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"How are things going?" "It's going okay." That was how one of my coaching sessions started recently, and with this particular business owner I'd learnt to be a little suspicious of that answer, because they have a habit of landing on the cautious read even when things are good. As we talked it through, the picture was considerably better than okay. The business had made some bold calls that were now clearly paying off, it was growing, and some significant opportunities were

"I need my managers to take more ownership." I've heard some version of that in several businesses over the last few weeks, and in quite a few of those conversations I found myself gently turning the question back on the person asking it. The frustration is usually real, but when you look closely at what happens day to day, the lack of ownership often turns out to be a fairly rational response to the way the people above have been leading. One business I work with has a manag

I found myself asking almost the same question in three completely different businesses last month, and it wasn't how they were going to win more work. It was what would happen to the business if they did. That sounds like a nice problem to have, and in many ways it is. But the more I've thought about it, the more I think a lot of growth plans have a gap in the middle of them. We spend a great deal of time working out where the revenue will come from, which markets, which con

Something odd seems to be happening with sales pipelines at the moment, and I've had so many versions of the same conversation with CEOs and MDs over the last few weeks that I've started to wonder what on earth is going on. The pipeline isn't empty. In most of the businesses I'm talking to there's plenty of activity at the front end, because they're being invited to tender, customers are asking for p roposals, specifications and detailed quotes, and the conversations feel gen

Picture a delivery team that has never missed a deadline in two years. Every client review comes back clean. Every board pack shows green against every line. And every time the leader running that team goes to ask for another head, the answer comes back the same way: things look fine as they are. That's the trap. Nothing has broken, so nothing looks broken. And in most businesses, resource gets allocated to the fire that's already burning, not the one being held off by three

I've worked with a number of business owners who know they want to step back or sell one day, and a good many of them haven't yet worked out what they want the sale to leave them with. By the time we get to talking about it, they have often started exploring the mechanics. They've spoken to accountants, considered different structures, thought about valuation and funding, and may have several perfectly viable options in front of them, each carrying its own questions on tax, p

He went back into the office on a Sunday evening for a customer, and it only cost him an hour, which is exactly why he didn't think twice about it. I was coaching a Marketing Director recently who'd made that decision more times than he could easily count over the summer, because each one on its own was completely reasonable. A good customer needed something at short notice and he could sort it, so he did. Nobody would call that a bad decision. In isolation, most of us would

Sales hit its target and so did Ops. So why isn't the business moving any faster? Sales promises a delivery date and Ops finds out about it the same way the client does, after it's already been communicated. Nobody did anything wrong here, and that's exactly the problem. The business loses days chasing a deadline that Ops never agreed to and never had the chance to push back on, because pushing back was never anyone's job, it was just friction that got absorbed somewhere down

I'm writing this in the final week of a run that started with three weeks fully off and has moved into three weeks working part time. When I was an employed leader, I always took my full holiday allocation and insisted my teams did too, and I genuinely believed I understood why that mattered. Now that I run my own business, I take eleven weeks off a year, and it's non negotiable, and I understand the why on a completely different level than I did back then. It isn't because I

I was talking to a leader recently who had a genuinely strong case for investment in a new project. Clear return, solid numbers, it was a plan that made sense to everyone on his own team. He put it to the board and got a lukewarm response, and came away convinced the case itself was the problem, so he started rewriting it, by adding more detail, and more of the thinking behind the plan. The case wasn't the problem. The board barely knew this part of the business, had no track

I was talking to a leader recently whose chair would go quiet for weeks and then land a string of pointed questions with no warning, always about cash. What's the runway looking like, what happens if this contract slips, why hasn't this been flagged sooner. He'd read it as difficult behaviour, a chair who didn't trust him, and turned up to every catch up braced for it. What was actually happening was much simpler. Nobody had ever given this chair a monthly cash position, pipe

A few days ago, in the final week of three weeks off, two relatively small things landed at once. A property issue hit another bump, and a completion statement arrived with a charge on it that I didn't believe was mine. Neither was catastrophic. My brain disagreed. Within minutes I'd gone from this needs checking to this is all going horribly wrong, with a genuinely irrational thought sitting underneath it, what if I lose everything. I spend my working life helping CEOs slow

There's a pattern I see more consistently than almost anything else in my work with CEOs and MDs, and it goes something like this. A leader becomes genuinely frustrated with someone's output, convinced they aren't pulling their weight or operating at the level the role demands, and yet when you ask what the standard actually was, the honest answer is that it lived in the leader's head and nowhere else. Nobody ever sat down and said, here's what good looks like in this role, h

There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes when someone good hands in their notice. Most leaders feel it as a personal blow, almost a betrayal, and the instinct to treat it that way is completely understandable because you've invested in them, you like them, and now they're going. But there's a question worth sitting with before you reach for that feeling, and it's this: is your business a river or a pond? A pond keeps everything in. The water doesn't move, nothing co

There's something about the current business environment that makes the usual approach to planning feel increasingly inadequate. Tariffs shifting overnight, inflation that won't quite settle, consumer confidence moving in ways that are hard to read, and a general sense that the assumptions you built your strategy on in January might not hold by March. Most CEOs are navigating genuine uncertainty right now, not the comfortable kind where you know roughly what's coming and you'

There's a conversation I had recently with a leadership team that's stayed with me, because it captured something I see constantly in growing businesses, usually in slightly different words but always with the same shape underneath. The team felt responsible for outcomes without having the power to actually act on them, and the board felt accountable for the business without quite being able to see what was happening underneath. Both sides were frustrated with the other, and

There's a cost that doesn't show up on any P&L, and in my experience it's one of the most significant costs a growing business can carry. It looks like this: someone who was brilliant in their last role isn't performing in their current one, everyone around them can see it, and yet the conversation hasn't been had. It just keeps not being had, week after week, quarter after quarter, while the business quietly pays the price. The reasons it doesn't get addressed are almost alw

There's a version of business loneliness that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, and it's not the loneliness of being the only person in the room who sees the full picture, or of carrying a difficult decision that nobody else can share. It's more specific than that. It's the loneliness of sitting across from someone who owns exactly as much of the business as you do, who was there at the beginning, who you've built something real with, and quietly knowing that you're no

May turned out to have a theme running through it, even though I didn’t plan it that way. I started the month writing about the CEO and MD relationship, which is probably the most under-designed structure in most SMEs. Two capable people, genuinely aligned on values and direction, but operating without a shared map of who owns what. Nobody has ever sat down and said: these decisions are yours, these are mine, these we make together. So they circle the same territory and quiet