The growth-obsessed entrepreneurs I know put themselves in their customers' shoes. They want to know where their customers hang out, what frustrates them and what they're hoping for, so they deliberately spend time around them and watch them like a scientist watching an experiment. They look at how customers navigate the online world and go and meet people offline too. You can only generate a lead if you connect with someone, and you can only connect with them if you truly understand their world.

Most business owners take for granted the raw material behind every asset they could own. The way you generate sales, your story, the way you build your brand, case studies, and testimonials - all of it can be turned into intellectual capital, and intellectual capital is the basis of every other asset in your business. My first ten years were all about turning CEOs into Key People of Influence, and every campaign in my first company related to that one idea. Once I documented it and owned it, I had an asset called how to become a Key Person of Influence, and I could scale it from there. FYI, every business I run now creates new assets with permanence every quarter - videos on YouTube, a book every two years, culture documents for onboarding. The business takes on a life of its own because of the assets, not because of the activity. Watch how I structure them:

The most useful line you can put under your pricing is “still not sure?” Show the packages you offer (Gold, Silver, Broze), then add a banner underneath inviting people to answer a few questions and find out which one suits them best. Ask 10 to 15 questions about their current situation and the budget they’re working with, and the assessment tells them this is the package for you and here’s why. Now people have more than a choice between buying at one set price and doing nothing - they can take the assessment and get a recommendation. This way, few people fall through the cracks. It’s easy to set up on ScoreApp, and if you’re building the page that sends people to it, my free 20-minute Blueprint covers what goes on a landing page and how it feeds a call to action:

If you run a business, you can start getting credibility from an award the moment you’re shortlisted, long before anyone announces a winner. A shortlisting gives you something credible to share with customers, journalists and your own team the moment the list is announced - you don’t have to wait for the result to start using it. The businesses that get the most from awards turn every nomination, shortlisting and win into PR and customer trust, and that begins with entering the right awards with a strong submission. I’ve co-founded AwardsApp with Donna O’Toole, founder of August Recognition, to make that easier - it brings together a verified database of over 1,000 UK and global awards, AI-assisted tools for building the entry, and the expertise of a world-class awards agency in one platform. Join the waitlist for early access to the launch offers and an invitation to the launch event:

European mindset: “This is amazing! How do we make it exclusive? How do we make sure only a select few get access?”. American mindset: “This is amazing! How do we make it ubiquitous? How can we make sure everyone gets access?”

The most valuable asset in your business is probably hidden in the last ten years of your work, and most owners are too close to see it. I was, and it cost me a $14 million sale. Ten minutes and a ten-year timeline is where you start finding yours. Split the timeline into ten segments, one for each year, and find your biggest success and your biggest struggle in every one - scrolling through the photos on your phone month by month is a good way to jog your memory. Then look for the thread that runs through them. You might find your best results came from working with IT service companies while your hardest projects were veterinary clinics, or that your strongest work was launch campaigns while Facebook ads never delivered. Whatever keeps showing up across your successes and your struggles is a theme, and once you can see it, you can give it a name.

In 1999 you had to earn over 4x the minimum wage to be considered a higher earner on the 40% rate. Today just 1.8x the minimum wage considered high earner! If the same minimum-wage-to-high-earner ratio was applied from 1999 you’d have to earn over £115k before hitting the 40% income tax rate. We’re seeing a level of wage compression that would make a Soviet era socialist blush.

A business that made £600,000 in a single week was called worthless by the people I tried to sell it to. I’d arrived in London with a suitcase and a credit card, knowing nobody, and did £4 million in sales in the first 12 months. A year after I landed we booked the London Palladium, filled it with 2,500 people and made £600,000 in a week. When the time came to sell, all we had was a database and a website, because I hadn’t captured or formalised any of the assets. A couple of years later, once I’d learned how to capture their value and pinned everything down, we raised money at a £9 million valuation. Sales alone don’t make a business valuable - your intellectual property does, so capture it and put it into a form a buyer can see and own.

“Nobody really reads anymore, so what’s the point in writing a book?” is an expensive myth. More people are reading right now than they have in years. BookTok has turned millions of young people into obsessive readers and become one of the biggest trends on the whole platform. People have been predicting the death of the book for decades and they’ve been wrong every time - Kindle was supposed to finish it off, then audiobooks, and neither has come close. Readers are out there, more of them than ever, and the only thing keeping you from them is a book you haven’t written yet. My co-founder Lucy McCarraher MBE has mentored 1,000+ entrepreneurs through writing their business books, and on Thursday 5th November she’s running a free live masterclass on how to publish a book that wins higher-paying clients and gets you onto stages and podcasts. Everyone who registers also gets her full book as a free download. Save your seat:

Coase’s Law = the cost of coordinating production is cheaper within an organisation than outside of the organisation. He won a Nobel Prize for that idea. It’s not true going forward. Big organisations are slow now. Small companies that decentralise are winning.

You want to know how Dubai created one of the most vibrant economies in the world … in a desert??? They applied English law … with low taxes. At any time in the future the UK can change policy and the country will boom. It’s a policy choice - smaller government and lower taxes will lead to a prosperous nation. Eventually the penny will drop.