Start Up To Grown Up

Your revenue has dried up. Here's how to fill your pipeline fast

Heather Townsend — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 05:31:25 GMT

In the space of 4-6 weeks we lost 25% of our monthly revenue for one of our businesses. We expect some softening of revenue over the summer months but not that much. It was, as they say, a low blow.

On the one hand it means that I can take more of the summer months off than normal. But let’s be honest, I don’t like dipping into our cash reserves to prop up a business which needs an injection of new clients.

If you haven’t faced this yet in your business, then you are lucky. It will happen. Here’s the advice I am personally taking and that I have given out time and time again to clients.

Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club

Don’t panic

My first bit of advice is don’t panic. Of course, that’s easy to say and less hard to do.

But this is a learning opportunity for you. It’s also time to really think about why this has happened. You will always make mistakes when running a business. And making the mistake isn’t the problem. Not learning from it is. What I want you to do is fail fast and learn quickly. After all, you don’t want to be in this situation again.

Before you start rushing around like a headless chicken with a face that says ‘desperate for work’, there are a number of things you need to do.

Look at the seasonality of your business

One of the places to look is the seasonality of your business. For example, in the run-up to June and July, did you in previous years see a softening of your business at this time? Did you see higher rates of client churn? Did you see fewer clients willing to buy your programmes? Or was there as we have in our business and many of our clients’ businesses, less leads coming through? After all, how many people put off major decisions until ‘after their summer holiday’? Or need to wait until the major decision makers are back from their summer break to be able to proceed with a programme or project?

If that’s the case, you’ve got a seasonal issue, not a work-has-dried-up issue. Which means you need to plan accordingly going forward. We’ve got exactly that situation in our business, where we often get a softening in the Accountants’ Growth Club running into the summer months, and then running into the winter months. It’s been a little bit more painful this year. But I know what I need to do to get out of it, and I know it’s fairly normal; even though it’s a little bit harsher than normal.

Work out your cash survival time

Then you want to look at your cash survival time. How much cash do you have in the bank? If you keep spending at the same rate, when does it run out? This is really, really important. For example, I know I can ride out this storm for about another 18 months if needed. Of course, I don’t want to waste 18 months of cash reserves to sort out the issue.

I work with a significant amount of accountants in our ‘accountants growth club’ business. The name rather gives it away doesn’t it? In this situation they always go to their costs and look at what to cut or reduce.

Avoid cutting stuff that:

is chargeable, or directly leads to more business for example fee earners (unless they are not earning their keep)
Materially impacts on your ability to deliver a great service
Significantly impacts on your ability to win more work

This analysis of overheads is a discipline that should be at least once a year. So if you haven’t done it for a while, this is the universe telling you to do it. And yes, we’ve gone through this exercise in the last month or so. We’ve looked at the stuff where we don’t think we’re getting value for money, and we have made those cuts. Most of them are temporary. Before anyone wonders, we haven’t gone to our suppliers and held them over a barrel and told them to ‘cut their prices or lose us as a client’. But we have spoken to them about what isn’t delivering us value and made cuts accordingly.

Reignite your pipeline of new business

Once you have stopped panicking, it’s time to move into reigniting the pipeline of new business. A principle that I live by is that when trading conditions gets harder, I need to market my services harder and more often. It’s the same with your business. Your number one priority right now is to generate more leads and then convert them.

Start with your warm relationships

You want to go to your warm relationships first.

Pick up the phone to your best clients. Ask how’s it going. Get them talking. A lot of people will find that just having a conversation with a good client will come away with new business. A number of my accounting firm owners are particularly good at this. For example, they will look at which of their clients is showing a significant increase or decrease in revenue in the last 3-6 months. They will then pick up the phone to them and funnily enough, often come away with work. That could be a cashflow forecast, a mandate to help with financing, business planning or a tax project.

Then pick up the phone to your good introducers, to see how they’re doing. It’s time for a good chinwag to see how they are finding things. With good introducers that you trust you can be honest with them about work being light on the ground. These are the people who could directly introduce you to a decent prospect IF you have the right conversation with them.

If ‘having a chat’ feels a bit icky

Now you might be thinking here and going:

oh, this feels a bit icky.

Then your brain starts to find reasons for you not to pick up the phone and have the chat.

If this is you, you need to manufacture a reason for a call. For example:

Sending over some thought leadership for a call to discuss it
Asking them to be a guest on your podcast or be featured in an article about them and their business
Asking for their time to do an ‘informational interview’ to find out more about their business, the market place and where they may need the services of a professional.

You’ve got to remember with these informational interviews, you’re not selling. You are there to listen and understand your ideal client more deeply.

Informational interviews have worked well for me in the past. In fact, that was one of the turning points at a point where we were struggling. We went and did informational interviews, particularly with accountants, because we wanted more accountants as clients. And the information we found out was gold dust. We picked up clients directly from the informational interviews. But the insight from the interviews gave us a rich seam of knowledge which helped drive the success of our business for at least the next 5+ years.

Go back to your pipeline that has gone cold

After your warm relationships it is time to go back to your pipeline. Particularly those that have not committed or gone cold.

Look at the people who have not yet committed. Maybe they’ve just gone quiet. Perhaps they’ve ghosted you. These are the people to get back in touch with. Your objective is to find out how it’s going. Has anything changed for them? You may find that they say something like

“You were on my mind to give you a call”

Funnily enough these getting back in touch calls often lead to new business. After all, priorities change for clients and prospects.

Then go back to the ‘no’ people, i.e. the people that said no, you’re not right for us. For these people send them a short email along the lines of:

We chatted a while ago, I just want to check that everything’s fine with your new supplier. Has anything changed? Happy to have a chat.

You may find out that they didn’t actually go with their new supplier. Or it’s not gone well, and actually they would like a chat.

Network your socks off: 60 in 60 days

So the next thing is, once you’ve done what I would call the easy wins: your good clients, your pipeline, your not-yet and no people, your good introducers, you then want to put in a plan to network your socks off.

This is the 60 in 60 days, where your aim is to have 60 conversations in 60 days. Included in this 60 are your current clients, introducers, prospects that have gone quiet.

What you’re not doing while you network your socks off is going to large events where you hardly know people. Because this is just not an effective route to market to drum up business in the short term. What you want to do is go relationship by relationship.

As always, you might want to have an in. So think about what that could be? (There are some suggestions earlier on in this article)

Whenever I’ve been researching a book, I’ve always done informational interviews to help get the case studies for the book and more insight. These informational interviews have always led to new business and more than paid for the cost of writing the book.

But what you want to do to fill your 60 in 60 days is draw up a network map. Your network map is where you decide who are the best 60 people to have a chat with. And whom will get you that all important introduction to these people. I’ve used a network map many times over the years on workshops and with individuals to help them identify where they can quickly access new business and important relationships via their network.

Paid subscribers now will be seeing a free guide to creating a networking plan including how to create that all important network map.

Included in the guide are:

5 steps to an effective networking strategy
How to create a network map AND get the value out of it
What to audit in your network and networking activities

Give your team targets for new business

Now you have a team it shouldn’t be all about you winning the new business. If you have a team of fee earners OR team members with a sales target, then you need to get them involved in this big push for new business.

In this scenario you want them all to come to you with a plan for how they intend to help make up the gap in revenue. Then your role is to keep them accountable to this plan. For example we talk about the pipeline and revenue four times a week in my business.

Don’t discount

At this point in time it’s tempting to want to drop your rates just to win the work. The short answer is ‘don’t do this’. However, if you are paying a team who don’t have work, you may want to say yes to some short term lower rate work for the cash flow it brings in.

Use the quiet time productively

Very often, I would love to be in the situation where I’m quiet with some white space in my diary. Rather than being flat out with client work. These quieter months are your opportunity to fix stuff in your business. So what have you been putting off? What will help you, if you use this quiet time to fix it, that will mean it will be easier to win work and then service it?

Is it something to do with your sales process? Is it about getting your marketing content sorted for the next six months?

In summary

Dealing with a ‘softening’ of your revenue in your business is a rite of passage for any business owner. This isn’t something to be scared of, but something to learn from going forward. But most importantly you need to do something.

How to build your marketing function: person by person

Heather Townsend — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:30:23 GMT

I’ve made some mistakes.

And this was a big one.

I built a marketing function that didn’t properly understand how we won work. As you can imagine it was part of the reason why our marketing stopped working. Then add massive changes to search and LinkedIn and our marketing was dead in the water.

With the benefit of hindsight, here is how I would NOW go about building a marketing function to drive high quality leads to our business.

Document the processes that work

Before you even think about outsourcing or hiring anyone to do your marketing for you, you need to document your processes. That means everything you do for what I would call the whole of Business Development: Marketing, Sales, Account Management that brings you work.

Hand on heart I did document our processes. But with the benefit of hindsight it was too high level. We’d also missed out setting KPIs. I.e if this is working, how will we see it? Whilst you maybe building a marketing function for someone else to run for you, you still need to be able to monitor it is working. Or, as I found out, pay for it later.

Build a marketing plan

Once you have all the processes working, then it’s time to build a marketing plan. After all, if you can’t articulate how you win business how is a marketing team going to do that? The problem is that many of us don’t really know HOW we win work. Yes, work comes in. Often by referral. But the actual granular detail of the little and big actions that we do to generate work is often hazy at best.

For my paid subscribers I have popped into the section below a link to a video I did for our 8-week launch pad programme to help you put together your marketing plan.

Stop being so trusting

I went so wrong with this. I trusted. Yep, trusted that my new marketing manager was competent and knew what she was doing. As a result of this trust I didn’t check the marketing plan and her actions. In fact, even worse I decided that she would report into someone else in my team who was good at sales, but didn’t understand digital marketing. That decision of putting them at arms length away from me probably cost me £100k of new business over the last 2 years.

When you are building the new marketing function it is essential that your new team members report into you. After all, you are probably the one that knows how all your business development processes link together: However loosely!

It’s not just getting your new marketing function to report into you. You need measures of success for each route to market AND what each person is doing for you. After all you can spend huge amounts of money on content writers, facebook ads without it actually bringing in the right type of new business for your firm.

Optimise your account management

We tend to in this world fetish winning new clients. Whereas most of us have diamonds in our client base. Possibly more work that we can handle, if only client service and account management was prioritised at a leadership and fee earner level. After all, we often trust that our fee earners are doing what they say they are going to do. And they are alert to new opportunities. In my experience this doesn’t happen unless there is a level of monitoring of client service and visible account management.

For example I would be measuring the following: (this is for paid subscribers)

What can now be done quicker with AI?

AI has come a long way now since it burst onto the scenes 2-3 years ago. Before you consider hiring someone else to do your firm’s marketing for you, it’s worth testing out the capability of AI.

I did a short video for our launch pad programme on how to use AI to support your marketing.

Outsource or hire

In the early days of your business my recommendation is to outsource parts of your marketing. After all a marketing executive is going to cost you £25k-£40k on a full time basis. That’s a lot of money to pay out on someone who isn’t going to be chargeable. Just at the point where you need new headcount to be revenue generating in their own right.

There are all sorts of things you can outsource, for example:

Writing your articles and white papers
Social media content
Paid media
The ‘technical’ side of digital marketing such as setting up and sending your newsletter

But, you need to know WHAT you will outsource and then WHAT does good look like when you outsource your marketing. Hence the need for a marketing plan. Without this understanding you tend to find that you may get ‘pretty’ stuff back that looks good, but doesn’t necessarily help you generate leads to high quality clients. This was exactly the problem we had with our marketing. Our social media marketing was personable, fun and funky. But did it showcase our expertise? Did it drive people to our website? Did it actually do more than the equivalent of being a chocolate teapot? No.

A good way of looking at what is worth outsourcing is to audit the amount of time you or others in your team are spending on business development related tasks. Then identify what can be done by others more cost effectively and potentially better. For example:

Digital marketing support: Can someone else set up your emails to your list? Or schedule your firm’s social media updates?
Can a content writer work with your fee earners to ghost write articles for them?
Can someone else repurpose your podcast, webinars or video materials into articles, social media updates or emails to the list?
Can someone else handle the production of your podcast? We do this with our How To Make Partner podcast. I use AI to help me create scripts/podcast notes from my written material or a recording of a group coaching call. Then I do the recording on Riverside.fm (affiliate link) and they do a light edit on Riverside.fm plus everything else for it.

For my paid subscribers I’ve included in the next section what we currently do inhouse and outsource in our marketing for the Accountants’ Growth Club

Start with a ‘do-er’

Once you find that you are paying for outsourced marketing support for more than 2 days a week you will probably find it is more cost effective to hire in permanent help.

