Bite Sized Business Tips

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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For all the talk of servant leadership, in society at large, our focus is increasingly on "me first". But if we actively participate in and feed a culture where it's all about me - my daily photo to share with you all, my obsession with me time, put yourself first, ...

Official confirmation of recession, tax raises and spending cuts. Doom and gloom 24x7 on the news. Here's my take on what it means for us as SME business owners. Context

1. This is not the first recession, and it won't be the last. Sometimes they've hurt a little, sometimes a ...
   
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I remember in the early 90s being told to staple my photograph to any CVs I sent out applying for work. I'm no George Clooney, so I wondered why.I later found out it was so that people who only had my name to go on would see that I wasn't ...

Make doing right easy. If there were a single mantra for consistently improving business (and life, and the planet, and my dancing), it would be tough to find a more effective one than "make it easy to do the right thing". Whether it's addressing commercial issues, strategic execution, or values ...

When it comes to sustainability and human rights, Fashion has earned a terrible reputation. And mostly for very good reason. But there are some shining examples in there.One of these is pre-owned luxury fashion retailer Sign of the Times. The original Chelsea shop was founded to media buzz in the ...

A key foundation stone for scaling effectively is clarity. Clarity of purpose first, then of values, of means and of responsibilities. But every CEO who wants to scale will have to grapple with how much detail is needed in terms of that clarity. Your team probably wants more detail (while ...

We're a restless bunch, us founders. We're don't tend to be particularly patient, and we get frustrated when people "don't just get it". Or in reality, when they don't "get" what we get. It's because we're passionate about what we're building. And as a result, we can be less forgiving ...