Have I failed? Yes, more than once

Most advisers have theorised about scale. I have operated at it.

I have run print production worth £14 million a year. Not advised on it, run it. Alongside that I built and personally owned ventures generating a further £1 million a year. I have closed deals worth more than £20,000 a month. I took a loss making business and turned it into £1 million a year at 80 per cent profit. I built a business from a £600 investment to over £1 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of two. I took restaurants from last place to first place on TripAdvisor in under two months. When Atarim needed its DIFM offering rearchitected, I did not write a roadmap and hand it over. I delivered the rebuild in under two months.

That is the difference between an adviser who tells you what should happen and one who has been accountable for making it happen, on budget, on a profit and loss account that was mine to answer for.

The part that usually gets left off

Have I failed? Yes, more than once. I have put my own money into things that did not work. I have backed ideas that were right at the wrong time, and ideas that were simply wrong, and I have had to tell people so out loud.

Those failures informed me. They made me stronger and, oddly, less risk averse, because once you have been through one and come out the other side you stop being frightened of the next one. I turn failure into an education, and that education into success. The wins listed above are not despite the failures. They are downstream of them.

Anyone who tells you their record is unbroken has either not been trusted with anything difficult, or is not telling you everything.

The clients who get the least out of me

They are not the ones who disagree with me. Disagreement is useful and I would rather have the argument in the room than find out six months later that nobody believed the plan. The ones who get the least are the ones who do not listen. They nod, and then they go back to the inbox.

If you do not listen, you get lost in the minutiae of running your business. The invoice that needs chasing. The plugin that needs updating. The supplier who wants a phone call about something that could have been two lines of email. All of it feels like work. None of it is the decision that changes your year.

I have seen chief executives with a diary so full that they are mired in welfare meetings and one to ones, while nothing gets done on product, on launch, or on the profit and loss account.

Part of my job is to keep pulling you back out of it. You are not paying me to admire the detail with you. You are paying me to tell you which bit of it is worth your time, and which bit you are hiding in.

Judgment from both ends of the market

I have advised enterprise leadership teams in the same week that I have taken a freelancer from £700 a month to £10,000 a month in under three months. The problems rhyme more often than either side would like to admit.

Bring in someone without that range and you get one of two things. Strategy with nobody to deliver it, or delivery with no sense of how the decision plays out at scale. My rates reflect not having to choose between the two.

What it costs

Considerably less than the cost of a strategic decision made without someone who has carried the risk.

The rates are published rather than quoted case by case. I do not work on commission and I do not negotiate. If you want to work out your own figure, the calculator on the costing page will do it for you in about thirty seconds.

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