Writing on the real challenges of running and scaling owner-managed businesses. The operational, the commercial and the human. Grounded in experience rather than theory.
Mike posts three to four times a week on the realities of running SMEs, operational leadership, people and change. Direct, evidence-informed, written for founders and business owners rather than HR departments or consultants.
The content follows the work. These are the areas Mike writes about most consistently, drawn from what comes up most often in real businesses.
UK businesses are navigating a burnout emergency and rapid AI adoption at the same time. These are not separate problems — they are colliding, and the collision is producing four specific risks most organisations are not yet managing.
Most founders at the £1–3m stage do not actually have an operations problem. They have a Direction, Structure or Team problem. The right answer flows from knowing which.
Fix the process and the same issue reappears six months later. The reason is usually in the behaviour around the process, not the process itself. Psychology explains what operations alone cannot.
The headline cost of a mis-hire is the salary. The real cost is the distraction, the team damage, and the opportunity cost of spending a year managing someone out rather than building something.
Change fails at the human layer, not the planning layer. Most change programmes have excellent documentation and poor psychology. The research on this has been consistent for decades.
At the £1m to £3m mark, the gap between a business that scales cleanly and one that becomes exhausting to run comes down to three structural disciplines. Most founders know them in theory. Very few have built them.
Underpricing is rarely a market problem. It is usually a confidence problem, a positioning problem, or both. Getting it right requires honesty about what the business actually delivers.
Most SME culture problems are leadership consistency problems. The gap between stated values and actual behaviour is where culture lives, and it is always visible to the people inside the business.
For more in-depth pieces on operational leadership, organisational psychology and the realities of running SMEs, Mike publishes occasionally on Substack.
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