Leading yourself
Atomic Habits for Owners
Atomic Habits for business owners: why small actions repeated beat big pushes, the four laws that make one stick, and how to design a habit that lasts.
Be, Do, Have
Be, Do, Have for business owners: why waiting for the resources keeps you waiting, and how starting with who you are being changes what happens next.
Comfort, Stretch and Stress
Three zones explain why busy owners stop developing. What comfort, stretch and stress are, and how to spend part of every week in the middle ring.
Control and Responsibility
Control, influence and concern as three rings. Where an owner's energy is wasted, where responsibility reaches, and how to turn a worry into action.
Future Self
Plan backwards from a specific person three years out, not forwards from today plus ten per cent. How Future Self turns ambition into dated decisions.
The Happiness Pie
Wellbeing splits three ways: temperament, what you choose to do, and circumstances. The slice owners spend their working lives chasing is the smallest one.
Identity and Beliefs
Techniques last about a fortnight when they are fighting a belief. How the belief loop seals itself, and how to design a test that could change one.
The Identity Iceberg
Behaviour is the only part anyone sees. Skills, beliefs, values and identity sit beneath it, and that is where a stuck habit sits.
Life Purpose — Coaching Mindset
Purpose is a thread already visible in your own history, and a practical filter for an owner’s hardest decisions.
Mastery — Coaching Mindset
George Leonard’s mastery curve: short spurts of progress separated by long plateaus. How to tell a plateau from a dead end before you kill a good initiative.
Parkinson's Law
Work expands to fill the time available. Parkinson's Law explained for business owners, plus how to put real containers around tasks, meetings and overheads.
Productivity for Business Owners
How an owner's week decays from diary hours to the few that changed anything, and what to do about the gap.
Purpose and Values
The four layers from purpose to values, behaviour and evidence, and how owners turn values on a wall into rules for decisions, hiring and performance.
The Results Mindset
Every month you collect a result or a reason. The two tests that separate them and how to run a real review.
Rocks, Pebbles and Sand
The rocks, pebbles and sand model for business owners: what counts as a rock, why urgent work crowds it out, and how to get rocks into the diary first.
The Rubber Band
The Rubber Band, or structural tension: why the gap between your numbers today and the business you said you were building is what creates movement.
Saboteur Clarification
What a saboteur is in coaching terms, the four-step loop it runs, where it costs owners money, and how to catch the sentence and act anyway.
Scarcity vs Abundance
Scarcity and abundance thinking for business owners: the fixed-pie assumption, the six places it shows up, and a worked example of what each response costs.
Self-Esteem, Self-Efficacy, Confidence
Three different things get called confidence. They are built differently and move at different speeds, and one of them is the place to start this quarter.
The 7 Habits
Read as a business model rather than a self-help book, Covey's seven habits are a sequence. The order matters, and it starts with you.
Principles and Universal Laws
The difference between universal laws, such as cause and effect and compounding, and the principles you choose to hold, with a price test for checking them.
Privilege and Responsibility
Ownership brings control and consequence together. The four positions owners fall into, Passenger, Taker, Martyr and Owner, and how to carry both properly.
The Performance Zone
The Yerkes-Dodson inverted U explained for business owners: how pressure affects output, why overload removes high-value work first, and how to spot it.
Latent Potential — Coaching Mindset
Latent potential is the output your business could produce from the same people, the same week and the same customers. Where the gap hides and how to close it.
Goldilocks Targets
How to set a target in the stretch band, between too easy and too hard, and name what has to change.
Leading people
Backbone and Heart
Backbone and Heart, from Mary Beth O'Neill: say what you see and stay connected while you say it. Why leaders drop one, and how to hold both in a hard talk.
DISC and Personality Style
DISC is a model of observable behaviour, not a personality test. The four styles, what each one costs an owner, and how to flex without becoming someone else.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is about accuracy and control, not warmth. The four parts, why your reaction decides how much truth reaches you, and how to work on it.
Empowerment
Empowerment hands over decisions as well as tasks. The six-rung ladder of authority, what it costs, and how to move one decision one rung this week.
Governing vs Managing
There are two jobs in every business: governing it and managing it. What each one covers, why managing always wins, and how to protect time for the other.
The GROW Model
Goal, Reality, Options, Will. What each of the four moves is for, why skipping straight to Options is the standard failure, and how to run one this week.