Your marketing plan will guide you to what they will be doing. But as a rule of thumb, they should free up your fee earners to service clients and find new opportunities. For me this means your marketing team are likely to support your firm by what I would call “doing”:

Creating the emails you sent regularly to your email list
Creating the firm’s social media output and creating suggested copy for social media for fee earners to use.
Repurposing existing content to create regularly published articles on the website
Event management, e.g. webinars or in person events or trade shows
Keeping the website updated

Add in a manager

Once you have got a ‘do-er’ in your team you are likely to then progress to having a manager. This is someone who:

Creates the marketing plan in conjunction with you
Monitors the KPIs for you
Makes recommendations on how to improve the marketing effectiveness
Manages external marketing suppliers

In summary

What normally happens when your firm grows is you get personally busy and possibly overwhelmed. The knee jerk response to this is to often outsource parts of your marketing without knowing what really does or doesn’t work when it comes to winning new business for your firm.

This is why the first task before you delegate any marketing work to others is to document your business development processes. Then build a marketing plan to achieve the new business you require. And only then consider what to outsource or hire someone to do.

How to create high-quality content when your mind has gone blank

Heather Townsend — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:30:22 GMT

So I am sitting here on a train mindlessly scrolling. When what I should be is writing this week’s article.

The problem?

I don’t know what to write.

My head is full of sewing designs I want to create this weekend after a week of draping training. The last thing on my mind is how to scale a small professional services business.

It shouldn’t have been this way. You see I have 75% of an article written on the importance of goodwill when scaling your firm. The problem? I don’t think it’s going to land well. AKA get a decent amount of reads and listens. To the point where I am not sure if I will finish and publish it. Or if I do publish it, I need to give it a big rethink.

But that leaves me with a problem. I still don’t have an article to write and then turn into a podcast episode for Sunday. And I don’t want to use much of my Saturday in creating one as I have sewing and household chores to complete on Saturday.

It struck me, that surely this is the time to talk about how to create content when you have writer’s block?

How to prevent writers’ block from happening?

I’ve been creating content now for over 17 years. That’s 6 books and their later editions, thousands of articles and now over 100 podcast episodes. As a result I know what gives me writers block and what gets my writing juices flowing.

The stuff that gives me writers’ block? It’s really simple. High levels of stress and a lack of white space in my diary. It’s not surprising really as when your brain is in ‘threat’ mode (i.e. under stress) it deals with this by becoming hyper focused on the perceived threats. Which means that the brain waves that dominate are the high energy gamma rays. I.e. the perfect state to deal with the challenge of surviving an attack by a sabre tooth tiger. But the exact opposite state to think creatively and laterally. After all, high energy gamma rays literally block your brains’ ability to access stuff in your subconscious.

What’s the stuff that helps me keep the writing juices flowing? It’s often a combination of things:

a call with a client
Something that has happened to me in my business or personal/councillor life
Something I have read
A holiday (normally by day 5 I feel an urge to write)

Which very much explains why I am struggling now for topics to write about. I’ve been on a sewing course all week. Which means I have been using my limited brain power for thinking and learning. So, I’ve not been speaking to clients, doing councillor work or reading business books. I am also aware that the last few articles have hoovered up my ‘banker’ topics on ‘dealing with stress’, ‘how to make yourself redundant so you can take a holiday’ and all that jazz. Although just the act of thinking about this has prompted me that it would be good to write an article on how to properly take your holiday ‘off-off’.

The power of a content plan

The worse thing you can try to do is create content when you have no idea what to write and up against a deadline. That’s just a recipe for either no content being created or poorly created content being churned out. And you know the stuff I mean. For example, either poorly written OR you know that AI has written a little bit too much of it.

A way to guard against this problem is to have a 30 or 90 day content plan sketched out. This means you have done the hard yards of thinking about topics and briefs for each piece of content, whether it is a social media post, podcast episode or article.

Of course, I really should have a content plan sketched out for this substack. So why don’t I? Firstly I haven’t prioritised this as a discipline. Secondly, my writing has always been very organic in nature. It’s part therapy part education. And therapy doesn’t always happen to schedule. But those are all really excuses. Note to self: Look through your articles, podcast episodes and client personas to focus on a content plan for the next 90 days! After all I can always ignore the content plan if a better article comes along that I want to write.

Get ahead

On the days when you don’t know what to write it is bliss picking up a pre-prepared piece of content and pressing publish. But to do this, you need to get ahead with your content prep. Given that my substack is very much last-minute-itus at the moment, it’s been a push to keep the weekly publishing going, let alone get ahead. But that is exactly the advice I would give to myself right now. If you have even a week of content planned out and mostly created life is so much easier when you don’t know what to write or record.

Have a swipe file for ideas

There are many times when I am on substack or other social media platforms and I see a headline or article that I wish I had written. When I am at my most organised and diligent I will often save these. Either the heading or the article to give me a prompt to write my version of the article. Of course, I would never plagiarise OR copy someone else’s work.

It’s not just social media that can give you triggers for ideas on what content you can create. For example how about:

using an AI meeting assistant transcripts with clients to give you ideas for articles
Signing up for clients and competitors ‘newsletters’
Signing up for news alerts
Writing down stories about what happened to you today that could be the basis of an article

Use AI as your writing partner

AI is a brilliant tool for business owners that still create most of their own content. However, I am not advocating that you delegate your creativity or authenticity to AI. They are there to be your research assistant, editor, ideas sounding board but NOT your writer. For me, that needs to be YOU.

Here are some ways I have used AI to help me with my content:

I’ve talked through a story that has happened to me recently (for example my house purchase falling through) and used it to brainstorm angles for an article for owners of growing small businesses.
Given it an old article and asked for ideas to repackage or repurpose it.
Done some deep research on google Gemini for something that is relevant or topical to my audience. For example I used this for the recent Growth Premium article.
Review my open rates for topics my audience likes
Asked AI to co-create with me the structure for an article on my topic idea

In summary

There is inspiration all around you for what content to create when you are staring at a blank page. However, life is much easier if you have:

Created a content plan
Got content ready to go before you need it
Maintained a swipe file of ideas of what to write
Found the time to relax your mind and brain

The growth premium no one warns you about

Heather Townsend — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 05:30:06 GMT

This left me feeling cold.

So here is how it started.

A founder of a small professional services firm is heading into his second year of business. He proudly put his forecasted numbers on LinkedIn to see.

Those numbers were bold, punchy and ambitious.

And me being me, told him that. But also said,

go for it… but don’t forget to enjoy your life while you are building a lifestyle for the future

So far, no conflict. Then someone comes in and says:

In the words of the Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the ps1… GO FOR BROKE… TRIUMPH OR DIE!!!! That would be my advice mate. Ignore the people that pour cold water on it and say it can’t be done. It defo can

Oh.

So, I’m not pouring cold water here on red hot ambition. In fact I admire those that have the vision and am prepared to focus and grow a business. After all, building something that can run without you AND provide you and your family with a secure financial future, does mean in the early days long hours and a level of sacrifice.

But, but…

It’s the sense that growth at all costs is a good thing. And that if you take maximum damage along the way, then it’s proof that you tried.

If this was someone I was coaching, I’d be having a strongly worded conversation with them right now. When you decide to leave corporate life and build up your own business you are putting much more on the line than just a regular pay check.

There is something called the “growth premium”. It’s the cost to you personally of growing your business. It’s what you will pay in the damage to your mental and physical health, your quality of sleep, relationships around you. This never shows up on your P&L. But this cost is real and it’s measurable.

There was research done on identical twins. One of the twins was self-employed and the other had stayed in regular employment.

The self-employed twin reported about 24% higher stress over six years, and evening cortisol roughly 53% higher.

Remember this is people with the same genetics and the same upbringing. So you can’t explain away this significant difference by saying, “some people are just weaker”. [1]

Then:

4 in 5 (80%) small business report symptoms of poor mental health at least a few times a year; the most common is an inability to focus (66%), then anxiety (64%) and disrupted sleep (63%). [2]

Anecdotally, I am not sure I could name any owner of a small business who is that lucky 20% who are not reporting symptoms of poor mental health. Then, if you still needed more statistics to believe the reality around the growth premium.

Around half of owners report poor mental health in a single 12-month period, and 41% name financial worries as the single biggest factor. [3]

The exact figure changes each year that Mind have done the survey. It goes between 47% and 56% each year.

The gender imbalance

When I look at the people in my industry who are ‘crushing it’. There are some patterns that are easy to spot. For example:

They are childless or their children have now grown up
They often have a life partner running the home
They have 2 directors which allows one to focus on winning work

This is not me about to get into war about the patriarchy. But its much, much easier to grow a business when you are not taking the burden of running a home, childcare or worrying about the school or nursery ringing you up saying can you pick your child up as they are ill. It’s not just about the burden of childcare. It’s just much easier to focus on the challenges of growing a business when your life responsibilities are simple.

When I think about my own business’s growth trajectory, I only decided to go for it when my 2 children went from primary to secondary school. I.e. they got beyond the stage when I needed to walk them to and from school. When they could actually sort out their own packed lunch and be trusted to leave on time for school. Whilst that is many of our normal day to day routine, don’t mistake this as nothing. This is a mental load that you are carrying. Which, let’s be honest, most male, childless business owners are not carrying.

Just in case you think I am playing gender politics here:

86% of female business owners report poor mental health, against 77% of male owners. [4]

That figure is about business owners’ own reported mental health by gender. It is not proof that their life partners absorb the cost, i.e. the growth premium.

But think about it, those long hours working away in your business. The challenge of being mentally present with your loved ones when your business is all consuming. It does come at a cost. Which is why I see so many failed marriages and relationships amongst the small business owners and partners in professional services firms. Yes the cliche about ‘marrying my secretary’ are not just a cliche. They are often the reality that this is the person the business owner spends the most time with.

So when you see someone on social media boasting about their numbers or projections or how many new leads they have got in the last 3 months. Take it all with a pinch of salt. After all, they are not living your life. Neither do you know how profitable it is to run their business. Nor will their success help you achieve your numbers. For example, one of my clients hired a new team member who was apparently ‘crushing it’ on social media with generating leads from LinkedIn and networking locally. She probably should have been slightly suspicious of how willing his former firm were to let him go. And you guessed it, he was great at winning clients. But he was quoting a rock bottom price to get them over the line. After 3 months they parted company!

Regular readers of this substack will know that I became one of the four in five. Yes, I have pretty much tripled my business in the last 7 years, but at what cost? The long hours I worked, the holidays I didn’t properly take, all led to burnout. I wouldn’t wish my form of burnout, fibromyalgia, on anyone else.

Whilst I would never go back to employed life. After all I am not sure that any business would want to employ me! But one of the ‘nice’ things about being employed (in the UK) is paid sick leave. Whereas if you are the boss of the business, very often your business can’t function without you. In fact:

61% of owners don’t take time off even when their mental health is suffering, and 51% wouldn’t feel comfortable disclosing it. [5]

Until 18 months ago I would have said that described me. I would not have said I had a mental health issue. Yes, perimenopause was playing havoc with my sleep and ratcheting up my levels of anxiety. But mental health issues? Absolutely not.

Clearly as the statistics in this article show, I was not unique in my stance. I was clearly carrying the growth premium - just not realising it at the time.

How can you minimise the impact of the Growth Premium

It’s all very well for me to talk about the Growth Premium. But the question you are probably wondering is how to avoid being one of the statistics quoted in the article. Or maybe you have realised you have become one of the statistics, and what can you do about it.

The glass balls metaphor

As a business owner you are always juggling balls. That’s just the reality of our life. Whether its clients, team members or something from your home life, there is no such thing as a perfect work/life balance.

The way to think of it is that some of the balls are rubber, i.e they will bounce back. Whereas others are glass balls. If you drop them, they will shatter and not bounce back.

Your family, personal health and key relationships around you are glass balls. These need to be protected at all costs. After all you can always find another piece of client work or team member. Once key personal relationships break down there isn’t always a way back.

Know when to stop pushing through

The nature of what we all do, i.e. run a small professional services firm, is that there will always be times when we are pushing through. When we are taking our body and mind through its healthy limits. This will always happen. The key is to recognise when it is happening, and when to stop pushing through. That means balancing these peak workloads with quieter weeks or a few long weekends.

Block out the non-negotiables in your diary

Early into your business life you will have the luxury of time. What you wouldn’t necessarily have is the luxury of a decent level of income coming in from the business. This is the stage to sit down with life partner or consider your family life and put some red lines down. For example, will you put a regular date night in your diary? Will you be responsible for the pick up and drop off from school on certain dates? When will you give your life partner time off running the house?

If you’ve got to the point where life is very busy or flat out with your business, it’s not too late to put in place these red lines. The sooner you do it, the less chance that you drop a glass ball.

Decouple your identity from your business’s profit and loss report

Last year we had our best ever year across the 2 businesses. We were literally flying high. Although the headlines didn’t quite tell the whole story. What had happened was one business was crushing it and hiding a business in decline. We decoupled the businesses into 2 different P&Ls in Q2 of last year. So I am in the weird situation where I am mid turnaround in one business. I.e. we have eliminated anything that isn’t adding value, reduced headcount etc. The other is still doing nicely. So on the one hand I want to celebrate the success of one business. On the other hand I am very aware the other business will make a loss this year.

This why it so important to have other interests in your life apart from your business. This way a bad year is just a bad year, not a verdict on your worth or value to society.

