developing the capability ourselves? The decision is usually made reactively — whoever is closest to the problem makes the call that feels most urgent. This Advisory gives you a durable framework for making it well, across different types of capability and different stages of the business.
If you are the person who closes most of your business, you already know this is a problem. Every deal requires your involvement. Every conversation where you hand off to someone else produces a worse outcome. The business cannot grow beyond your personal capacity to sell — and your personal capacity is already fully committed. This Advisory explains how to fix that, in the right order.
Underpricing is not just a margin problem. It affects who buys from you, how they treat you, and how much of your business you spend serving customers who would have paid significantly more. This Advisory explains how underpricing compounds across your business, how to know whether it is happening to you, and how to raise prices without losing the customers you want to keep.
They did not leave angry. They did not find a better alternative and switch. They simply got busy, the next engagement never quite materialised, and enough time passed that reaching out started to feel awkward — on your side as much as theirs. This Advisory explains why this happens, how to re-engage the customers who have gone quiet, and how to build the simple habit that stops it from happening again.
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You're on the list. We'll be in touch before launch.