I still pick up the phone.

I needed a job.

I wanted to do the work the way I thought it should be done, which is difficult on someone else's payroll. It is also difficult inside any established firm. Companies get stuck doing things the wrong way for reasons that have nothing to do with the market — history, politics, who owns which budget. Change from the inside is possible and it is slow, and the person leading it usually gets further with an outsider next to them who has no stake in how it has always been done.

It is also why I work from outside. Inside a company you get the part of the problem your title covers. I wanted all of it.

Most firms treat growth as an operational problem. Improve the process, increase activity, optimize what is already there. Operations matter and they do not create distinction.

We are working in a market optimized for sameness. Firms benchmark each other, adopt the same practices, buy the same technology and describe themselves in nearly identical language. Optimization makes an organization efficient. It rarely makes it memorable.

The firms that get chosen have a point of view. They understand people, they connect ideas from outside their own industry, and they say things their competitors would not say. That is creative work, and the studio exists to make it commercially successful.

Someone told me recently that they do not think of me that way, that they put me on the strategy side. I took it as a compliment and I think it is accurate.

Sales gets less credit than it deserves, and that is truest in idea-led firms. The best sellers I have worked with were strategic go-to-market executives. They understood the whole commercial picture — product, brand, messaging, selling, delivery — because in a firm built on an idea those are one system. Change the product and the story changes. Change the story and what a seller can promise changes. Change what delivery can do and the other two are wrong.

Treating any one of them as a separate discipline is where most of the damage happens. That is what growth advisory should mean, and it is why the studio works across all of it.

Expertise is necessary and it is not enough. I have watched strong firms lose to competitors with fewer capabilities because buyers could not tell why they were different. I have seen firms with a clearer story outperform businesses that were objectively better.

Growth depends less on what you know than on how well other people understand it, trust it, and act on it.

Every week. I have run sales organizations and I never stopped being a seller. I pick up the phone, sit in pitches, and write the email that has to work.

That is most of why the studio exists. Advice that has not been tested in a live conversation tends to be tidy instead of real. When I hand a system to a client's team, I have usually run it myself first.

Every month, leaders present their businesses to experienced executives who examine the commercial story, challenge the assumptions and give practical feedback.

Those sessions show me the same patterns turning up across firms that have never met each other. It keeps the studio working from observation instead of theory.

Curious leaders. People willing to question their own assumptions and try something they have not tried.

I also like leaders who still get in front of their own clients. They have a sharper read on the market and they notice faster when something is not working. They are also the ones who will put me in front of a buyer, which is where the work gets tested against a real person instead of a hypothesis.

Thirty years taught me that you cannot lead a commercial team unless you are willing to do the work yourself. Leaders who believe that make the best partners, because we are not arguing about whether the approach is realistic.

One more, learned the hard way. The leader has to be ready to fund the answer. I once spent six months on a firm whose owner was never going to pay to fix what was wrong. I ask that question first now.