Put your happiness and health on your business dashboard

I bet you probably look at the following things regularly in your business. E.g. your revenue, profit, dividends. But do you track your happiness and all round general health? If not, why not? I go through periods where I score my pain, stress and anxiety levels out of 10 on a daily basis. It proves to be a great barometer on how I am really doing.

After all, why did you start your business (or buy into a business)? It wasn’t to be stressed, burnt out and unhappy? Whilst your future financial health probably was part of the decision making, I’m sure you didn’t sign up to damage your mental and physical health in the process? So, why don’t we place as much attention on our self care and how WE are PERSONALLY doing? A good way of thinking is that you would provision for a tax bill or bad debt, why not provision for recovery periods? This could be a holiday where you are “off off” or a few lighter weeks after a busy period.

In summary

Ambition is not a problem. Punchy targets and goals are not a problem. If this is you, go for them. But remember, as you grow your business you need to enjoy the journey.

Don’t be so busy making a future lifestyle that you forget to live a life.

10 tactics to reduce your stress levels that you wouldn’t find in a text book

Heather Townsend — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:31:17 GMT

Stress.

It’s an evocative word isn’t it?

We are told to reduce it, manage it, deal with it.

But ultimately, when you are responsible for a largish payroll and run your own business, it’s your constant companion.

As your business gets bigger, the pressure you are under on a day to day basis gets bigger not smaller. It’s this pressure that can cause a business owner to go, ‘enough is enough’. I class myself in this group of people by the way.

This means if you are going to grow AND scale your business, you need coping strategies to minimise the impact of the pressure on you. This is the focus of the article.

My story

This is what happened to me. Whilst my medical history may be somewhat unique, the pattern of my decline into burnout isn’t unique.

In 2017 I took the decision when my business partner decided to semi-retire and leave the business to build up a coaching business that was scalable with capital value. That became the Accountants Growth Club - the leading business coaches for accountants. Alongside my work helping people make partner, my first target was to move to working 4 days a week. That never really happened, then in 2020 Covid hit.

Like many business owners this was one hell of a time. Not only did I have fears over my own health as an asthmatic, but my parent’s health and keeping a business alive. A business where ALL my corporate work had been halted or pauseD for the foreseeable future. Plus was seen by many as a ‘discretional’ spend. I.e. could be stopped… So I did what any normal business owner does, I pivoted and worked 7 days a week. After all, what else was there to do at this time apart from zoom calls with family and friends, and your hour of exercise outdoors a day?

Given that I am still talking about my 2 businesses now, you know that we survived. But my Oura ring tells a different story. I started wearing it in 2019. So I have nearly 7 years of data. Until the last 12 months, my heart rate variability has fallen year on year.

So what you may be thinking. Your HRV is a good measure of how much strain or ‘pressure’ your body is under. The higher the number the less strain your body is under. Yep, what you are seeing is the body of a business owner who is not coping with all the additional pressure.

But if you had asked me, I would have told you I wasn’t stressed. After all in the years since covid I was rarely ill. I’d get possibly one cold or bug every 12-18 months. What I hadn’t realised was that there was a reason for this… I lived like a hermit, AKA worked from home, and hardly mixed in places where I could get bugs given to me… That really does help!

When my ankle decided to go for the second time, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was once again overwhelmed with pain and couldn’t exercise. That last pillar of stress relief had been removed and I sunk into burnout; a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia.

The question is, if stress or an unhealthy level of pressure is our constant companion AND you need healthy coping strategies, what are these healthy coping strategies?

What really is stress?

Before I go any further and talk about counteracting stress, we need to talk about what actually is stress. Stress is when the pressure you are under gets to unhealthy levels. We all need a certain level of pressure to perform at our best. I wouldn’t be the only person who woefully under performs on a day when my diary is empty. It’s when you have too much unhealthy stress over too long a time that your body can no longer bounce back and burnout sets in.

The people who cope best with high levels of pressure have a tool kit of coping strategies that they use. But not only that, they have strict boundaries to allow them to counteract the level of pressure they are under.

What has worked for me to reduce my stress levels

Everyone is different. But over the rest of the article I am going to talk about what has worked for me to reduce my stress levels. You may read this and think, that will never work for me. But what is important that you DO something that does work for you.

Do the normal stuff

By this I mean anything that you will see on a leaflet at your doctor’s surgery or the standard advice that any quick AI query or google search will tell you, i.e.

Prioritise sleep
Move and exercise, i.e. do as a minimum, a daily walk
Eat healthily and cut back on alcohol, caffeine and ultra highly processed foods
Take breaks

But if you were like me, I would have truthfully said to any clinician, but I am doing all of this. So, what really does make the difference?

Take your holidays

Anyone can book a holiday and then travel somewhere. But the key question is whether you are actually giving your brain and body downtime. Time away from the hustle and bustle of work. For example, if you are still dealing with emails or questions from staff members or clients, this isn’t taking a holiday.

This is just doing reduced hours from a different location to normal.

I know. Tough love from me today.

I used to kid myself that I was taking a ‘staycation’. What that meant was I cancelled most client calls and didn’t attend the team meetings. But still had a call with a favourite client or 2, then sorted out my backlog of work. I’ll repeat, THAT IS NOT A HOLIDAY.

Or my favourite was over the Christmas break to write a new edition of a book. I’ll repeat again, THAT IS NOT A HOLIDAY.

If you are reading this and nodding along going, I can relate, please, please, please get your diary out and put in 6 weeks of holiday over the next 12 months. Even if you are thinking, my business couldn’t cope without me, just do it. You have time to figure out HOW your business can cope without you.

Give someone else your diary management

Have you noticed when a favourite client or a really important client asks for a meeting at a certain time, you will do everything in your power to make it happen? Or is this just me? Perhaps it’s not a favourite client, maybe a very interesting new lead that has just popped up in your inbox? It doesn’t matter who it is, but there will always be people that we struggle to say no to. Which means our boundaries are often weaker than we would like to admit.

The real change comes when someone else manages your work diary. They don’t have the same hangups or vulnerabilities. They will protect your down time and thinking time properly.

Have 1 day per week that is a no meetings day

This is my Friday. It is, as far as I am concerned, the best day of the week. Sometimes I am working on client stuff or working on the business. Often I am writing this substack article. But it is the day where I get to choose what I am doing. It’s absolute bliss.

Enough about me. I have noticed (so anecdotal) that the most chilled out business owners I know are the ones that have set aside one day per week to work ON the business. Or use this day to get their own stuff in order.

Measure your stress levels

When I got my Fibro diagnosis everyone said “you need to reduce your stress levels”. As far as I was concerned, my stress levels were fine.

I’d just got comfortable with being uncomfortable.

My daily normal was high levels of unhealthy pressure. So you can deduce that my brain wasn’t going to give me a realistic state of my stress levels. The best measurement for me? My HRV and my resting pulse rate at night. I have found that these are the best biomarkers for the state of my body.

I’ve been under strict orders for 12 months to reduce my physical, emotional and cognitive load. As a result I track carefully what does place a load on me and what doesn’t. So doing a lot of boring SEO changes to meta descriptions may be classed as work. But not being disturbed and singing along to my favourite songs whilst doing the work shows up as me being ‘restored’ and ‘relaxed’.

It’s this careful assessment of the impact of life on me that has helped me create my boundaries to guard my health such as:

No social media after 19:00 (substack excluded)
No facebook or LinkedIn on my main mobile
Any event in the evening has to be really worth being there
1-3 days of ‘rest’ days after a high pressure or high activity day.

It takes time to build this level of awareness about how your body responds to this thing called life. But in my experience it is well worth doing.

One day a week completely ‘off-off’.

I know, I know. You have a business to grow, clients to placate and team members to handle. And all that jazz. But hear me out, your brain needs down time. It can’t be on-on-on all the time without eventually your body waving a red flag. As a business coach I have applied heavy pressure on even the most work-addicted business owners to take that one day off-off. They have all said that this day off has been much needed and now part of their routine.

Find a serious hobby

Running your own growing business can be all consuming. Our identity, waking moments and future prosperity is tied up in our business. But it is only one part of you. There needs to be other parts of you that take you away from your business. This could be anything from something sport or exercise related (watching or doing), time with family or friends, or a hobby. If you have followed me for long enough you’ll know my serious hobby is sewing my own clothes.

This serious hobby helps give you perspective on what is happening in your business. it helps you see the wood for the trees. But most importantly it means you feel the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune a little less intensely.

Get expert advice

You have a choice. Drive yourself into an early grave. Or build a future that is fun, healthy and prosperous. If you are reading this article and have got to this point, you probably need some help to change your current status quo.

I know it is boring to say this but your health is really your wealth. For me that expert advice was working with a clinical psychologist, i.e. therapy. But for you it may be a mastermind group or a business coach. (Hint, I know a good one!) I am coming to the end of my relationship (for now) with my therapist.

Step up and own your situation

It’s easy to blame other people for your current situation. Such as the needy client, the under performing team member, the wife/husband in your business that wouldn’t change or the tough trading conditions. There is typically always an excuse. But nothing is going to change until you decide it will change. Of course when you are run down and your batteries are empty it’s hard to step up and change the status quo. But it’s your business and your future health that is at stake. Which is why very often willpower is not enough, the help and support of external advice is essential.

Look for certainty

As I write this, my one of my businesses lost 25% of its revenue in the last 6 weeks and the other had a £100k+ programme pushed back at least 6 months. Yep, double whammy. This situation actually inspired a number of my recent articles:

But I am currently relaxed and am not in a corner wibberling. Whenever things get difficult or high pressure I look for certainty. Which is why I am all over our pipeline for both businesses and keeping my team honest and accountable to what they will do to hit forecast.

It’s the same with you. Just putting in place a plan will reduce the pressure on you. Uncertainty is a killer.

In summary

This is your business. That means you have a choice about the pressure you decide to be your daily normal.

A final thought for you:

Life isn’t a dress rehearsal.

That life you are building with your business? Make sure that your health is such that you can enjoy both your now and your future.

AI and LinkedIn broke my marketing (this is what I did next)

Heather Townsend — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:30:28 GMT

AI and LinkedIn broke my marketing.

Yes, perhaps a little dramatic to start this article, but sadly that’s the truth.

A year ago I had realised that AI had broken the traffic to my websites, I wrote about it here:

But the actual damage was more than AI. And it was much worse than I had original thought.

My marketing and ability to win work over the last 17 years has been based on what I like to call the holy trinity of content marketing, SEO and social media. Everything I have done, apart from a 3 month trial of facebook ads a few years ago, marketing wise has been about being a bloody good inbound marketing expert. Of course, self taught. (Which will be relevant!)

The problem comes when that holy trinity breaks down. This is how it happened. Firstly, AI and AI tools ate up pretty much all of informational search. Which means that I lost across both websites about 30k monthly page views. When that level of people stop coming to your website it means that organic signups plummet from about 300 a month to a trickle. And not much of a trickle either.

But, there is still social media. Or is there? Facebook and Instagram moved to a pay to play model if you wanted any reach on these platforms a number of years ago. LinkedIn has now gone the same way with its Brew360 algorithm update. What used to be an easy way to get 2000+ eyeballs on my stuff per post with 14k followers has become anything but easy. In fact I now celebrate if a post gets over 500 views. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

So of the holy trinity, that leaves only content marketing left. But if the 2 mechanisms to get people to see your stuff are broken, it’s a little bit like shouting into a void. Nobody is hearing or seeing you. Although there are the podcasts which are slowly getting traction.

Slow is the right word for the podcasts! But my start up to grown up podcast is projecting to over 27k downloads in the 2 years I have been running it. Plus the how to make partner podcast is great at getting me conversations with L&D professionals in my ideal clients. Plus it is helping get an occasional sign up to our Progress To Partner Academy. (Although infrequent or rare may be a more accurate word than occasional!)

It all got pretty bleak

You know how business demands that you should say ‘it’s all going well’. Actually, it all got pretty bleak with our ability to attract new members to The Accountants’ Growth Club. For an organisation that says it is the leading business coach for accountants and excellent at helping grow accounting businesses, it was, shall we say, not walking its walk or talking its talk.

The very thing we were supposed to be good at was the thing we were not demonstrating with our revenue figures. They had stubbornly plateaued or declined for the last 2 years.

However I am now sitting here with the healthiest pipeline of new members we have had for nearly 3 years. And that’s not an exaggeration. Even better this pipeline is now converting. Which if we keep on doing what we have been doing for the last 5 months should mean we go from eating into our cash reserves to having a profitable business.

Over the rest of the article I will explain what I have done to reverse our fortunes.

Invested in paid facebook ads

I am not a fan of Meta. In fact, I have a plan in my head to come off the platform personally in the next 12 months. I’ve just got to step down as a councillor first before I can do that.

Our email list was dying. It was pretty much dead on its feet and as much use as a chocolate teapot to generate new clients.

I needed a mechanism that would bring me new ‘on target’ sign ups to our list FAST. In fact I recently looked at where our new qualified ‘we want to talk to you about joining the club’ leads were coming from. It was over 90% from people who had signed up to our email list via facebook in the last 6 months.

