Fresh perspectives and powerful insights to spark action.
Sometimes the best insights come from taking a step back and looking at familiar challenges through a different lens. Our blog explores the practical side of leadership, strategy, and personal development – sharing real experiences, honest reflections, and actionable ideas that actually work in the messy reality of business life.
From navigating difficult conversations to building strategies that stick, these posts offer straightforward guidance that comes from getting things right, getting things wrong, and learning from both.
Essential habits for when sales are good but money is still tight
A business can have good sales and still run out of money in the bank. It's one of the most common surprises that catches out owner-managers, and one of the most avoidable. The accounts look healthy, the year-end shows a profit, and yet Friday comes, wages are tight...
How to delegate when letting go feels impossible
In the last blog post, we looked at the risk of being a single point of failure in your business. Being that founder who still does everything themselves, or if they don’t do it, they definitely want to be all over it – know about it, decide about it, check it. You...
What to do when your business can’t run without you
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not just from working too hard, but from doing that and then realising you’ve been working on all the wrong things. Answering emails that someone else could handle. Updating spreadsheets instead of serving clients. If...
Coaching: The Manager’s Secret Weapon for Building Self-Reliant Teams
Picture this. You've allocated a task to a team member and it comes back only half done. Instead of sending it back, you finish it off yourself "because it will be quicker." Or maybe you've held onto a piece of work instead of delegating it "because they won't do it...
Delegation: The Core Skill Every Manager Needs to Master
Many new managers discover quickly that promotion brings both opportunity and overwhelm. What once looked straightforward suddenly feels like constant pressure — expectations, decisions, and responsibilities all seem to multiply overnight. One of the biggest...
The Green Cross Code for Business Strategy
Image by Thorbjörn Ruppel from Pixabay Who remembers learning the Green Cross Code? Stop, look right, look left, look right again, and if it's clear – cross. For those of us who grew up with it, the rhythm is still there, somewhere in our muscle memory. Simple,...
Authentic Leadership: Why Being Yourself Isn’t Enough (But Being Someone Else Is Worse)
There's a new book out called Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). I read a review of it in the Harvard Business Review. The premise? That authentic leadership isn't just overrated—it's potentially damaging to leaders themselves....
Plan is a Verb as well as a Noun
In the world of small business, the word "plan" often conjures images of static documents gathering dust on a shelf. But what if we reframe the concept of planning from a noun—a finished product—to a verb—an active, ongoing process? This shift in perspective can be...
Setting Boundaries: Having a life as well as a business!
I have to confess, as a new business owner I was really terrible at setting boundaries. Truth be told, I was pretty poor at it before too but it got much worse when I started working for myself. I said Yes to pretty much everything, however unreasonable. Jump on a...
Head or Heart? The Business Case for Compassionate Leadership
In boardrooms across the globe, a quiet revolution is taking place. Leaders are discovering that compassion isn't the soft option—it's the strategic advantage that drives exceptional performance. Far from being about lowering standards or avoiding difficult...









