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"When setting out on your journey, do not seek advice from those who never left home” - Rumi If you want to know what to expect, speak to the person who has experienced it. Ideally somebody who is willing and eager to share, as you don’t know what you don’t know. When on an unclear journey, you need them to drive the questions for you. Example: My friends recently got back from living in Gibraltar. Before they moved there they had asked me what it was like to live in Spain a

Last week I hired an Olympian. Here’s what I learned and how it will help your business: Background: I play badminton recreationally regularly to a decent standard, but I thought it is about time I got some professional help. If it is something I am going to do regularly for the foreseeable future then I may as well be good at it. So I hired a badminton coach, Rajiv Ouseph . I looked for a coach as I was inspired by another read through of the fantastic article “Personal Best

In business, being good isn’t good enough. You need people to believe you are good. Perceptions trump reality . As an entrepreneur you cannot just deliver great results, you also need to tell your clients and your leads how your help led to the great results. My clients often tell me that one of the most frustrating things they find while running their service businesses - be it coaching or agency work - is their clients not properly attributing their success to the work the

Remember: Goals don't have to suck. Goals don’t have to be boring, serious, stale. You can add fun things in there. In fact, I strongly encourage it. Here are some of my favourite fun goals: 🍝 Pasta quest: Eat as many different pasta shapes as possible within the space of one year. 🌍 Global Grub Hunt: Try a random country's cuisine every month. Use a random country generator, then Google or ChatGPT to find a dish that the country is famous for that you will make. Great for

“The story starts in California. 1981. Charlie Munger hires Chet Holmes to sell magazine ads. He's given a list of 2,200 potential advertisers and a bunch of flyers. Chet doesn’t send one flyer. Instead he backorders hundreds of issues of competitor magazines. And realises 167 companies are responsible for 95% of all ad sales. So Chet ditches the list and goes all-in on the 167. Free gifts, lunches, dog-eared determination. A few months later Xerox order 104 full-color spread

Many entrepreneurs wish they could duplicate themselves, wouldn’t work be so much easier if there were two of you? What many don’t think about is how much better life could be if they split themselves in half. Let me explain: Many entrepreneurs get "lost" in their business. Their entire life becomes consumed by their business, and they lose their identity. They are no longer their name, they are their business. This often leads to business problems, relationship problems, and

Most people’s goals suck for the same reason - the goal they set is outside of their locus of control . You need to be able to directly influence the variable you are measuring. You need to be able to control the goal. For example: ❌Goal: Get 10 new clients per month. This is a bad goal because I cannot control whether somebody buys from me or not. ✅ Goal: Reach out to 10 potential clients per week This is a good goal because it is SMART and process-based. I can directly co

‘Tis the season. Nights draw in, family commitments increase, clients become demanding but aloof. How can we protect our time and energy during the holidays? Here are some of my top tips: ⛔ Start to say no now When I first started running my own businesses I overestimated how much time I had, and how much I could complete. Around this time in the year, I would find myself agreeing to things that I couldn’t possibly do simply because I had forgot to factor in the reduced time

Most people start a business for two reasons: To make more money To have a better life Unfortunately, most people seem to forget reason number two shortly after they start. Kat Boogaard shared her experiences of rediscovering reason two, remembering that she started her business to have a better life, and her subsequent journey detailing how she cut back her working hours so she can enjoy her life and work properly again. While I don’t think she got all the systems set up ri

I was recently reminded of a maths hack to work out tricky percentages, and it subsequently reminded me of a broader truth. It is often easier to flip the problem. The maths hack: rather than trying to figure out 18% of 50, you can just do 50% of 18 (9 is the answer in both cases). Due to the commutative property of multiplication, you can flip percentages to make them easier to solve mentally. Equally, you can use this trick in your life and business when you feel overwhelme

RB2B identifies individuals who visit your website. Without them filling in any kind of form or anything, RB2B will identify the person and send you their full name, their email address, and their LinkedIn profile. It is certainly ethically questionable, but it is legal in the USA. Companies in other countries can use the tool, but RB2B only identifies US-based individuals. I recently tested it. Before testing it, I listened to the founder describe exactly how it works in a

"It isn't that they cannot find the solution. It is that they cannot see the problem” – The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K Chesterton You cannot fix a problem you don’t know you have. I believe that proper problem identification is one of the most valuable skills a person can have. My role mostly revolves around asking people the right question. Yes, I sometimes give direct advice and action points. But, normally, business owners know their own business. They know how to fix a

One of my favourite things about being an entrepreneur (and a consultant!) is thinking of creative solutions to problems. While every business follows the same fundamentals, every business and every entrepreneur is also unique. Business “gurus” often give advice as though it is the only way you should be doing business - you must do ads, you should never do cold email, you have to work 60 hours per week, etc. The reason they present that kind of advice so confidently is o

My email open rates for Work Smart Wednesday dropped by 15% last week. I wondered why, until my partner told me they found it in their spam folder for the first time. Ah. Yes, that would make sense of the drop. So, what did I do about it? And why does it matter? Firstly, it matters because email marketing is still one of the highest ROI activities that any business can do (and shockingly few businesses actually use it, only around 30%). I particularly like email marketing a

Which one is worse than the other? A) Making a $1000 offer to someone with a $100 budget B) Making a $100 offer to someone with a $1000 budget. The correct answer is "B" which is FAR worse. In option "A" you lose $100. In option "B" you lose $900. I was reminded of this recently by Hormozi, but I learned this the hard way through experience within my own businesses - it is a bittersweet feeling when a customer tells you they would have paid 10x more. I often recommend that cl

Neiman Marcus makes 40% of it’s sales from the top 2% of it’s customers . It is like the Pareto Principle on steroids. If you look into your business, you will almost certainly find a similar pattern - often, a tiny proportion of people create an outsized proportion of results. But would you be right to ignore the other 98%? How can we best leverage this effect? Particularly across more aspects than just revenue. The first question has a fairly simple answer: It depends what

I recently read something I am terming the Einstein Conundrum in a satirical comic book I enjoy called The Dilbert Principle . It goes like this: “Imagine you're having a conversation with Albert Einstein and he suddenly gets struck by lightening. This freak accident instantly makes him twice as smart. Would you be able to tell the difference? Once a person is smarter than you (or one step ahead), it doesn't matter if they are one percent smarter or one thousand percent smart

My client, Colin, is a back pain expert. He is excellent at helping people overcome their back pain so they can live happy lives. Colin gets a good number of discovery-style free advice call bookings via his YouTube channel where he gives genuinely free no-obligation advice to help people. This advice has been some of the best I have known any coach to give for free - he has had people tell him that his free advice has brought them back from the edge of suicide and others be

People who are just starting out with their business often ask what they should do in order to get clients. My responses are always the same, as the first stages are always the same for all service businesses: Figure out who your target audience is Create a kickass offer Start with warm outreach Please note that some things commonly regarded as “necessary” aren’t listed here. Because they aren’t necessary. People tend to waste their time on things that regular people think t

I recently listened to an episode of the HBR IdeaCast podcast called “Grit is good. But quitting can be, too” and it reminded me about how I make decisions. After burning out some years ago many years ago, I struggled with the societal view of failure. People default into thinking that quitting something is bad, that it is a failure. Many of the synonyms we have for quitting are also synonyms for failure. However, quitting isn’t always bad. The trick is knowing what to quit