Bite Sized Business Tips

Karma's great. But not the reason to follow your values. I once found myself sat opposite the decision-maker for a significant project we were bidding for. He asked me if I remembered him. To my shame, I didn't. To my pathetic sales skills, I told him I didn't. He told ...
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Fun. So often lacking in business. Or forced. Or contrived. Or plain cringemaking. I laugh when I work. Lots. Sometimes others laugh with me. I suspect often at me. And my favourite feedback I get from people I work with? "It was fun." That they enjoyed it. Do we get ...
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Are new services the answer to your growth ambitions? In every engagement I have with consulting or agency CEOs, we always hit the question of "Should we start to offer xyz service?" when we talk strategy or growth. It could be to break through a plateau, to grow faster, or ...
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Love, hate or ignore him, there is much to be learned about negotiation from the Windsor Framework negotiated by Sunak and von der Leyen. Here are some key ones I take away. By way of additional context, we run a consulting training course, and within that, there's a module on ...
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The ripples you create... I was on a train going into central London yesterday. A lady came on, Korean I think, and sat down opposite me and on the other side of the aisle. She pulled out a tangerine and peeled it. She then offered some to the man sitting ...
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Could your strategy be not to double your business / kill the opposition / become the biggest / ..... ? I was given an interesting dilemma by a CEO who I once worked with. He'd done the work with his leadership team to bring control to their operations - the ...
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Back in the 1950s, after US presidential elections when pollsters asked citizens who didn't vote for the winning candidate what their reaction was, the responses tended to be along the lines of "He's our president, I wish him well". Today, this cannot be said of most citizens of either the ...
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Honour. Seems like an old-fashioned word. "Doing the honourable thing" is mostly taken to mean that young men should accept their responsibility if they've made someone pregnant outside of a long-term relationship. Or a negatively-loaded word as used in "honour killing". The irony and delusion of someone believing that murder ...
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"Turn it into a process". Most SMEs I come across with are either doing this, or claiming that they are doing it, such is the shame of not having all their key processes in place! For SMEs, I enjoyed Sam Carpenter's Work the System. Along with The E-myth, it creates ...
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I've always had a mantra about what good consulting is. It's what I strive for, and what I say ad nauseam when I teach consulting skills. Great consulting is when we come up with a better answer than either one of us would have come up with alone. That means ...
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We've just had a wonderful time snowboarding and skiing in Sierra Nevada in the South of Spain. The range is nowhere near as big as the Alps, and warm weather meant that only about 30% of the slopes were open. My younger self would have written this off as a ...
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Flourish. That's my word for work in 2023. It's always been there for me. It was the biggest satisfaction I got when I had a large team - seeing team members flourish. The stories that live with me most and which get me most emotional are those where I've seen ...
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