Digital paid media, whether google ads or facebook ads, is something I always recommend using the experts for. We pay for a very good facebook ads expert and as a result the channel has delivered for us. But at a cost. That cost is about £1000 per month. However as we are no longer exhibiting at Accountex, we have freed up money to do this.

My long term plan is to wean us off being wholly reliant on paid facebook ads. But to do that, I need my website to start performing again.

A paid website SEO audit

I used to be damn good at generating traffic to websites by writing high quality content which was optimised for SEO. Well, I was until I wasn’t. You see the rules changed with AI, and I and my content writer hadn’t realised and were still playing by the old rules.

I knew I had a problem. But the question was how to start to resolve it. You see, you don’t know what you don’t know. And optimising meta data on posts and pages was not the way forward.

Here is how to optimise for the on page stuff:

So I paid for an SEO audit with and her marketing agency which you can buy on Fiverr (PS this isn’t an affiliate link, and pick the premium option as the 1 hour feedback session with the SEO expert is absolute gold dust)

Let’s just say the results from the SEO audit were illuminating but also mortifying. Let me explain. I’ve always been pretty good at the ‘on the page’ SEO stuff. But don’t know about the back end technical stuff. So have always trusted our web developers and my former marketing manager. Who once again I am finding out had a ‘hole’ in her digital marketing knowledge. Even if she came highly recommended as an expert in digital marketing for accountants.

There were some really basic errors in our website that would have been killing our reputation within google. Some so basic that I am rather embarrassed to write them here. Such as:

Not setting up google search console (I know, I know…)
Letting our web developer put H1 headings in our website footer (which means multiple H1 headings on a page which is a red flag for google), so every page and post on our website had multiple H1 headings.
Not having alt tags set up on all our images
Not having meta descriptions set up for all our categories and tags
…. And so on…

But perhaps the thing that the SEO audit revealed was sloppy website practices. This was a website that was the 3rd or maybe 4th iteration since it was started in 2017. We’d left up old pages, old posts and old images so the website was so bloated it was running slow. No wonder we had been penalised in google for crimes against their ‘spam policies’

Of course its early days for the website performance, but I have a strong belief that this, plus our investment in SEO optimised content hubs and reworking of our funnels will mean we can get back to 100 new sign ups on our email list each month.

Tightening up our email marketing

I used to be fanatical about sending emails with minimal links and no images. However when my former marketing manager took over, they created a standard Accountants Growth Club email template which had our logo on right at the top. Whilst it may have felt great from a branding point of view, it was killing our open rate. We also discovered that the technical server/verification thing on our emails had also broken. Cue conversation with our IT support team.

We were doing everything to demonstrate to email software that we were sending promotional material and was potentially spam. As a result our emails were tending not to be opened.

Therefore, it was back to tight email discipline. That means:

removing disengaged people from our list every 90 days (not once a year)
Only having the unsubscribe link and perhaps 1 more link in our emails
Asking people to reply to emails to show that we are a real person (this is working really well)

So far this is starting to work. We are seeing more leads book themselves into a call with my relationship manager.

Getting granular with our pipeline of new business

I’ve always been a trusting sort of person with my team. And yes, that’s what the textbooks on leadership say you need to be. As a result I’ve always been held hostage to fortune or what my sales team decided to tell me. I’ve never really had insight to what was going to land and when. Even though I have been asking for it for years.

That finally changed 4-8 weeks ago. I can now see our pipeline of new business and what stage it is in the pipeline. Finally we can forecast about what is likely to come in and when. It’s this granularity that is meaning I am pretty optimistic about the next 6 months even though our current monthly recurring revenue is not pretty. Which is a euphemistic way of saying “we are making a loss” In fact, the pipeline and how it is moving forward is suggesting that within 30 days we will break even again, then within 60 days we will be back to making a profit. And within 90 days we will be, dare I say it, within sniffing distance of our first target of £6k per month profit.

You have to make your attention match your intention

Up until now I have been talking about marketing tactics. Do this, change that etc. Whereas the biggest difference has been creating the time to work out what the problems are and how to fix them. I could have never done this if I still had my previous coaching workload. In fact, whilst this period is painful, we are finally starting to scale the business, rather than rely on me being chargeable to make money.

Would I prefer to have not gone through this level of pain? Definitely. However it sharpens the mind and focus!

Keeping my team accountable

When I say my team, I am talking about associates, employees and suppliers. The work I have been doing over the last 3 months have identified where I need to step up. But also where I need my team to step up. We’ve got too comfortable in a number of relationships with suppliers. That ‘comfort’ has meant that our marketing effectiveness has tumbled. Which is costing us big time. And yes, those pointed conversations are happening…

Training my team

It is all very well me knowing all this stuff about digital marketing. I need my team to also know what to do when stuff goes wrong. For example I switched a setting off in Yoast (an SEO plugin for our website). Which then meant our newly switched on facebook campaign wasn’t working. That’s literally burning pound notes time. So on Friday evening I spent an hour in a very humid and sweat-producing study to fix what had gone wrong.

I will now also share how I unpicked the issue and fix with my team so that when they encounter problems with (as it happens) redirects, my team can fix it too.

In summary

The worst thing you can do when your marketing stops working is ignore it. Or carry on doing the things that are no longer working. I found that out to my cost!

What I want to leave you with are these thoughts:

Consult and pay for experts when you are struggling. Remember this is an investment and whilst they may come with a high price tag, this will save you a huge amount of money and frustration down the line. (Get in touch if I can help you)
Allocate time in your diary to work ON your business to fix the problems. Otherwise nothing will change.
Keep your team (in whatever guise) accountable and measured. Don’t let them become too comfortable and complacent. You are not a charity so they need to earn the money you give them in return for their work for you.
Measure and monitor the health of your business development activities.

How to make a clear decision even when your brain's in panic mode

Heather Townsend — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:30:40 GMT

It all started innocuously enough.

A phone call from the estate agent on Friday. It went along the lines of

“The tenants are still in the property. Do you still want Tuesday’s survey to go ahead?”

The very same tenants that had been given notice for the 2nd June. And when we spoke to them in May were clearly looking at other properties and getting ready to leave.

This wasn’t part of the plan for our house move. But hey, these tenants could just be waiting on a date to move into their next place. Or the sellers given them an extension (very unlikely given the recent change to the rental rules here in the UK.)

So I give the go ahead for the survey to happen anyway. Partly because I am naive, but also because I suspect I may still be charged for it given the late notice of cancellation. But also because I want to show goodwill to the seller. I then have a phone call from the owner of our estate agent on monday suggesting that we postpone the survey and laying out a worst case scenario. That being, the tenants will now be wanting to get on the social housing ladder. They will only get rehoused by social services when they have a formal eviction order with bailiffs due any day. And that means a legal process which will take months.

Oh.

At this point, I still don’t know what the situation is with the tenants. The best case “they are just waiting on a date to move into a new home”. Or the worst case: they are sitting tight until the bailiffs come around and then social services will act.

So, I start asking for answers from our sellers estate agents. I also ask our solicitors to formally ask what is happening. It takes over 24 hours for the answers to come back, and it is still sparse. It’s the worst case scenario, our tenants will not budge until a formal bailiff order has happened.

This is the point where it becomes difficult. There are no right answers here. This is exactly the type of dilemma you will face when growing and scaling your business. There will be difficult decisions with no right answers. And for the rest of the article I’m going to share my normal routine when faced with these tough decisions in business.

No decision is a decision

It’s easy to want to put your head in the sand and think,

“I’ll take that decision later.”

The reality is not taking a decision is a decision within itself. Let’s go back to the problems with my house purchase. By just thinking, “It will be fine, it’s not a problem,” I am leading myself into a potential crisis. The last thing you want in business is to be heading towards a crisis.

Although I’ve said many times that if you are growing and scaling a business, you are either approaching a crisis or just finished a crisis.

So there I am. The survey is about to go ahead, and I have no idea when we are going to get vacant possession of this house. The first decision I have taken is to get informed. The worst-case scenario is we could be waiting 18 months for this house. Of course, that’s unlikely, but that is the worst-case scenario.

Look for certainties

Very often, decisions are difficult because there is no right or wrong answer. This is the exact situation that I have with this house purchase. Do we sit and wait and find alternative accommodation while the house purchase goes through? Do we delay our chain from moving while we wait for vacant possession? But maybe lose our buyer and chain in the process? Or do we exit from this house purchase and go and find a new place to live?

As you can see, I’m faced with difficult choices. Each of them comes with risks, and each of them costs money. This is typical of a difficult decision you have to take as the owner of a business.

Here was the certainty I surfaced and decided was a non-negotiable:

Our plan A has always been to move down to Kent. It’s always been to sell our house. We were prepared to rent for a while if necessary or put our stuff in storage while we wait for the right place to move into. This hasn’t changed in the last 6 months.

This means we proceed with the sale of our house even if we don’t have anywhere to move into right now. After all we don’t want to spend a significant amount in stamp duty to rush into a house that we don’t want to live in permanently. We will also be in a stronger position when it comes to buy if we have the cash in the bank from our house sale. It gives us more negotiation power if we need to find a new place.

I rang my parents to check that they were OK with us living with them for a undetermined amount of time. Thankfully they said yes… Which gives us far more options and flexibility if we need it.

A good question in this situation is to always ask:

1 day, 1 month, 6 months, 12 months from now will I regret this decision?

This exact questioning technique helped me see the wood for the trees. I would regret dropping out of the purchase.

Research the possibilities

I am not familiar with the legal proceedings to evict a tenant that has overstayed its welcome. However the internet is a great place to find this out. So I went into google gemini and now know:

The routes our sellers could take to evict their tenants
How long each of these routes will take (particularly given the delays in court proceedings where we want to move to!)

Armed with this information I can see that we are looking at anywhere from 12 weeks to 18 months for our house to be vacant. This could be a long time living with my parents or renting. However, this assumes that our chain is ready to move tomorrow. Whereas I know that a late August move date is a possible but could easily shift back. particularly if I don’t drive it hard. If August isn’t a possibility then actually a September move date for the whole chain may involve only a small amount of time with us with our stuff in storage.

It’s the same if you need to take a business decision. What are the knowns and unknowns? What are the most likely courses of action?

Consider the agenda of the stakeholders involved

There are many risks at play here with our house situation. Namely:

Our seller decides it is all too hard and lets the tenants carry on living in the house
The seller takes the slow route to evict the tenants
The tenants trash the house on their way out.
Our chain gets spooked and collapses as our house purchase is now under threat.

This is often part of the decision making process that we skip. We let our anxiety and brain take us to a worst case scenario. So, part of my decision making process was looking at the emotional and rational drivers of the key stakeholders; the tenants, the sellers and our purchasers.

I came to these conclusions as the most likely scenarios:

Our chain below us will be fine if we reassure key stakeholders that we will proceed with selling our house to the rest of the chain’s timescales. (Guess what, this has happened already!)
The sellers are keen to sell. After all, they had a sitting tenant who had been there for 7 years. The UK’s new rental act that has just come in will make it much harder for them to evict these tenants or put up their rent going forward. They are also on a timeline to start legal proceedings. Delay and their house sale becomes in doubt and the length of time to do legal proceedings jumps up significantly. This tells me that unless we come out of the purchase, the purchase will go ahead. Additionally they want to liquidate their asset, which means they are likely to choose the quicker route to evict the tenants.
The tenants want to go into social housing. That means we know they will only be considered for social housing when they have a formal eviction order and the threat of a bailiff visit. That means at least 8 weeks before we can move into the property but more likely 12 weeks.
Given that the tenants are living in the house AND have a young family I doubt they will trash the property. However, there is the risk that they leave it in a poor state. Hence we will insist on a deep clean and inspect the property after the clean to see what repairs are needed before we exchange contracts.

Despite the voices of doubt in my brain telling me this was all a disaster, this careful consideration of likely motivators and drivers from the key stakeholders was a useful exercise. It switched my brain from an emotional mess into one which was rational and thinking clearly.

Take advice

This is a situation that I haven’t been in before. I am not experienced in the ways of property sales or rentals or tenants that wouldn’t budge. So I took advice from our sales progressor at our estate agent. Well when I say advice, I used her as a sounding board. (She seemed more spooked than me!) She did ask one useful question:

How emotionally attached are we to the house we want to buy?

The answer was pretty emotionally attached. Which told me to not cut off my nose to spite my face. Whilst we don’t want to move our stuff twice (e.g. into storage and then out of storage, or into a rental property) then we will. Whilst I didn’t gain much from my conversation with the sales progressor, it was a very useful sounding board to talk through my thinking.

Every time I have had a difficult business decision to take I have always sought counsel from my trusted network of people. That network has never given me bad advice. Only advice that I have ignored to my cost!

Look for danger signals

If I was a landlord on the point of selling my rental property and this sale was at risk, I would be updating the buyer regularly. Just as I have done with the buyer of our house! However this doesn’t seem to be the case with our seller. Which, for me, is a large risk factor.

