Journal Themes
If the market won’t sit still, your business model and offers must be adaptive
The businesses that cope best right now are not the most polished; they are the most responsive. When you build that responsiveness into the way your business functions, uncertainty becomes something you work with, not something that works against you.
Practical prompts to stop playing only to win
If you want to build space for thinking how to change the game, try these prompts in a leadership meeting, planning session, or strategy day. If you are a solopreneur, try them in a journal or a thinking walk.
Examples of a layered revenue architecture by industry
Monetising value at multiple layers is highly protective.
How simple changing the game can be
“Changing the game” can sound grand, like inventing a brand new industry but it can be far more practical and specific. Here are just three pretty straight-forward ways to find some Blue Ocean in your world.
Experimenting. Testing new ideas in a micro business
Fail fast everyone says. Often offered as a cure-all for uncertainty but I find this is unhelpful advice for many small businesses
Using digital tools well starts with understanding your own Small business
You may not even need a tool. You may simply need to make the best use of the tools you already have. Sometimes the problem is not technological at all. The important thing is that the business need comes first.
What project accounting is
Project accounting is the practice of tracking, managing, and reporting money at project level, rather than only at business, department, or cost-centre level.
The small business owner’s digital tooling playbook
Create capacity, improve customer experience, and raise quality by using the digital tools you already have, or choosing better ones with more knowledge and more confidence.
Innovation requires experimentation, but experimentation is not innovation
Testing ideas, trying new approaches, and learning from what happens are all essential. Without experimentation, innovation remains theoretical. But experimentation on its own is not innovation.
Analysis as an input to innovation
“Analysis” has a reputation problem. It is often positioned as the opposite of creativity, something you endure in order to get back to the interesting work. And yet, much meaningful innovation can come from understanding how things actually fit together.
A product ladder for artists
I find it useful to think of your products as a ladder, with different products being relevant at different stages of a customer journey.
Bigger moves with a strong demand Pipeline
A strong demand pipeline is, and should be a confidence-generator; confidence that the business is on the right track, and well aligned to the needs of a target market. It can even show a business new target markets, if you know how to look well enough.
You cannot choose the right tools until you know what the business needs
Choosing the right tools starts with understanding the business problem in clear, structured, unambiguous language.
Having ideas is not the same as innovating: ideas are not the problem in small business innovation
Despite an abundance of ideas, innovation rarely survives contact with day-to-day delivery. Most ideas fade, stall, or remain half-formed. They sit in notebooks, voice memos, or the back of the founder’s mind, revisited occasionally but never quite acted on.
