You built it, and every hard call still stops at your desk. The price rise you have been putting off, the hire you are not sure about, the client who is a third of the turnover. BuildStrong is six months of working those decisions through, one every fortnight, at a whiteboard, with somebody who has no stake in the answer.
Everything that still reaches you is a judgement call. The client threatening to leave. The two bad options. The quote that does not fit the price list. None of it can be documented, because it was never the same situation twice.
So you decide alone, usually in the van or at eleven at night, and then you lie awake marking your own homework. Your team cannot tell you when you are wrong. Your accountant tells you how the year went months after it ended. Your family wants you off the phone. There is nobody in your week whose job is to think about the business with you, and it shows in the decisions that keep getting pushed to next month.
That is what BuildStrong is for. Not the work. The deciding.
Fifteen years across organisational consulting and executive coaching, much of it inside large organisations as a senior business analyst and transformation specialist, which is where the habit of putting a problem on a wall and working it comes from. Gallup-certified in CliftonStrengths and a FITT16 practitioner. Owners and leaders coached in firms of five staff to five thousand, including Arrow Planning, Toyota, Convatec and the University of Oxford. The credentials in full
What can I say about the work John has done with us today at Arrow Planning. He's just delivered a fantastic coaching session with the team. We've been working through some genuinely difficult subjects, and he's presented them in a way that's allowed everybody to engage properly with these difficult matters.
It takes a real weight off my shoulders. The pressure and expectation isn't solely on me. I'm not standing there having to find a way through these problems alone. John leads me through them, then comes in and helps me actually activate them within the team, creating solutions that set the standard for the future.
Thanks, John.
I just wish I'd met John years ago. The frameworks he uses would have saved me from expensive mistakes in two previous businesses.
BuildStrong is not a retainer and it does not run on. It is six months with two or three outcomes we agree before it begins, a midpoint at three months where we check them, and an end date after which you carry on the thinking without me.
In the first session we agree what has to be different by the end, in two or three figures you already keep: prices up and the margin that follows, a client won without you in the room, a fortnight away without the phone going. They go on the whiteboard and they stay there for the six months.
We hold the outcomes up against where the business is. If the work is doing what it should, we carry on. If it is not, you can stop there and pay for the half you have had. You run a business; you would not sign anything without a break clause, and nor should you here.
The outcomes are met or they are not, and we say which. By then you have done this often enough to run it yourself: the question, the board, the decision. Some owners come back for a second six months on new outcomes. Nobody drifts on.
Six months, a session every fortnight, so twelve at the board. £3,600 for the whole engagement, which is £300 a session, with the option to stop at three months and pay £1,800. No retainer, and nothing added on.
Every session is a Whiteboard Session. Your thinking, out of your head, onto the board, into a solution. What goes up is your call, and it is always something live in the business this week.
The thing you have been going round in the car. Not a reflection on last year. The decision that is costing you money or sleep right now.
I write as you talk, so the whole of it is where you can see it. Then we find what connects, what is missing, where your own way of running the place is sitting inside the problem, and what will actually hold. Nothing between sessions. The thinking happens here.
Written on the board before we finish, and the first thing I ask about next time. And I say what I think. You are not paying for somebody to nod. When I have a view you get it, marked as mine, and you do what you like with it.
Online with the board shared live on screen, or in person in central London or Milton Keynes. Nobody else is in it. You pay, so there is no sponsor, no report and nobody to answer to but you.
The price rise, worked through client by client, with the number you would actually say out loud.
Where the work comes from, who else in the business could win it, and what they need from you to do it.
What the next size is, what breaks on the way there, and the one decision that gets you moving.
Which of it should, which of it is habit, and what has to be true for the business to run a fortnight without you.
The three or four figures you should see every month, and what they are telling you about the value of what you have built.
Your own pattern, read through your CliftonStrengths profile, and what to do differently on the next one.
Six months is long enough to get through most of this list. You choose the order.
Most of the owners I work with have been sold coaching before, or a mastermind, or a programme with a workbook. Here is what they tell me put them off, and how this is built against it.
| What you may have had before | What BuildStrong does instead |
|---|---|
| "They'd never run a business. They'd read about it." | I have spent fifteen years inside organisations watching what works and fails, and the owners and leaders I coach run firms of five staff to five thousand. I bring what I have seen. I do not pretend to have carried your payroll. |
| "Twelve-month contract, direct debit, and I stopped turning up in month four." | Six months, and a break at three where you can stop and pay for half. If you are not getting the return, you leave. |
| "A framework for everything and an answer for nothing." | No frameworks on the wall. Your decision on the board, worked until it is made. If I have a view, you get it. |
| "Ninety minutes of me talking and them nodding." | I write as you talk, I push back when I disagree, and you leave with something written down and a date on it. |
| "It felt like therapy. I wanted the price list sorted." | Every session is about a decision in the business. If what is in the way is personal, I will say so, and that is a different conversation with a different person. |
Sometimes what comes off the board is that somebody else has to be able to make the calls. Not the processes, which you have written down. The judgement. That is built in a person, by exposure and correction, over time, and it is a separate piece of work with its own price.
Different names, different years, the same role. Every one of them was fine at week six. Something happens around month three, when a senior person stops learning how things are done here and starts deciding things. Hiring is a way of buying somebody who already knows how you decide, and that is not on a CV.
When you have done a thing ten thousand times you stop seeing the steps, you see the answer. So watching somebody work it out slowly is hard, and you step in, every time with good intentions. Developing people is a specialism nobody taught you. That is a gap rather than a flaw, and gaps close.
Six sessions over three months with the person who could run things when you are not there. Live decisions worked through at the board, scenario practice off stage for performance on stage, and the work of merging their own values with the role so that what comes out is theirs rather than an imitation of you. You and I check in throughout, because the hardest part of this is usually not their development.
£1,800 for the six sessions, which is £300 a session. Open to BuildStrong clients and to at.theboard members, at the same price.
The aim is not that you step back entirely. Most owners do not want that. It is that the business runs for a fortnight without you and nothing needs deciding twice.
If nothing has ever been written down and you are answering the same question forty times a week, an hour at a whiteboard will not fix that, and I will tell you so and send you off to write it down. If the decisions that reach you are repeatable with clear rules, that should be a system rather than your judgement. And if what you need is five other owners rather than one coach, at.theboard is the room for that, and I will say so.
I would rather say any of this in the first hour than three months in. It costs me the work, which is fine.
The point is to leave you able to do this without me.
Not new frameworks and not a programme. The deciding you would already be doing if your week had an hour in it with nobody wanting anything from you, done often enough at the board that by month six you run it yourself. If you come back, it is for a new set of outcomes, not because the first set never closed.
If what comes off the board needs the team to change too, TeamStrong is the next step.
The fastest way to know whether BuildStrong fits is to be at the board for an hour.
You'll know whether the practice is for you. The hour is enough.
Book an hour at the boardOne hour. No charge, nothing to prepare.
Wondering what this looks like when the relationship deepens? Read about going further →