Martyn Buxton has spent over fifteen years in UK manufacturing, most of them watching the same thing happen to the same businesses: they compete on price, they grind, they look for ways to undercut whoever just undercut them, and eventually they hit…
There's a cost sitting somewhere in your business right now that you know exists but can't locate. You can see it in the overall number. You just can't tell which part of the operation is producing it, which means you can't do anything about it. Th…
Ask any business owner if they invest in their people, and the answer is likely to be yes, of course. There's a training budget. People go on courses. Boxes get ticked. But ask what that budget contains and the picture starts to look a bit differen…
There’s a point in a growing business where being busy stops feeling like momentum and starts feeling like survival. Customers are chasing. The team is working flat out. Problems are being solved all day long. You go home exhausted, come back the n…
You can run a successful business for years without really understanding what is happening underneath the headline figures. Sales are coming in. Customers are buying. Wages are getting paid. The business looks busy. But that doesn’t necessarily me…
Notes from this week's episode of What One Thing, with guest Ben McManus of BM Civil Engineering. A client once asked Ben McManus if he wanted to think it over before turning down their price. He said no, on the spot. That's the sort of answer tha…
A lot of business owners think about their brand the same way: get a better website, post more on social media, maybe bring in an agency to sort out the marketing. Lucy Rennie, who joined us for the second episode in our manufacturing mini-series, t…
If business has felt harder over the last few years, you're not alone. Rising costs, shifting markets, acquisitions, supply chain headaches and more competition than ever have plenty of business owners wondering where the next bit of work is actuall…
Business owners tend to start out brilliant at one thing. Building websites, fixing IT problems, running the numbers - whatever the trade is. You quickly realise that you also become a salesperson, recruiter, bookkeeper, marketer, and now, on top of…
If someone asked you one simple question... "Why should I buy from you instead of your competitor?" Could you answer it confidently in ten seconds? It's a surprisingly difficult question. One that catches a lot of people out. In this episode of…
You start with a skill. You're a great engineer, a good accountant, a brilliant IT consultant. Then, somewhere along the way, you turn into a business owner, and suddenly, the skill you started with is about 10% of what your week looks like. The res…
Lead generation gets a bad name, and most of the time it deserves it. The scripts, the cold sequences, the "Hey Phil, hope you're well" openers. The majority of business owners would rather do almost anything else, but that still leaves us with the …
You've seen the headlines. You've heard the promises. You’re probably dabbling with Chat GPT, Claude or Co-Pilot, but the gap between "AI could help" and knowing where to start feels enormous, and nobody seems to be explaining the bit in the middle.…
This episode is a little different. There's no guest, no external expert, and no tidy list of lessons from someone who's figured it all out. Instead, it's an honest account of something we tried, how it went, and what we'd do differently. Which we …
What does "be real" even mean in business? Marc Johnson gave us his take on honesty, masks and the conversations that matter. Most business advice tells you to be authentic. Show up as yourself. Drop the mask. And then offers absolutely nothing in…
A kid behind a till in Sports Direct tried to sell Diyar an oversized bag for two quid. Diyar said no, but then gave a thirty-second exchange that turned into the best explanation of why most sales pitches fail that we've heard in a long time. But w…
There is a version of business ownership that still gets praised far too easily. Being busy. Are you busy? Great! Oh, I’m so busy. We love the word busy, wear the busy badge with pride, when really, who started a business to be busy? Treating the …
There’s a weird gap in the AI conversation. On one side, you’ve got big promises: automation, transformation, “work smarter”.On the other, most small business owners are staring at their day-to-day thinking: That sounds impressive… but what does it…
Most small business owners don’t ignore their numbers because they don’t care.They ignore them because they’re busy delivering, selling, and keeping everything moving.But as Debbie Porter shared on What One Thing, the cost of ‘not looking’ rarely sh…
Most business owners don’t set out to feel trapped. They start with ambition, opportunity, and the promise of flexibility, only to realise years later that their business depends entirely on them. In this episode of What One Thing, Bev Flanagan sh…
If you’ve ever hit a goal and thought, “Is this it?”, you’re not broken, it happens to most people. In our latest episode of What One Thing, we sat down with Lisa Johnson, a business owner who has built multiple seven‑figure businesses, done the bi…
There’s a point in every business where you stop reacting and start reflecting. Usually it happens quietly.Often it happens late.And almost always, it’s slightly uncomfortable. In our latest What One Thing episode, we did something we don’t do oft…
In this episode of the What One Thing podcast, Phil Davenport (Affirm IT Services) and Hayley Baxter (Corbar Accounting) chat with Jade Hallam, founder of Clever Clicks, a Nottingham-based digital marketing agency specialising in SEO and B2B marketi…
In this episode of the What One Thing podcast, Phil Davenport from Affirm IT Services and Hayley Baxter from Corbar Accounting sat down with Hazel Woodward, founder of a thriving social media agency that started — quite literally — as a lockdown lea…