You can do everything right on sales and still get caught out. When you’re growing fast, the first thing that breaks is delivery. It goes out of sight, and by the time it shows up in the numbers it’s been broken a while. The attention’s on sales, the next round, the push into a …

You can buy exactly the right tool and still watch your team go back to the spreadsheet. The tool usually works fine. What’s missing is trust, and trust is what decides whether anything you introduce actually gets used. I’ve been testing a delivery platform with AI built into it. The …

There’s a moment most service businesses hit somewhere between 5 and 30 people. Delivery is heavier than it should be, every operational question routes through the founder, and somebody says the sensible-sounding sentence: “we need to hire an ops person.” It’s not a bad …

I worked for Xbox during the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii era. Proper console wars. I spent a lot of time on the road, visiting stores and showing staff the latest Microsoft products. Feature sheets, demos, the whole thing. My job was to help them understand why Xbox was the one to …

I worked on a team in charge of a 10k charity run on Sunday. The run went well for one simple reason. Nothing much happened. Around 7,000 runners moved through Oxford on closed roads. Volunteers were in place. Water was ready. The route was marked. The day passed without the kind of incident that …