It’s something that concerns me. But as others have said the landlord may just be working out what they will do and how they will do it. They may be banking on us being so emotionally attached we will still go through with the sale. However, they should have known pretty close to the 2nd June that the tenants hadn’t returned their keys to the letting agent. And we are now the 19th June… This is not a good sign.

This is giving me a steer to set some expectations with our seller, namely:

We want regular updates to help us plan
We don’t want to wait to hear about bad news

It’s the same for you and your business decision. Look for danger signals. For example are you asking your business to do something you have never achieved despite trying? If these signals are loud enough, what do you need to do differently?

Work out your next few actions

I don’t know when we will move into our new house. Or even what that house will be. But at this stage I don’t need to know that. What I do need to know is my next few actions. Which are:

Setting up the regular dialogue with the seller and setting out our boundaries
Keeping our chain informed that we will progress with the sale regardless of what happens with our purchase.
Keep moving forward with selling our house.
Start looking at rightmove again for anything that could be a great alternative to the house we want to buy.

Our minds often go to the worst case scenario which could happen a long time in the future. That’s why it is key with difficult decisions or tough scenarios to stay in the short term and what you need to next in the next week or so.

In summary

Leading a business where you are responsible for a payroll each month that pays your team’s rent, bills and mortgage is a big responsibility. It comes with a level of pressure that you don’t have as a sole practitioner. That means surfacing problems and taking tough decisions or working your way out of a difficult situation.

The 5 specific moves that made me redundant from my own business

Heather Townsend — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:31:07 GMT

I had a big birthday 6 months ago.

The type that makes you stop and reflect. Both on what has come up to this moment and then what you want to be different for the next decade.

It’s not a particularly cheery thought to realise that I have probably had over half my life. I’ve definitely had over half my life of the ‘best years’ of my life health wise.

Anyway I digress. My husband’s hard stop on his working life is when he turns 55. That’s in just over 5 years time. I have swore on my babies’ lives that when this happens I will have drastically reduced my working hours. After all, I’m not going to be working 50 hour weeks when he gets up when he wants and spends a significant portion of his waking hours walking, cycling, eating or watching sport and films.

Given these very real reminders of how old I am and that the clock is ticking, it’s led me to reflect on when is enough, enough. And at what age do I want to retire. Then what does retirement actually mean.

Whilst you may be reading this and thinking about the ‘growth’ stage of your business, and ‘capital value on exit’ is something that doesn’t concern you right now, it should concern you. After all, knowing your exit plan helps you build the right business going forward.

For the last 12 months I have deliberately reduced my working hours and chargeable time in our Accountants’ Growth Club business. This has been for many reasons. Firstly, my health. I’d burnt out and had a new diagnosis of Fibromyalgia to contend with. 12 months on from that diagnosis the pep is coming back into my step, but a bout of chronic fatigue can still catch me out.

But the other reason for reducing my working hours and chargeable time was to build a business that was not reliant on me and could command a reasonable capital value on exit.

One of the real learnings of the last 12 months has been my need to simplify my life. Much of the big moves are now in place to do that, such as moving house, standing down as a councillor in 2027. But the really big move, the one which I wish I could fast forward a few years to get to is the selling my Accountants’ Growth Club business into an employee owned trust.

So what did I do to get my Accountants’ Growth Club business less reliant on me? I.e. to both reduce my working hours but also start the journey to build an asset with capital value. That’s what I am going to focus the rest of the article on:

I stopped taking on new clients

Of course, the business carried on taking on new clients. But I physically stopped volunteering to lead on new clients. For example, last July when I was pretty much in bits, a large piece of work came our way. The sort of juicy £100k+ contract that would fill the coffers of our business AND build us credibility. I knew I just didn’t have the bandwidth to lead on this project. So I deliberately asked my associate to lead on this big project. You know what? The world hasn’t crashed down as a result. In fact, it has played to our mutual strengths and I have utmost confidence that this client’s mandate with us will grow as a result of them leading on the work.

Coaching relationships are not meant to last forever. So when my coaching relationships within The Accountants’ Growth Club have come to a natural conclusion I have not replaced them with new members. Although in the next few months I am likely to take back one of my members. But I am finally under 20% of the chargeable income for our Accountants’ Growth Club business. This lack of reliance on me for my coaching ability has given me white space in my diary and means that the business should attract a higher valuation as a result.

I got ruthless with the bits of the business no longer serving us.

One of my strengths in life is my loyalty. That means particularly to people. Even when it no longer serves me personally. Over the last 18 months we as a leadership team within The Accountants’ Growth Club have been interrogating our profit and loss account. As a result we have said goodbye to our Accountants’ Recruiter brand and mothballed for the time being our AGC Digital brand. We are now free of distractions and focused on building the core of the business back up again, membership subscriptions. Yes, I am taking a £10-15k hit as a result of shutting up the Accountants’ Recruiter brand but it will help us in the long-term.

It’s not just the bits of the business no longer serving us, it’s also the processes and systems also no longer serving us. I am measuring and monitoring where our leads are coming from. Any marketing that is not earning its keep is being ditched. As a result we are no longer exhibiting at the UK and Europe’s largest trade show for accounting professionals, Accountex.

One of the changes we are about to make is to deliver our webinars on one side of the business as recorded webinars. This will enable us to hit all the time zones for our audience and reduce the amount of time I need to spend presenting the webinar.

I did an audit on what I was doing day to day

I now know why our marketing struggled so much over the last few years. Firstly there was the trust placed in a former marketing manager who was, shall we say, not as competent on digital marketing as I needed them to be. We are now 2 years on from them leaving us and undertaking an SEO audit. Let’s just say things are still surfacing from their era in charge that will have handicapped our marketing.

To be fair it wasn’t all their fault. When they first left I was running a full client portfolio and took on their full time role. As a result I never quite had the headspace until actually quite recently to get into the weeds of what will sort out our marketing. Over the last 12 months I have moved from being very reactive with our marketing to proactive and purposeful. I’ve been working out what I am doing or should be doing and capturing it. Then starting to hand it down to our marketing executive and training them to step up and take more off me.

Moving more of my stuff onto my team AND reducing my chargeable time with clients have been game changers for me to reduce the business’s reliance on me.

I’ve stepped up and lead

I have been told a few times by my leadership team that my business is my business. I am the boss, so lead the damn thing. And yes, they were right. As a result I have set in place:

Quarterly reviews with my team members
Quarterly refresh of our business plan and growth plan with my leadership team
More explicit requests from team members
Putting the time and effort in to stop rework from team members (whether directly employed by us or not). E.g. better briefs for our copywriter.
Time in my diary to prepare for quarterly reviews and quarterly plans
Monthly leadership team meetings to course correct if needed.

This isn’t just with the people I directly employ. This is with our freelancers and important suppliers. As a result we have changed a few people from our trusted freelance pool but also put in place better checks and balances on what is happening.

I have leaned into AI more

This time last year AI was like a trusted intern for me. It was happy and enthusiastic but not always accurate. You could say I was playing with it. Now I am using it with purpose to reduce the amount of processing and thinking I am doing. For example:

Triaging my email and acting like an executive assistant and sorting it
Creating webinar outlines and scripts based on my analysis of our audience and the material we already have
Repurposing articles
Creating social media posts and also infographics.
Creating show notes, SEO meta titles and descriptions for this weekly start up to grown up article and podcast episode.
Rapidly editing video using the AI tools in riverside.fm (affiliate link)

In summary

Your business doesn’t magically become independent of you. You have to do stuff before you can be released from being the business. If you do decide to release yourself from being the business a number of things will happen:

You will have more time to do the things you love
Your business’s capital value will rise
You can reliably scale your business

How to eliminate your emotional baggage when managing people

Heather Townsend — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:30:26 GMT

Deep breath. Confession time.

I had been considering accessing therapy for a few years before getting my Fibromyalgia diagnosis.

I knew in my heart of hearts that a number of former employees AND my own personal stories had contributed to some pretty dysfunctional thinking. The type that was hampering my ability to lead and manage my people effectively. Looking back I was getting scared of my own shadow.

As a business owner you never start off as a bad manager or leader of people; more often than not you are a naive and inexperienced manager of people. I’ve been training people on managing and leading others for at least 25 years. Did it help me personally become a better people manager? No. I had to learn the painful way. Experience, when it comes to people management, really is the best teacher. As a result of that inexperience stuff happens which can lead to traumatic and painful experiences as a result of managing people. Despite what it may feel like, it is possible to ditch the emotional baggage and move on.

Signs you are dealing with emotional baggage

You don’t need to have booked a session with a therapist to be struggling with emotional baggage. There are often the clues hiding in plain sight, such as:

You consider yourself to be a poor people leader or manager
You have fixed opinions about what staff members will or wouldn’t do
You are fearful of setting expectations or having difficult conversations with team members
You keep reliving what went wrong with the team member
When a team member’s name comes up you feel your body tense up or get a strong sense of dread/anxiety
You find it hard to trust your team members
minor problems with staff members make you paranoid and think the worst is about to happen

As I read through this list I could tick off all of them. For example I went through a period of a few years where I couldn’t keep someone in a role for more than 12-18 months. As a result I would be triggered whenever a team member would send me a text message saying “can we have a chat?”. And I mean really triggered. I would feel my heart rate rise, the anxious thoughts would become loud in my head. I felt that they were about to resign. Every single time! And I mean every single time. When all they wanted was a chat. Literally a chat. If you are wondering this reaction was one of the reasons I knew I needed professional help.

Why emotional baggage is so easily accumulated as a small firm owner

Emotional baggage is insecurities mixed with inhibitions due to events that have taken place

Stressful events - inside and outside of work - can leave you feeling residual stress, anxiety, self-doubt and trust issues. If you are an inexperienced people manager and don’t have effective people processes in place it is much easier for stressful events, e.g. a team member leaving acrimoniously, to happen. This means that a growing small firm is fertile ground for this stuff happening. After all, how set in stone or effective are your people processes? How much real experience have you had managing a team of people? Particularly when its your business? Looking back, I now realise that I had little to no people management experience when I started running my own firm. I lucked in with our first employee who has now been with me for 14 years and I am proud to call my business partner.

Then these stressful events become emotional baggage. This emotional baggage is your brains way of protecting you. After all, it wants to protect you from having to experience this traumatic staff member related event again. So, your brain takes meaning from the event - whether real or not - and translates this into stories and limiting beliefs, i.e. emotional baggage. This emotional baggage can often be related to:

Your skills as a people manager
Your ability to grow your firm
How your staff will or will not behave and react.

As a small business owner when you have a falling out with a member of staff it can be more traumatic than managers in a corporate setting. After all, this fall out normally has major implications for your personal and business finances plus the amount of hours you work. It may even delay the growth of your practice.

On a personal level due to the revolving door of people I have had in my business I have told myself, and truly believe, that I am poor at people management. Whereas the reality is I am inexperienced and often not allocating enough time and prioritising managing the individuals in my team.

How to eliminate emotional baggage

Now, of course, you can take the therapy route. And I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I certainly was a candidate for therapy long before I decided to engage one. In fact, I now believe that if I had accessed therapy a few years earlier I wouldn’t have descended into burnout and fibromyalgia.

A good way of thinking about emotional baggage is as unprocessed emotions. Emotions that are not recognised and dealt with at the time don’t go away. They just get turned into stories, limiting beliefs and reappear when we get ‘emotionally triggered’. I.e. something happens which results in our brain signalling the flight/fight response and flooding our body and mind with fear and anxiety. This is exactly why it has taken me years to retrain my brain that an employee asking for a chat with me is not a sign that they are going to resign!

Acknowledge your feelings

The first step to overcoming emotional baggage is to be aware of where you have collected it and how it is impacting your decision making and day-to-day life as a people manager. Good ways of acknowledging your feelings include journalling, meditation and working with a coach (or therapist) to explore your fears, self-limiting beliefs and stories. As a coach I have helped many of my clients with this stuff.

Root cause what really triggered the situation/event

As a business owner it is easy to fall into the trap of blaming yourself. It’s never normally as simple as that. People issues often happen because you haven’t instigated robust people processes. For example I know if I had been better at setting objectives and holding team members accountable to those objectives I wouldn’t have had nearly as many people issues. In fact I would have caught the employees imploding out of sight many months before their position and performance became untenable.

Doing a root cause analysis where you determine exactly what lead to the situation can help you understand:

How you can prevent the situation reoccurring
What scripts in your head you need to rewire because you have corrected the root cause.

Ask yourself what would a detached observer say about what happened?

When I have worked with my coach and relayed some of the stories of what has happened I find their reaction interesting. Normally, they feedback to me that what I have taken as normal is anything other than normal. And whilst I may be taking all the responsibility for the situation and what then happened, it is never normally that clear cut.

When you are at the centre of a negative situation it is hard to get perspective. As a result stories can easily get created in our head about what happened and how we or they were truly at fault. The reality is that most people issues are never solely one person’s fault. The protagonists normally all contribute in some way to the problem. When you ask yourself what a detached observer would say, you can start to shift the rational from the irrational. It can help you change the stories and limiting beliefs which have formed in your head.

