Your business probably doesn’t need another guru.
It might just need someone from outside to come in, have a proper look around and ask a few awkward questions.
The outside view
Every business has something weird in it.
I mean that affectionately.
Businesses evolve rather than being designed. A workaround gets introduced because somebody is off sick. A spreadsheet appears because the proper system doesn’t quite do what someone wants. One person becomes responsible for something because they happened to answer the phone that day.
Five years later, thirty people are following a process nobody would ever deliberately invent from scratch.
From inside the business it all seems perfectly normal, because everybody has become used to it. From outside, sometimes it looks completely bonkers.
That’s one of the places where I’m useful. I like understanding how things fit together, finding the point where they don’t and asking why something is being done the way it is.
Sometimes there’s a very good answer.
Sometimes everyone goes quiet.
The second one is usually more interesting.
So, what about me...
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become a business guru.
My background is in engineering and telecommunications, and I’ve spent around three decades dealing with complicated systems, difficult problems, customers, projects, teams and situations where the obvious problem often wasn’t the actual problem.
Eventually that turned into running businesses too, and running a small business is quite an education.
One minute you’re making decisions about strategy. The next you’re dealing with a supplier, somebody resigns, a customer hasn’t paid and the printer stops working. Despite employing several perfectly intelligent adults, there will inevitably be some piece of office equipment that everybody believes only you possess the mystical knowledge required to operate.
That’s the reality of small business that I understand.
I’ve helped build and run Litenet, worked in large organisations, written a book, published articles, spoken at industry events and spent much of my working life solving things. Some of those things have been businesses. Some have been telephone systems. Some have been on ships. Some have been on church roofs.
There’s usually a way through once you understand what’s actually happening.
A slightly unusual CV
I’ve done a few things along the way.
I wrote Preparing and Planning for a VoIP Migration, I’ve written for the Association of MBAs and industry publications, spoken at events including the WAN Summit, built a business and served my local community.
Outside work, things have been slightly less conventional.
I’ve climbed Mount Fuji overnight for charity. My first ever skydive was solo. I once travelled across India and Nepal in a salmon-pink rickshaw with three mates and very little idea where we were going. I’ve appeared in a Skunk Anansie music video and, in a horror film, achieved the dizzy heights of being credited as Angry Van Man.
Not all of this is particularly relevant to business consultancy.
But it does mean I’ve got a few stories.
I’m not trying to build another business-guru empire.
There are some excellent consultants, coaches and advisers out there. There are also enough proprietary frameworks, funnels, masterminds and promises of effortless growth to keep LinkedIn occupied for several lifetimes.
That’s not really my thing.
I don’t want to arrive with a methodology and spend three months trying to squeeze your business into it. I’d rather start with the business itself.
What are you trying to achieve? What’s getting in the way? What does the evidence tell us? What have you become too close to see? What would make the biggest sensible difference?
It isn’t terribly glamorous.
It tends to be rather more useful.