The $60,000 Lesson That Built a Billion-Dollar Business
He called me because his second-in-command had seen my work at her previous employer. He was a founder. Early days of what was then a promising startup — the kind of business that has energy and momentum but not yet the systems to match. He was also furious. Sixty thousand dollars had gone into a […]
What’s stopping you from getting the results you want?
I’ve asked that question in one form or another across more than 400 projects over four decades. The businesses are different. The industries are different. The people are different. The answers are always a variation of the same three things. Every operational problem I’ve ever seen comes back to errors, time, or the absence of […]
The Key Person You Cannot Afford To Lose
I was sitting in a client’s office not long ago. He was walking me through his monthly process — the manual steps, the spreadsheets, the workarounds he’d built over the years to keep things running. It was exactly why I was there. We were going to automate it. Halfway through the conversation, I stopped him. […]
Your Quote Template Is Costing You Clients
Let me tell you about a conversation I had with a sales professional not long ago. He was one of two salespeople in his business. Each quote he worked on was worth between $500,000 and $1 million to the company. He was personally responsible for roughly $10 million in annual turnover. I asked him how […]
The Cost Nobody Is Calculating
Imagine you are buying a new car. Different brand, different make to your last one. Every knob feels wrong. Every display seems to be in the wrong place. The indicators are where the wipers used to be. But you love the car. It drives like heaven. And within a few weeks, you’ve adapted. The muscle […]
A Postcard From The Edge Of The Universe
By the time you read this, I am somewhere in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. At 2,400 metres above sea level. No humidity. No light pollution. Just the clearest night sky on the planet — and more telescopes per square kilometre than anywhere else on Earth. The reason the world’s best observatories are here […]
What a Swaying Workbench Taught Me About Financial Models
I built my first serious workbench from Tasmanian oak. It took a weekend. It was solid, flat, well-jointed. One leg was perhaps half a millimetre short. You’d never notice standing next to it. You’d only notice when you placed a long piece of timber across the surface and watched it rock. A swaying […]
The $1M Hire You’re Not Ready For
So, you’ve decided to hire. Brilliant. Your business is growing. You need the hands. The candidate is excellent. The salary is $120,000. Now let me do some quick maths with you. At 12–15% margins, a $100K employee needs to generate $1,000,000 in revenue just to break even. That’s before you factor in desk, equipment, onboarding, […]
Cutting Cost Using Your Existing Software Tools
You can use your existing software to cut costs… Today I want to talk about the situation that a lot of companies nowadays are using Software as a Service [SaaS] offers in the cloud. Software as a Service means you are renting a software packages and you pay a license fee per person – per user. This […]
My Proven Action Steps To Functionality
We start with the Strategy session where we discover what is missing in your situation and also what you have already. So we close the gap between what you have and what you want to achieve. (Analyse) Next step is the Design of the model and from there I can Program and use workflow and interfaces to make it a user experience […]