Make friends with anxiety

Any traumatic event is likely to result in you being emotionally triggered in the future. This can lead to feelings of anxiety rearing its head. For example if you have had a number of staff resign, it’s very easy to jump to conclusions (like I was doing for years) that when a staff member asks for a chat they are going to resign.

In these situations, always acknowledge the anxiety. Trying to ignore it actually does the opposite, i.e. amplifies its effect. Once you have acknowledged the anxiety, then ask yourself what has prompted it. What message is your brain giving you? Then you can start to analyse whether that message has any basis in reality.

A good way of helping rewire these stories in your head is to put together a checklist of things that will help you see the fact from the fiction. For example, if you are worried that a team member will resign your brain will naturally look for evidence that they are likely to resign. Therefore, if you consciously start looking for evidence that suggests the opposite it can help you understand what is most likely to be happening.

For example I have a constant story that my business is going to run out of money. I knew the origins of this story even before working with a therapist. As a result I always hold healthy cash reserves. In fact my accountants over the years have often chastised me that these healthy cash reserves are too healthy. Anyway, I check my cash position every week. That’s every week without fail. Not because I believe my business is about to go under. But doing this check stops the unhealthy story about going bust from taking root in my head.

In summary

You will pick up emotional baggage from managing people as your firm grows. And you will find that from time to time this baggage hinders your ability to grow your business or take the appropriate decision or course of action.

However, you don’t need to carry your emotional baggage for ever. It is in your power to unpack it or even leave it by the wayside. If you are tired of that little voice on your shoulder worrying you, then perhaps its time to reach out and ask for help?

5 subtle (and not so subtle) signs that you have a performance problem with a staff member.

Heather Townsend — Sun, 31 May 2026 05:30:52 GMT

I’ve had my fair share of employees leaving. Some I have regretted and some I have breathed a sigh of relief when they left. And some that I have needed therapy to properly process and put down the newly acquired suitcase of emotional baggage.

With the benefit of hindsight I now realise my weakness, people management, has held back the growth of my businesses time and time again. I’ve been far too trusting, far too laissez faire. My bank balance has paid the price for it. The challenge with people management is that you need to adapt your style to get the most out of your team members. Not necessarily the other way around.

Over the last 2 years my businesses have grown to over £550k. I could not have done that without a stable team. In fact, I would go as far as saying it is not possible to scale your business without a stable team of people in core positions. Therefore, it really does pay to ensure that your current staff members are fulfilled AND performing well. Hindsight is wonderful, but often, we don’t realise we have a performance issue with a member of staff until it is way too late. Either too late to rectify the issue or too late to minimise the damage they will cause.

For the rest of the article I will now look at the mental check list I go through when I think there are potential performance issues.

Have you properly set expectations for your staff member?

Have you set clear expectations about what you expect from them? By that, I mean performance objectives, KPIs, up-to-date job descriptions and weekly/monthly conversations about the targets and results you expect from them. Without setting clear expectations, it’s really difficult to identify if you have a performance or management problem.

It’s very easy to think that all this stuff is ‘too much’ for the size of your firm. After all if it is you and just a handful of other people this can feel like overkill. Particularly if you left a big firm and swore to yourself that you would stop doing all that performance management ‘box ticking’ that HR required.

The litmus test for whether you have been clear about what you expect your staff member to do is, hypothetically, call in an HR professional to formally talk to your staff member about their performance. The litmus test is whether your staff member would be surprised about the conversation. If you have set clear expectations, they can be annoyed, frustrated, angry, unhappy but not surprised.

Have I flexed my own management style?

My businesses are all run remotely. We don’t have a central office where we all spend some or all of our time together. As a result my preference for people management is to let others get on with it and not bother them. As I have found to my cost, that only works with a small percentage of people in the world! I have many horror stories but the one I want to share was an employee who was quietly going to pieces and refusing help or denying that there was anything wrong. This resulted in them not doing any client facing work for a month and us losing about £50k of business. In the subsequent formal performance management meeting they put the blame on me and said I should have been sitting down with them every day and going through their to-do list with them. Now if this was the only way they were going to fulfill the demands of the role there was a capability issue. After all, they were not new into the world of work.

This period of time did teach me one thing. I had to flex my own management style. I couldn’t expect all my team members to thrive working semi-autonomously! As a result everyone within my team is managed differently. Some of my team I speak to nearly every day, and others whenever they need me. Which can often be every few weeks but supplemented by an online dialogue and exchange of messages.

Actions mean more than words

I see this one all the time. In fact, it’s even happened in my own business. This is where your staff member is saying all the right things, but not backing it up with the results or performance. It can often happen when a staff member is keen to get promoted or a pay rise or have the title. For example, the newly qualified team member who decides that because they are now qualified, they deserve a pay rise. Or the team member who asks to be promoted, but doesn’t display the behaviours, or put the work in that would demonstrate their suitability for the role.

I had a former member of the team that was motivated by titles. Less so by the actual work and responsibilities that went with them. They wanted the ‘head of growth’ title in the business and the external recognition that went with this. But they didn’t want to own the sales forecast that went with it. After all, their belief was that someone else would line up the opportunities for them and they would put the ball in the back of the net. This was a big red flag for me. Anything where you are hearing the words but not seeing the actions backing up the words or desire is a red flag.

As the saying goes, words are cheap. Before you make any decisions about how well a team member is performing, look at their results. What are they actually doing and completing?

Are they fulfilling ALL the requirements of the role?

Very often staff members will cherry pick which parts of their role they will do. After all, we’re all human! The tough bits (or the bits they don’t enjoy) may get deprioritised. In this scenario, if you don’t talk to them about the importance of doing the bits of the role they are not doing, then they certainly won’t remind you! You may find that you need to micromanage your staff member for the parts of the role they want to avoid or delay, but leave them to get on with other things independently.

Sometimes it may not be as simple as ‘they are not doing all the requirements of the role’. Your staff member may fill their diary with the stuff they are good at and enjoy. They may ‘bust’ their chargeable targets, but at the expense of their other responsibilities. It then will become your responsibility to help them rebalance their working week and mindset to help them do everything which is expected of them.

Have they become your dysfunctional star?

Dysfunctional stars lurk in professional services firms. They are brilliant at some things but typically cause you or your firm endless problems with their behaviour or how they go about things. It‘s normally their brilliance with clients, winning new work or a prized technical skill that means you are reticent to tackle them about the negative side of their behaviour. It can be tough to deal with the dysfunctional star, particularly if they have strong relationships with some of your best clients.

Dysfunctional stars, if left to carry on working in the way they are, will eventually poison your business from the inside. After all, if you refuse to deal with their negative behaviours, you signal to other members of staff that you are condoning it. This will undermine your attempts to instigate a values-driven, positive working culture. This one rule for one person, one rule for others then decreases staff morale, increases staff turnover and causes regular ‘people’ issues that need to be dealt with. Often a dysfunctional star, if left to their own devices, may decide that they are bigger than the firm and leave with a large portion of the client base following them. And ask me how I know!

“But that’s just [name]’s way of working”

How many times have I heard this from the firm owner? What they are really saying is that I (and the rest of the staff) are tolerating how this person works. Very often, the way this person works is not where or how you want it to be. When the firm’s culture excuses poor or adverse behaviour from an individual, you know you have a performance issue to deal with.

Often this problem starts slowly. A little like the analogy of the frog in a saucepan of water that is being slowly heated to boiling point. By the time the frog realises the water is now too hot it is often too late for them to take action. It’s the same with your team members and their way of working.

Classic issues that will eventually cause problems in your business are someone:

Not using your practice management system as the single source of truth and creating their own action plans or spreadsheets of work to be done.
Preferring to email rather than phone or vice versa.
Turning up late to meetings
With poor communication skills

An unexpected drop in performance or change in behaviour

A drop in performance or change in behaviour, whether expected or unexpected, always needs to be investigated. Sometimes, this is obvious to see, such as your staff member stopping contributing in meetings or missing deadlines. Sometimes it can be more subtle, such as delaying updating your firm’s practice management system. The key here is having standards that staff members are required to achieve, and the ability to monitor these standards. It’s the monitoring of these standards which will often alert you to a problem that is starting. Do remember that a drop in performance or change in behaviour may be indicative of a problem in their personal life. What is key here is to approach the conversation about performance with an open mind.

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In summary

However you spot the issue with a team member, what is important is that you act on this. The sooner you start a dialogue the lower the risk of material damage to your business going forward.

Remember your sanity, current and future bank balance rely on your taking action swiftly not letting anything linger.

The £20k trade show lesson I won’t forget

Heather Townsend — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:30:57 GMT

Over the last month I have been exposed to some dodgy ‘marketing’ tactics.

I have to say they left me feeling pretty m’eh as a result.

Particularly when we spent £20k on exhibiting at a trade show and became the customer…

In this article I am going to explain why they don’t work and why they may actually damage your reputation rather than lead to new business.

Ambushing a trade show

Last week I was at the biggest trade show in UK and Europe for accounting professionals; Accountex. Over 18 thousand visitors attended the show across 2 days. People come to this show from all over the world.

Which means it attracts blood suckers. By that I mean the human equivalent of these.

When you consider this kind of trade show, it brings up lots of ideas for guerilla marketing tactics. There are the more harmless types which I have seen many times:

Walking around the show floor with a top on that advertises your product or service. E.g. “ask me about… with a big QR code on to scan”.
Walking around the show floor giving away your own merchandise and freebies.
Painting pavements near the show with your marketing message
Adding stickers to the back of the toilet doors
Leafleting people while they wait to enter the trade show

Let’s be honest, most of these are going to have a poor return on investment. Plus some poor person is going to have to clean off your stickers or wash the pavement. I’m all for innovation but not if this means you are going to have a negative impact on others.

When it comes to trade shows, the organisers make their money by exhibitors and sponsors. Of course, sponsors are typically exhibitors who have paid for the most prominent and largest stands and now have the privilege of getting their logo onto the show’s marketing materials.

Anyway, I digress. When we were exhibiting at Accountex it cost pretty much most of our marketing budget. There was the cost to actually exhibit, then to hire the equipment, then the travel, subsidence and accommodation for the 4 of us on stand, plus ‘stand theatre’, plus printed literature… and finally the lost opportunity cost. For a small 3 x 3m stand with 4 people, we didn’t get change out of £20k.

This was our experience of Accountex last year. We found that on day 1 we were having a huge amount of conversations. So good right? No, wrong, the conversations were with people trying to sell to us or sell through us to our members. These were literally show attendees that had planned to come to the show to sell to exhibitors. It meant that day 1 of the show, where we would expect 75% of our good leads to come from was a busted flush.

As an exhibitor there can’t be much worse a feeling than being on your feet all day in a noisy room with no natural light, and then having 6 hours of conversations where you are being sold to.

To give you a comparison, we picked up under 50 qualified email addresses from exhibiting at that trade show. We only scanned people who were worth following up with. I can do that easily with a month of facebook ads and spend less than £1000 in doing so. In the balance of fairness in previous years we picked up a significant amount of business from exhibiting at this trade show. Just not in the last couple of years…

We are now 12 months on from the disastrous trade show. Funnily enough all those people who decided to ambush us and sell to us, we’ve not taken them up on their offer. The bad taste they have left still, well, tastes bad.

Deliberately hustling into an existing relationship

This happened not just once but many times. To the point where our estate agent warned us that it would happen.

When you decide to sell your house in the UK there are a number of online property sites where the majority of individuals use to market their home. Of course, when your house goes up on these sites, the whole ecosystem around selling and moving kicks in.

One of the estate agents we considered acting for us decided to see whether they could hustle into our relationship.

Now this was an estate agent that we had said:

You are our second choice
Don’t email us with your standard marketing material
We’ll be in touch if we need you
We decided not to go with you as we wanted a partnership with our estate agent, and we felt you were putting us through a process.

So this estate agent saw our house on the property selling platform. Then posted a business card with “please call me”. Which as a seller of a house does make you think…

What if they had a ready made buyer that wanted to see our house?

Anyway, I reasoned that this was very unlikely! Then about a week later we got a hand delivered sales letter with their ‘magazine’.

My email to our contact at the estate agent was pretty to the point about these aggressive sales tactics. You can imagine that they were told to not darken our letter box again. I decided to give our estate agent a moment of light relief and blind copied them into the email… They had a good giggle apparently!

This wasn’t the first time we had this aggressive sales tactic. We even had the estate agent contact us that failed to call us back when we called them! Talk about an embarrassing phone call back to them… If they had got their sales process and telephone routing right between offices they could have got to the next stage and actually met us. Instead they were fighting over scraps.

Whenever one of our members of the accountants’ growth club outs themself as a member on social media, there will always be at least one of our competitors approaching them. We normally get told about these ‘desperate’ approaches.

Last week our house’s status went from ‘to sell’ to ‘sold subject to contract’. I get sent through the post 2 postcards from removal companies. In my view this is great timing from these removal companies. Now we have ‘almost’ sold, we will be almost definitely using a removal company. And unlike the estate agent’s invading our post box, we haven’t publicly stated we have decided on who is going to act for us.

