People are great at zero to one, others at one to many. There are two types of people in business, people like founders, who are great at taking an idea and executing it, and then iterating on that till they find product market. They're great with that experimentation stage of a business where you are taking something that is pretty ephemeral, like an idea, and actually getting it out to customers and testing it out in the marketplace.
Having a thousand batshit crazy ideas means nothing if you can't execute. I'm someone who loves the creative process. I love ideating. In fact on this podcast, I'm often told my, by my producer, to stop winging it because the reality is that execution means everything. Ideation is only important at the very earliest stage.
Privilege exists. Recognize yours and check it. So without going into a huge amount of detail, I come from a massively privileged background. I went to the right schools, the right universities came from the right family and grew up in the right area. I have friends and family members who are well off, and I am very fortunate to have been able to travel the world and see things that many people haven't been able to.
Start a podcast or write a blog to learn and to share, not because of what it might get. So over the last couple of years I've been podcasting and I've recorded well over a hundred episodes across the podcast that I currently have. When I first started them, I did it because I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from people with whom I have great relationships and great respect for, and who have been through things and challenges that I have not seen in my own life.
Just because Xero says that everyone can do their accounts doesn't mean that everybody should. So SaaS tools like Xero have democratized access to finance or certainly accounting. For many small businesses, it's meant that with very low effort, one can get their accounts up and running. But there is a reason why accountants trained for many years.
Assume your job will be replaced by AI within the next decade and act according. So we're going through a bit of a golden age of AI right now, but over the last several years we've seen AI grow at an immense pace. It went from being able to beat chess Masters to then being able to beat go masses to today where we have things like chat, GPT, and Dalle, able to provide conversational AI and even generate images for you.
Just because a VC is your friend doesn't mean that they'll invest in you. I have scar. It'll come as no surprise to you that I have a huge number of relationships and even really strong ones with people within the venture capital industry. And when I went out to raise for my business last year, whilst I was able to get in the door, I wasn't able to raise.
You may despise politics, but any organisation over a certain size is gonna. Now we've all seen the sitcoms and dramas that deal with off office politics and the reason that they are great fo, no wait, start again. 63. You may despise office poli no, 63. You may despise politics, but any organization over a certain size is gonna have it.
As a CFO, live and die by this rule. Sh*t in equals sh*t out. As a cfo, your role is to take information, synthesize it, put it into context, and help leaders make decisions. But if the data that's coming into your system is questionable, then the decisions that come out the other end are equally going to be questionable.
A players know how to lift others up. B players only know how to put them. We've all worked with B players in our careers. These are the guys that always step away from blame. They're the first to point fingers, deride and insult other employees and just sort of do their job whilst moaning as they do it.
Higher for attitude, not accolade. . I now don't even look at university as a key reason to hire someone. In fact, I often don't look at it at all. Some of the worst hires I've seen have come from supposedly great institutions with great outcomes, but they're just not able to do the work. And this is because attitude is far more.
Being great at your job does not make you a great. Okay, sorry. 58. Being great at your job does not make you a great manager. . So this typically happens in very technical roles. You may have an amazing engineer or someone who's great in finance. They can knock out a spreadsheet or write code in their sleep.
But then as you try and develop them and put them into a managerial role, they really struggle. And there's a lot of reasons for this. When you are really good at doing something, it's very hard to stop doing that. But the purpose of being a manager is to guide and direct and nurture other people to do the job that you were.
Too many people fail upwards. We've all seen. People who are mediocre at best, but always seem to be able to make their way up the ladder. They know how to play the game, they know how to deal with the politics, and they always seem to get ahead even though they didn't necessarily deserve it. This is the sad nature of life today.
Being a great manager doesn't mean you'll be a great leader and vice versa. Management is about what you do, leadership is about why you do it. A manager is there to manage a team, to develop them, to direct them, to tell them what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. whilst the leader is someone who sets the big vision for a business for an organization, something that is five years or 10 years down the track and transcendental, and then they hire in managers to help them execute on that vision.
Don't run a business. Run a set of process. ad hoc-ery can kill a business, and this can be really hard to understand, especially when you're a startup founder, because ultimately you are operating in a sea of uncertainty and often there is nothing that you can recognize as a replicable set of processes, but for your business to grow, what you need to do is identify, document, and then replicate a bunch of processes, whether that's sales, whether that's finance, whether that's operations, or whether that's marketing.
Penny wise and pound foolish. So I've been in lots of businesses where founders would scrutinise the minutia of every line item of spend. And whilst that can be a good thing, it doesn't help to scrimp on the basics. . The reality is that when you are leading a team, especially, they will pick up on these sort of things.
Too good to be true, always is. We've all heard the phrase, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and this is a reality in life and in business. You may have had a supplier that's come in way cheaper than their competitors. But if you take a step back and think through why this might have been the case, it may be that they're scrimping on quality or on the volume of product that they're selling you.
Find a coach, a mentor, or a therapist. Thank me Later. So I've been really fortunate in life that I've had a succession of mentors who can be either informal or formal, that have guided me through my thinking about what it is that I want to do with my life, how I should operate, and internally what it is that I should be doing.
Family business is cutthroat. So I've worked with a family business for many years of my. And whilst I loved it and felt part of something that was bigger than myself, it was also inherently really difficult. You see issues like sibling rivalry, you see problems like politics entering the system, and equally, when money is introduced, there are often complaints and disputes that arise when you get into a family business.
As a leader, never ever think that your team and your employees aren't watching every step. You. If you are someone that spends out of control, turns up for meetings late, or de rides employees for no reason, your team is gonna see this, and they're also gonna learn from this. Now, it took me a long time to internalize this because you know, we all have egos and we all want to act in a certain way, but when you're a leader, a leader in a business, you have to step up and take a higher road because employees and the way they act are defined by the culture of a business.