Build a business that grows on purpose.

Ninety minutes a fortnight, about three hours a month — and if the business genuinely cannot spare its owner for that, the diagnosis has already started, because a business that cannot release three hours of its owner's month has no room for thinking, which is usually why the margins have gone unexamined. The between-session work is mostly not additional; it is work you are already doing badly or avoiding: pricing the next job properly instead of fast, chasing the overdue debtor, finally working out what your cheapest category of work actually costs you. The first six weeks are the heaviest, because calculating true margin by job and rewriting a price list is real work on top of a full diary. After that the changes start taking work off you rather than adding it — the loss-making jobs that generated all the chasing are the ones that go.

Then apply the same discipline to that engagement that this one would apply to your business. Was anything measured — a baseline gross margin, a conversion rate, a cash position — or was it good conversation with no numbers and no dates? Did the coach ever look at your actual accounts, job by job, or did the sessions run on how things felt? And did you ever hear something you did not want to hear — that a service loses money, that a client should go, that the plan you arrived with was the problem? If the answers are no, the numbers were never going to move. Here the first two sessions are a diagnosis built on your last twelve months of figures, progress is a one-page scorecard you update yourself, and the ninety-day review is against numbers in writing. Bring the old engagement to the call as evidence.

Flat out and profitable are different conditions, and the gap between them is what this page is about. Being busy tells you the diary is full; it does not tell you which jobs make money. The illustration further up is the pattern to check yourself against: a business where the cheapest category of work took forty-five per cent of the hours and, costed honestly, lost money — being flat out was precisely the problem. Before concluding things are fine, try three quick questions: gross margin by job type, not in total; what cash looks like in eight weeks; which clients you would not take on again at their current price. If the answers come easily and the numbers are good, you may genuinely not need this. Most owners cannot answer them quickly, and busyness is what stops them ever finding out. That is worth thirty minutes of diagnosis.

Separate the decisions from the results, because they move at different speeds. The decisions can move fast: gross margin by job type is usually calculable within the first month from records you already hold, and it regularly changes your view of the business in one sitting. The results lag, because a pricing change has to work through the order book and a repriced quote takes weeks to become banked cash. Expect the middle to feel worse before it feels better — in the illustration above, revenue drops in month three when the underpriced work goes, and that is exactly where most owners lose their nerve and reverse a correct decision. A quarter is realistic for the first numbers moving; two quarters is common for the pattern to be undeniable. Anyone promising a transformation by week three has not looked at how long your cash cycle actually is.

Here the question has an unusually clean answer, because everything is written down. At ninety days we sit the one-page scorecard — revenue, gross margin, pipeline, cash and whatever the constraint was — next to what we said would move, in writing, at the start. Three outcomes are possible. The numbers moved: carry on and reset the next quarter. The numbers did not move for a reason we can name — a pricing change still working through the order book, a decision made late — in which case the review says so and sets the date it should show. Or the numbers did not move and there is no good reason, and then the right answer is to stop, and we will say it before you have to. What you will not get is a pivot to how much clearer things feel. Feeling clearer is welcome; it is not evidence.

You need enough to diagnose from, not a finance function. The practical minimum is management accounts — rough is fine — and some way of seeing what each job billed against what it roughly cost, even if that starts as a spreadsheet built in an afternoon. What the numbers look like matters less than whether they exist: a margin you can actually see beats a perfect chart of accounts you cannot. If none of it exists, the first job is producing it, and that is bookkeeping rather than coaching — we will say so on the call instead of selling you sessions that would be two people swapping opinions. One reassurance worth giving: nobody is grading the state of your records. Owners regularly arrive embarrassed by their accounts, and embarrassment keeps figures in the drawer, which is the one place this work cannot reach them.

Different job, different direction. An accountant primarily looks backwards and outwards — recording what happened, keeping you compliant, filing on time — and even a good set of management accounts is a report, not a decision. This work starts where the report stops: which jobs to reprice, which client to let go, whether the hires in the plan survive contact with the margin figures, and whether you hold your nerve in the month revenue dips. Coaching is no substitute for the accountant — it runs on the numbers they produce, and if those numbers do not exist yet, producing them comes first. Buzz Coaching sits alongside Buzz Accounting, but there is no bundle and no expectation you move your accounts anywhere. If the gap is the figures themselves — margin, cashflow, forecasting — Financial Coaching with Peter, our Finance Director, is the closer fit, and the call will say so.

The fee is quoted on the discovery call and confirmed in writing before you commit — there is no price list here, because the right figure depends on stream and rhythm, and a headline that differs from your actual quote helps nobody. The more useful half of the question is the return. If this works, it pays for itself through specific, checkable changes: a price increase that sticks, a loss-making service repriced or dropped, hours moved from your worst-margin work to your best. The illustration above — invented, deliberately — shows the shape: the same revenue at a better margin, worth a defined amount per year. Your version of that arithmetic gets sketched on the call, with your rough numbers, before any fee is discussed. If the plausible upside does not comfortably clear the cost, the honest advice is not to buy, and you will hear that from us first.