The Leadership Quadrants — Mindset
Every handover involves two things: the outcome and the method. Split them and you get four ways to lead a task — direct, delegate, guardrail and release.
Level 5 Leadership — Coaching Mindset
Jim Collins found the leaders behind lasting company leaps shared humility and fierce will. What Level 5 means for an owner and for what the business is worth.
The Motivation Map — Coaching Mindset
Rank your motivational drivers and build the year around them.
Primal Leadership
Primal Leadership for business owners: the six leadership styles, why four lift a team and two drain it, and how to widen the range you lead with.
Situational Flex
Leadership style is a gear you choose. Four styles, read the task rather than the person, and stop losing people at the second stage.
Social Styles
Two things anyone can observe: whether a person asks or tells, and whether they show emotion. Four styles, and the skill of moving towards the person opposite.
Team Development: The Four Stages
Bruce Tuckman's four stages, why team performance dips before it rises, and what the owner should be doing at each one.
Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?
Goffee and Jones on the four behaviours of leaders people choose to follow: selective weakness, reading the room, tough empathy and being different.
The Will/Skill Model
Max Landsberg's four boxes: guide, delegate, direct and excite. What each person needs from you, and why the box belongs to the task, not the person.
Who Is Sailing The Ship?
The two jobs every business owner has, on deck and below deck, why the below-deck work wins the diary, and what happens to a business when nobody steers.
5 Star Coaching
Frame, ask, options, commit, follow — a five-move structure for the conversation that ends with your people owning the next step instead of you.
Ask, Don't Tell
Telling creates compliance, asking creates ownership. The eleven-second habit costing owners twenty days a year, and the four questions that fix it.
Ask the Question, Yield the Answer
A question is an instruction about what somebody thinks about next. How to design better questions, hold the silence, and get answers that survive Monday.
OARBED: Above and Below the Line
OARBED sorts what people say after something goes wrong: ownership, accountability and responsibility above the line, blame, excuses and denial below it.
Partner Alignment
Seven scales that show whether you and your business partner want the same things: ambition, money, time, risk, decision rights, exit and standards.
The Stages of Learning
The four stages of competence, from not knowing what you do not know to doing it without thinking, and why the job you do best is the hardest one to hand over.
The Forgetting Curve
Ebbinghaus showed memory falls away steeply then flattens. Why the training you paid for changed nothing, and the four things that make it stick.
The Knowledge Pie
Four slices: what you know, what you know you don't, what you have not thought to ask, and what you are certain of that quietly stopped being true.
Growing the business
The Ansoff Matrix Explained
The Ansoff Matrix for business owners: four routes to growth in ascending order of risk, why the cheapest box gets ignored, and how to price each option first.
Built to Last
Built to Last, from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras: preserve the core, stimulate progress — and the blunt test that tells a real value from an old habit.
Business 101: The Six Parts
Every business runs on six parts: market, marketing, sales, delivery, money and leadership. How to score yours and work on the one that is holding you back.
The Ceiling of Complexity
Businesses grow in steps, not a smooth line. The ceiling of complexity explains the long flat stretches, why they happen and how an owner breaks through one.
The 4 Decisions Driving Growth
People, strategy, execution and cash. Verne Harnish's four decisions are limiting, not additive: growth runs at the speed of the weakest one.
Good to Great
Jim Collins's disciplines for a small business: first who then what, the brutal facts, the hedgehog concept, profit per X and the flywheel test.
The Golden Circle
What, how, why. Simon Sinek's three rings for owner-managed businesses, and why communicating from the outside in turns your quote into a price fight.
Innovation in Small Business
Innovation is a five-stage loop of small, tested changes, and the stage that kills it is the decision that never gets made.
Man on the Moon — Coaching Mindset
Kennedy’s Moon goal was specific, verifiable, dated and beyond the current method. What that means for a business destination.
Now, Where, How
Now, Where, How is a three-question planning model for business owners. Get the baseline honest, the destination dated, and the moves down to three.
Organisational Health
Patrick Lencioni's organisational health model: minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, low turnover.
The Performance Matrix
Results on one axis, behaviours on the other. Four boxes, four different jobs, and the conversation owners tend to avoid.