Why do these aggressive sales tactics not normally work?

It’s because we are in the relationship business. In professional services it is all about the relationship. Get the relationship right and deliver on what you say you are going to do, and the client is likely to stay loyal. Now, of course, there are always pockets for the marketplace that are more price sensitive. But it is up to us and our team to demonstrate and call out how we are delivering value for what they are paying.

As soon as these types of sales tactics are applied to me I tend to think these things:

Are you desperate for work?
Do your values match mine?

Either way, it’s not what you want a potential client to be thinking!

3 decisions that turned my empty pipeline into a waiting list to work with me

Heather Townsend — Sun, 17 May 2026 06:23:18 GMT

Today is a slightly different weekly article.

There is no weekly article. (Next Sunday normal service will be resumed, no pitch just an article)

Just a very personal podcast episode on how I went from clueless to building a repeatable system to win work.

As you will find out in the podcast episode, there were 3 key decisions that moved my business forward.

By the way… in my first year of business I billed £27k. Go me. That was 2009. Last year, 2025 it was £650k. Since 2018 I have tripled the size of my business from £200k to £650k in 2025. And those included the pandemic years when corporate training and coaching budgets were cut and we needed to pivot hard to survive.

I probably have never told you my credentials for helping people win business…

I’m the author of best-selling and award-winning book The Financial Times Guide to Business Networking and The Go-To Expert. As well as the author of The Accountants’ Millionaires Club: Poise of Partnership: How to Make Partners Still Have a Life.

If this wasn’t enough to convince you:

In 2018 I launched the Accountants Growth Club which is now a coaching business with a £30k MRR of which I am less than 15% of the monthly income. (Yes, I can literally market and sell a service that I am not delivering…)

My 3 biggest clients are each worth over £100k per year. (Yes, I can sell big pieces of consultancy/coaching/training work to large corporates)

I’ve sold recurring services, consultancy, coaching for the last 17 years.

I’ve trained lawyers, accountants and consultants over the last 15 years on:

How to win work via their network
How to build and monetise their niche
How to win their own work (by any means)
How to win work via their existing clients
How to find the time to do business development
How to sell
…. and it goes on….

I know what it takes to win work of the right kind. I’ve done it myself. And I’ve helped hundreds of people like you learn to be good at winning the right type of work.

As you will find out in the podcast I struggled with many of the things that professionals like you find with business development.

Firstly, no one taught me how to win clients BEFORE I left my job. I had to figure it out myself. But I figured it out much faster after spending (and paying for) time with 2 experts on winning work. I just wish I had done the first session months earlier…

Then I realised that all my work was initially coming from my ex-colleagues and family network. Which was used up pretty quickly.

That meant I had to learn a repeatable system to go out and regularly win work. I built that via social media (Twitter) and blogging.

Finally after writing The FT Guide To Business Networking I had a hole in my pipeline. After all, the book wasn’t yet published AND I had spent all my time for marketing on writing a book. I had to learn to be consistent and plan my marketing activities going forward.

In summary

It’s that nobody ever taught you a repeatable system for winning work. And when you’re your own boss, there’s nobody there to help you build one.

That’s exactly what the Launch Pad programme is designed to fix. (It starts this thursday - the 21st May...)

In this short video, (click on the button 👇) where I walk you through how the programme works and what you’ll have built by the end of eight weeks.

Watch how the programme works

Nobody told you this part of running a firm

Heather Townsend — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:52:42 GMT

There’s something that nobody tells you when you set up your firm.

You’ve been trained to be exceptional at the technical work. The accounts, tax returns, reporting etc. You spent years getting good at that. You’ve got letters after your name to prove it. (And you probably proudly display them on your LinkedIn profile)

What they didn’t teach you was how to win clients.

And now that’s the thing standing between you and the firm you actually want to run.

If you’re honest with yourself, business development has always felt like someone else’s skill. Something that other people are naturally good at. The kind of thing that involves schmoozing and networking and saying things that feel a bit “ick.”

Maybe you’ve been relying on referrals. They’ve kept things ticking over, but you know the tap isn’t flowing as freely as it once did. Or your network of friends and family is starting to run dry.

Maybe you’re just starting out and the phone isn’t ringing the way you hoped it would.

Or maybe you’ve got clients, but they’re not the right clients. And winning better ones feels like something you haven’t quite figured out yet.

The problem isn’t you.

It’s that nobody ever taught you a repeatable system for winning work. And when you’re your own boss, there’s nobody there to help you build one.

That’s exactly what the Launch Pad programme is designed to fix. (It starts this thursday - the 21st May...)

Normally, I would be running this only for accounting firm owners, but my team have said, why not open it up to your Substack audience. After all, I’ve been helping coaches, trainers and consultants to win business for 17+ years.

In this short video, (click on the button 👇) where I walk you through how the programme works and what you’ll have built by the end of eight weeks.

Watch how the programme works

Back with you tomorrow.

Heather

PS: The programme starts Thursday 21st May. There are only 10 places.

PPS: Hit reply if you have any questions about the programme

PPPS: If you sign up before Monday, you’ll get a free personal review of your website from me, worth £500+

How to win clients without feeling like you’ve turned into a salesperson

Heather Townsend — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:30:27 GMT

I like going into sales meetings with a colleague. Not because I fear sales or are bad at it. Because they bring a different energy to the meeting. It also allows me to move into the role of summariser and observer. A role that I love.

You see, they say I am great at sales meetings. Apparently I am fearless and ask questions that I have no right to ask.

Not sure that is true. But what I have is less hangups about sales. And that’s the thing, it’s these hang ups about selling that hinder many of us from winning the clients we deserve.

Let’s prove this

When you were 18 or perhaps a bit older did you wake up and think,

“I’m going to grow up and become a sales person”.

I suspect not. You were going to become an accountant, lawyer, consultant etc. Anything but a sales person. After all who wants to own up at a dinner party that you sell double glazing or are an estate agent?

But the problem is, if you are going to grow and scale your practice you need to become a great sales person. Until you have a team underneath you who are all competent and capable at selling, this is your responsibility. For many of us, we never quite get away from being involved in sales.

We hate calling selling “selling”

Think about all the various names we have for selling; business development, hunting, farming, writing business, hunting expedition, fishing… anything but the actual word, selling.

Changing your identity

It all starts with changing your identity. If you are still thinking that selling means becoming a 2nd hand car sales person then you are never going to embrace this responsibility.

I often do a session at conferences on how to learn to love business development. I start by asking what do people see as the attributes of a sales person. And the normal stuff comes out:

Pushy
Manipulative
Talks too much
Extroverted
Etc

I then ask people what do they see as the attributes of a typical lawyer, consultant or accountant. And funnily enough the list is often diametrically opposite the first list. Is it any wonder that we often decide we ‘can’t do sales’. Or that we think that great sales people are born rather than made.

This means sales needs to be reframed. Here are the reframes that will help you love sales:

Reframe 1: You are problem solving with your clients/prospects

I asked my daughter what she liked about being an accountancy apprentice. She gave me an answer I didn’t expect. Apparently every day she is problem solving on behalf of her clients. She loves problem solving. Even better, she gets paid for it. Perhaps her stint when returning to the classroom in lockdown where she learnt how to do the hardest level of sudoku rather than the actual lesson content wasn’t wasted!

When I ask this question doing my talk on learning to love sales, I ask the room who loves problem solving for their clients. Pretty much every hand will go up.

When you think about what you are really doing with sales it’s:

Finding out the real problem your prospect is motivated to solve
Helping them solve this problem with a solution.

If the solution happens to be using you and your firm, that’s just a risk you are going to have to take!

Reframe 2: You are helping your clients buy

Many of us recoil from the thought of selling as it just feels too pushy. After all, no one likes to be ‘sold to’. However, if you reframe this as helping your clients buy, it feels so much easier and more natural.

When you are helping your clients to buy you are:

An equal partner
Not forcing them to do anything
Providing them with information to help them make a decision
Attracting them to come to you for help

Your clients always have real problems. You know that, I know that. However, they need to trust you enough to talk to you about these problems. You can’t do that without a strong relationship forming. But unless you create the time for these clients to talk, they are not going to tell you about them. This isn’t about a formal pitch. It’s about doing the basics well and then creating the time to understand more about them and their needs.

Reframe 3: Sales is a skill to be learnt

So many of us believe (whether or not we voice it openly) that sales people are born not made. After all, how many times have you said:

“They were a natural at sales” or “It’s not what I am good at”

But sales skills are a skill to be learnt. Just like any other skill. When you approach sales with a growth mindset, rather than a fixed mindset, i.e. “I’ll never be good at sales”, you will become that person that others see as a ‘natural’ at sales.

Be curious

If I put a prospect in front of you who needed your technical expertise you would get stuck in. You’d be professionally curious and even ask the difficult questions to help find the right solution for the prospect.

But the problem comes when we are in selling mode. We forget the need to be really curious. Sometimes we get fixated on our technical area of competence and forget the bigger picture. Or we get it into our head that it’s not the ‘done thing’ to ask that.

Whereas what I do differently to my colleague is I believe that no question is off limits. That means I will ask stuff like:

Are they talking to any other providers as well as us? If so, I will ask if they feel able to name who they are talking to and what has prompted them to speak with them. [This then helps me think about what I need to differentiate about us and our offering.]
Their personal and business objectives/goals. This could be at an individual, department or organisational level. Plus what are their motivations for these objectives or goals. This is much more of an exploration than the “what are you worried about” type surface level question that is often asked.
What prompted them to get in touch with us.
How they found us
What is the impact of doing nothing? Or could they achieve the same desired result using their own resources?
What would the right supplier do to delight them?
What have they done before but it didn’t work? [This is often illuminating for their real reasons for buying and what is going to help them say yes to your potential solution.]
If we were sitting here in a year’s time and it had gone wrong, what would we have done? Or not stopped them from doing?

The point I am trying to make is to ask that extra question and go deeper than you normally would. You’ll be handsomely rewarded by what the buyer tells you.

Move the process forward

We often think that the best sales people can enter a meeting and exit with a verbal agreement to work together. Sales doesn’t work like this. It’s a process where you and they go through a series of defined steps. What we often forget to do is to test their commitment. I.e. by asking for them for something. Ideally a commitment to move the sales process forward. For example, will they agree to:

Talk to one of your colleagues (who has the expertise they need)
Agree to another meeting to move the conversation forward
Agree to look at a draft proposal together to get it ready to be submitted
A date when they want everything decided and the work started

Normally if you have been curious and really listened to the prospect they will move the conversation forward. But you may need to ask them:

What’s the right next step for this?

In summary

Great sales people are made not born. If you can get your head around the fact you are not selling, just problem solving with your clients whilst being curious, this sales stuff will become much easier.

How to get AI to triage your email...

Heather Townsend — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:43:33 GMT

I’ll be honest, email is the bane of my life. Hate it. Want to ignore. But sadly, it goes with what I do.

I’ve used Sanebox for over 15 years now to help with email management. (That link will get you a gift for clicking on it, and I get a small gift as well)

But recently Sanebox has felt stale to me. What if I could go further with triaging my email?

Up until AI appeared on the scene, email triage used to be on a individual training basis. I.e. if you get an email from this person, do this. For example, invoices from the car hire company get sent to our receipts inbox. Now this is fine, up and till a point. But what if AI did the triaging? So you didn’t need to get good at setting rules?

This is what I wanted. AI to actually do something useful for me. To do the initial thinking with the emails I receive. So I can literally just batch process them in the morning when I have the motivation to do this.

This was supposed to be easy

Given everything I know about AI, it was supposed to be easy. I should be able to connect google gemini to my google inbox and it do its stuff. Then I should come into an inbox in the morning that has been processed and is ready for me to give it the quick once over.

Funnily enough, it is easy to:

connect up Claude or Google gemini to my inbox
read my inbox
categorise my emails into different types

Which is great. But that list lives outside of my inbox. I then need to filter my email (google gemini) to find the email to then process. Or if it was claude desktop, click on the link in the list to go into my email to process.

That’s a pretty slow step on what should be easy.

What I wanted was to come into my email inbox and have the emails already sorted and waiting for me. I didn’t want the 3rd party software to then tell me to manually find or link through to the email.

What I did first

The first thing I did was consider my actual workflow.

So, when do I want my emails to be triaged?

What should they be triaged into? I.e. the categories? How do I define the categories?

How do I then get the right ones into my workflow software, monday.com?

You need to do this thinking first. For example, do you want emails from certain clients to be flagged as ‘super, super, time critical and urgent’.

AI agents and workflows when done properly are based on this thinking rather than playing with it going “this is really cool”.

The things that didn’t work for me

We work in google workspace. Therefore my first port of call was google gemini and asking it to help me set up a gem to do this work.

This route didn’t work because I don’t have Gemini Enterprise and the connection between monday.com and gemini needs an enterprise level connection. Sadly, google gemini didn’t feel like telling me this!

