Author Archives: Marianne Page

What’s It Like to Be Your Customer?

Every touchpoint a customer has with your business tells them something about you. The question is what it says, and how deliberately you’ve shaped it. Think about the last time you had a really poor experience with a business. My guess is it was a series of small things – a call that took too […]

Stop Solving the Same Problems Twice

If the same things keep going wrong in your business, you’re missing a How To. Every business has its recurring problems: the ones that get fixed on a Tuesday and are back by Friday; the ones that different members of the team handle in completely different ways, so the outcome depends entirely on who picked […]

Great Players Don’t Always Make Great Managers

Football has been proving this for decades. It’s a lesson a lot of small businesses learn the hard way too. Alan Shearer. One of the greatest strikers the Premier League has ever seen. Natural leader on the pitch, wore the armband with pride, scored goals that people still talk about. Newcastle gave him the manager’s […]

Are You in Love with the Struggle?

Most business owners say they want freedom – more time – less stress – a business that runs independently of them at every turn. And then they take their laptop on holiday…just in case. The truth is, a lot of them are holding on to the very chaos they say they want to escape, and […]

Sexy Systems Get Attention. Sticky Systems Keep It.

Most business owners are visionaries. They’re energised by possibility, fired up by new ideas, and never happier than when there’s something exciting on the horizon. Getting new customers through the door is the fun bit for them – the creative campaigns, the networking, the buzz of growth – that’s where their energy and attention naturally […]

What Really Makes a Business Worth Buying

A set of manuals

Ask most business owners what makes their business valuable and they’ll talk about their idea, their reputation, or the size of the opportunity they’re sitting on. Buyers don’t pay for potential. They don’t pay for enthusiasm, and they definitely don’t pay for chaos. They pay for consistency. They pay for evidence that the business will […]

Stop Fighting the Same Fires – How to close the frustration gap

If it feels like you’re dealing with the same problems again and again, it’s probably because you are. They show up in slightly different ways, on different days, with different people involved, but underneath it all, it’s the same issue repeating itself, and over time, that becomes exhausting, not just for you, but for your […]

Why New Managers Struggle

Managers in small businesses rarely step into the role fully prepared. They’re often the person who was doing a great job, got recognised for it, and suddenly found themselves responsible for others as well. There’s rarely any real development, so they do what most people do: they copy what they’ve seen before, whether that came […]

“Good enough” doesn’t scale

Ah, I do love that phrase “Good enough is good enough! It sounds so common sensical – practical, even. But it’s one of the most dangerous phrases you’ll hear in a growing business – especially one looking to scale. When ‘good enough’ actually is ‘Good enough” may be good enough when you’re small – when […]

Why Scale Demands Simplicity

Growth feels like progress. More customers, more revenue, more opportunity. On the surface, everything looks like it’s moving in the right direction, but what most people miss is what growth exposes. As a business grows, anything that isn’t quite right becomes more visible – small gaps turn into bigger ones, things that were manageable when […]