Performance on Purpose: The Model in Brief
The short version of the model behind all our coaching: are you performing well, and is that performance pointed at a purpose you chose?
The Pillars of Value
The six pillars that affect what a buyer will pay for your business: profit quality, owner independence, recurring revenue, spread of risk, systems and growth.
The Planning Hierarchy
Vision, strategy, plan and action answer four different questions, and each level has to come from the one above. How to find and fix a broken link.
Project Management and Scope
Scope, time and cost: fix two and the third must move, or quality moves for you. How owners land internal projects and keep client job margin intact.
The Rules of the Game
How to write one page that says what your people may decide alone, what they must check first and what never happens, with money limits written in.
The 10 Departments
Every business runs ten functions whether or not anyone owns them. The ten, the three tests of real ownership, and how to spot the ones nobody holds.
The 5 Ways to Grow a Business
Leads, conversion, transactions, average sale and margin: the five levers that produce profit, why they multiply rather than add, and which one to move first.
The Three Freedoms
Financial, time and mind freedom: the three scores that show whether the business works for you, why you never average them, and how to move the lowest.
Making Decisions — Coaching Mindset
One-way doors and two-way doors. How reversibility tells you how fast to decide, whose decision it is, and why slowness usually costs more than a wrong answer.
Kettle Logic
Five reasons not to do something usually means one real reason, unspoken. How to spot kettle logic in yourself, your team and in a prospect's objection.
Money and numbers
Breakeven: The Number to Hit
How to work out your breakeven sales figure, turn it into a daily number, and use it to price a hire, a discount or a price rise before you decide.
The Cash Conversion Cycle
The cash conversion cycle is the number of days your money sits in stock and in other people's bank accounts. How to work it out, and how to shorten it.
The Dangers of Discounting
A discount comes out of your gross profit, not your price. The arithmetic of discounting, the mirror image of a price rise, and when a discount is right.
Lifetime Value — Coaching Mindset
Lifetime value is what a customer contributes in gross profit over the whole relationship. How to calculate it, and why it changes what you can afford to spend.
The Product Ladder
Entry, core, premium and continuity: the four tiers behind a range that was designed rather than accumulated, and what a missing tier costs you every year.
Profit vs Cash
Why profitable businesses run out of money: what separates profit from cash, how growth consumes it, and the cash conversion cycle every owner should know.
State Your Price and Shut Up
Say the number, then stop talking. Why the silence after a price is arithmetic rather than rejection, and what to say when a buyer pushes back on it.
The Value Ladder
How to design the sequence of offers that takes a customer from a first small purchase to your best work, and how to size the gaps between the rungs.
Selling and customers
The 4 Kinds of Seller
Order taker, presenter, relationship builder, adviser. Four selling habits with four predictable results, and why the likeable one gives away margin.
How Customers Buy
The buyer's journey has six stages and most sales processes touch only the last three. What happens at each stage, and the one that decides the outcome.
The Ladder of Loyalty
Seven relationships, one word: customer. What each rung needs, why businesses leak between rungs three and four, and how to fix it without advertising.
The Marketing Gravity Wheel
No single channel holds a business up. One hub, a handful of spokes running to a cadence, and why channel concentration is a valuation risk, not a preference.
The Sales Process
A named sequence from enquiry to signature, where each stage has a test to pass before anyone moves on. See where sales leak and hand selling to someone else.
The SPIN Cycle
The SPIN questioning sequence for business owners: Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions, with a worked example of the implication step.
Wants vs Needs
Needs get you onto the shortlist; wants decide who wins the work. How buying decisions are made, and the three questions that uncover the real want.
Feel, Felt, Found
An objection is a statement of risk, not a request for information. A three-move structure for lowering the defence so new information lands.
Change and pressure
ADKAR: Why Change Fails
ADKAR explained for business owners: the five things one person needs before a change sticks, how to diagnose which one is missing, and what to do about it.
The Emotional Change Curve
Every change dips before it works. The emotional change curve explains the trough, why owners abandon good decisions at week six, and how to hold one properly.
The 5 A’s of Change
Awareness, acceptance, action, accountability, adoption — the five stages a change must pass through in order, and how to spot the one yours is stuck at.
The Formula for Change
Dissatisfaction times vision times first steps must beat resistance. Why the three factors multiply rather than add, and which one to fix first.
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