Then my IT team told me:

So then I considered as suggested by google gemini to use the zapier/make connection and/or google gemini chrome extension, or the monday.com extension for chrome.

Once again my IT team told me… no

My IT suggested claude cowork. So I dutifully downloaded claude desktop and asked it for how to do my workflow.

Then I tried it out and discovered it could triage my email… but wouldn’t then label the emails so they were presorted in my inbox.

Then I went down a rabbit hole to see whether I could get claude co-work to do this.

I wasted a shed load of time…

At which point my IT and I decided what I wanted to do wasn’t possible.

By this point I’ve wasted about 4 hours and thinking that I am useless.

Until my IT suggested I did it this way…

For paid subscribers I detail the exact workflow I used and the software to triage my email so AI categorises my email and pre-sorts it ready for me to process it.

How to restart your business development activities when you’ve gone quiet

Sun, 03 May 2026 05:30:54 GMT

I didn’t mean to do this.

But it’s been almost a month since the last How To Make Partner podcast episode went live.

You see, I’m human. And life happens. Then before you know it your regular business development activities have stopped.

For me, it was a very simple problem. No one told me I had run out of episodes. And neither had I put a prompt in my diary to write and record some more episodes. (That has now been fixed)

So in this article I am going to share my advice on how to restart your business development when you’ve stopped it for a while.

On wednesday this week I’ll be publishing, for paid subscribers, how I managed to get an AI Agent to triage my emails into my google workspace account.

This was much harder than I first thought!

I’ll be sharing the thinking you need to do in advance, then the exact prompts I use and how you can change them to match your own requirements.

Embarrassment

The first problem you often need to face in this situation is getting over the embarrassment. Funnily enough my standard ‘plug’ to get people to subscribe to the podcast talks about episodes being released weekly. And I’ve now left it a month since last recording an episode. That’s embarrassing. And for me who talks about always making time for business development and the importance of being consistent with your “business development as usual” type activities, it’s frankly mortifying.

For me, I’ve recognised that it is embarrassment that is stopping me from restarting this podcast. And often naming the emotion helps you realise that it is just a feeling. I’m not broken. I still have something to say. People still welcome what I talk about. I am also thinking about a regular listener to the How To Make Partner podcast Rebecca, who is on one of my “how to make partner” programmes. Rebecca will have noticed that I haven’t recorded an episode recently. Also Leanne, another regular will have noticed that I haven’t recorded recently…

Funnily enough knowing that my podcast helps Rebecca and Leanne - people I have met and know - means I want to get back and record another episode. I hope that my mistake by not publishing something for the last month helps listeners like you when life gets in the way and your business development stops, gives you comfort.

Procrastination

Maybe the problem isn’t embarrassment. Maybe it’s procrastination. We know we need to do business development, but we procrastinate. There is always something more important. For example, I know that I have been proactively nudging my network to find another big anchor client for my How To Make Partner business. So I have justified the lack of an episode with “at least I am doing some business development”.

Procrastination is often a sign that this is something we need to do. But we are being pushed out of our comfort zone. It’s our brain’s way of keeping us safe. When you are procrastinating the best thing you can do is identify one small and safe action you can take to get started.

What’s your why for doing business development?

Last week I was rung up by a potential corporate buyer of our how to make partner services. We do a considerable amount of coaching and programmes in strong regional to large professional service firms around the world. And this was someone who wanted to get me to run one of these programmes for her firm. Despite not answering my message to her when I emailed a few weeks ago, she mentioned that she had shared the podcast episode I shared with her to key people in the firm. Oh and she was booking me to run a virtual session on sales for her fee earners in January.

At that moment I was like “she shoots, she scores”.

And suddenly I realised, this podcast is now earning us business. And it wouldn’t carry on doing this if I don’t keep on regularly publishing. D’oh.

This moment for me was a very clear reminder of WHY I need to keep up with the podcast. And when you have dropped your business development activities, reminding yourself WHY you are doing it can be that powerful reminder to get started again.

I had another powerful reminder of why publishing new How To Make Partner podcast episodes and sharing them amongst our corporate HR buyers wins us work. My business partner had copied a few of my outreach emails to potential corporate buyers and sent them to more people in our network. One person came back after the nudge and asked to buy 7 seats for our Progress To Partner Academy. Once again, the podcast is earning its place in our marketing plan.

Do you need a marketing plan?

This wasn’t the problem for me, but I see it time and time again with our clients. When you don’t have a marketing plan that you feel able to implement and confident it will generate new business, you will often not do any business development activities. After all, if you don’t have a focus for your business development activities this can often lead to doing nothing. Although we tell ourselves we will do a little each day. Often that’s our brain lying to us!

In summary

But ultimately at the end of the day, I am reminded of the advice I often give others in this situation.

When you fall off a horse, it’s not about how hard you fall, or what made you fall, it’s ultimately about how quickly you get back on the horse again. And its the same with business development. It’s about getting over the shame, embarrassment or whatever story your brain is telling you and just finding a small action to restart your business development activities.

Feeling like you are falling behind on AI adoption? Here's what to do first

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 05:31:11 GMT

When I think of that quote that was circulated when social media was in its infancy, I think it could easily apply to AI adoption right now.

“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done, there’s surprise it’s not better.”
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist

In the last week I have had a number of conversations with clients who run small professional services businesses that are worried they are getting behind with AI. After all, go onto LinkedIn, Substack or even the more ‘social’ of the social media platforms and any conferences, and you will be bombarded by advice on how to use AI. You may even be told that you don’t adopt it now your business will become extinct.

This reminds me of my early business life. I was fortunate enough to be part of the early adoption curve with social media. Indeed one of my proudest boasts was that I was the most influential tweeter in Bedfordshire. Go me! Yes, social media did change the landscape for marketing and communication. But did the early adopters of social media win the day? In my view, no. Did the late movers with social media lose business due to avoiding it entirely? Possibly. But definitely not at the level many of us worried.

So in this article, I will share the advice I gave my clients this week.

Why not being first doesn’t mean you’re behind

Here is the thing nobody on LinkedIn or substack is telling you: the firms or individuals that rushed headlong into AI in 2023 and 2024 largely have very little to show for it. If you look carefully, you’ll find that they have a collection of half-used tool subscriptions which may not have been embedded into the business workflows. You also may find that the person’s motivation for posting their fear mongering is to get you to buy their AI training course…

We are still in the early stages of AI becoming useful for small professional services firms. The tools are maturing. Or I’m finding not living up to their hype! But the use cases are becoming clearer. However, looking to the past, the firms that built sustainable practices around social media were rarely the first movers. They were the ones who were often fast followers rather than first movers. As a result they waited long enough to understand what actually worked and what they should utilise in their business.

Whilst you may think you are late in adopting AI, the answer is this is typically just anxiety speaking.

Don’t just jump into the tools: do this first

The temptation, when you do decide to act, is to start with the tools. It is easy to pick up a Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot subscription and then specialist AI tools for your industry. The best thing you can do is resist this temptation to buy yet another subscription.

Before you spend a penny or an hour on any AI tool, do three things:

First, identify the areas in your practice that are costing you time and effort: the admin, the manual data entry, the processing work that adds no value but cannot currently be avoided.

Second, map those workflows. Understand what actually happens, step by step, before you start imagining what AI might do to improve it.

Third, build a business case. What would it be worth to your practice if this task took half the time? What would you do with those hours? For example, one of the business cases I talked about with a client was their invoicing process. They were spending typically 5 hours a week on their invoicing process. This was adding no value to the client. We identified that if AI could speed this up there was easily 100 hours a year of low value effort that could be eliminated. When this was applied to the individual’s hourly rate this was a substantial saving. Only once you have done that work on the business case does it make sense to go looking for tools. At that point, you are then solving a defined problem rather than searching for a problem to justify a tool you have already bought.

Look at your existing software

A significant amount of what is currently being marketed as AI is, on closer inspection, functionality that has existed in software for years. Just repackaged with a new ‘AI’ label and often a higher price point.

Before you pay for anything new, look at what you already have. Your practice management software, your e-signing document tool, your email marketing software, your microsoft office or google workspace suite: the chances are that some of what you are being sold already exists in the tools sitting on your desktop. It is worth spending an hour with each of them before opening your wallet.

For example I was talking with a client about whether they needed to invest in an email marketing tool. Then when we looked at the functionality of their practice management tool it appeared it would also do the bulk email marketing functionality as well. Even better, as it was fully integrated within the practice management system, there was no need to move data in and out of the practice management system.

Consider data security

When you or your team use a free or consumer-grade AI tool and paste in client information, such as the free version of ChatGPT, that data may be used to train the model. You don’t need me to tell you that this is a high level of risk for any professional services firms. Typically as soon as you use the paid version of a tool you can normally stop the tool from using your clients’ data or any sensitive data to train itself on.

Very often the issue with data security is ‘shadow AI’. This is where your team members or employees are using their own version of an AI tool. This adds in a massive data security risk. One of my clients did a straw poll in an ‘all hands’ meetings and discovered that nearly all of their junior staff were using the free version of ChatGPT. And as a firm they had no oversight of where they had potential data breaches. This means just as your firm now has a social media policy it needs to have an AI policy. This AI policy should set out what can or cannot be put into an AI tool.

Consider the ethics/longevity of the tool you are planning on adopting

I am horrified that a tool such as Grok exists. An AI tool that has misogyny, homophobia and racism built in as a standard. Would you want to find yourself featured in a Grok created piece of deep porn? And more importantly, even though Grok as apparently a great image creator, would you want to support this kind of software via paying for a subscription?

Then there are the challenges inherent within ChatGPT. Whilst is maybe the most recognisable AI tool to the person on the street it is losing money hand over fist. Which is why I think that OpenAI had no choice but to introduce advertising to ChatGPT. In its current format with the current business model ChatGPT isn’t sustainable. If you start to invest heavily in ChatGPT you could be building your AI house on sand.

Having been a heavy user of AI tools for the last 3 years I am aware that the technology is evolving and improving rapidly. The ‘front runners’, Google’s gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are all getting better with each new model release. I have also seen that they all have different strengths. For example, Google’s gemini’s nano banana (image generator) and Vee (video generator) are brilliant. But when it comes to tone of voice work it’s Claude every single time for me.

Given the pace of change of these AI tools and the ethics, that are a moving feast, I would not recommend buying an annual membership. Instead carry on paying month by month.

In summary

AI will change how professional services firms operate. That much is clear. AI used well will drastically reduce the amount of ‘processing’ type of work. But the change will be gradual.

What AI can’t do is replicate the human to human contact. Or our ability to make value judgements based on nuances. That’s where our value as professional advisors (whether coach, consultant, accountant, lawyer etc) will lie going forward. But the question is whether your business model is skewed to delivering that as the value? Or whether an AI tool could do this instead? If an AI tool could “be” your business for a client that’s when you need to look at your business model.

So the next time a conference speaker or a LinkedIn post makes you feel as though you are falling behind, remember Avinash Kaushik’s quote.

Everyone wants to do it. Nobody quite knows how. And when it finally gets done well, it tends to be by the people who took the time to do it properly.

The day I found out that my team were b*tching about me on a private Whatsapp group

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 05:31:03 GMT

I expected it to be hard to win business as a new business owner.

I didn’t expect this specific thing to be hard.

Funnily enough the winning business bit came fairly easily to me. But the identity shift from solo firm owner to owner with a team wasn’t easy.

You see, initially I did what most of my peers were doing. I hired people from my network; my peers. Sometimes as an employee, sometimes as an associate. It didn’t feel like I was their boss. We were just working together as grown up adults.

Then I hired my first “serious hire”. You know the one. The one whose salary eats up all your available cashflow and feels like a gamble. He was ten years older than me. I felt that I had hired him to grow this business together. To be more like a peer again.

But he liked calling me “the boss”. Every time he said it I cringed inside. I didn’t feel like “the boss”. I was also desperately trying not to become the bad bosses of my past. Sometimes it he said it when he didn’t want to take a decision:

“You’re the boss…”

But I now realise with hindsight, that his use of the word “boss” was a way of saying he needed stuff and a certain type of energy from me. Stuff that I wasn’t giving him as I was still used to this informal way of working with my team. Such as:

Regular performance reviews
Conversations about his targets and objectives and how he was going to achieve them
Consequences if stuff didn’t happen

What makes this stuff difficult

The first 10 years of my working life didn’t teach me how to manage people. Whilst I may have written many, many courses on people management and leadership skills, this is a poor substitute for actually managing and leading people.

When you only have a few people reporting into you, and particularly if they are associates or freelancers this people management stuff seems like overkill. After all, they can always call you and speak to you about the work. When you work so closely with a small group of people, you just know that they know what is expected of them. Well that’s what you tell yourself, and it often isn’t the case!

What I didn’t realise when I set up my business was I needed to transition my identity from technician to people manager. I now look back and wonder how things would have been different if I had brought that rigorous people management discipline into my interactions with my earliest employees?

How this approach to people management cost me

For a long time I ran my team as though we were all mates working on a shared project. I thought that my team would naturally work hard, flag problems early and be honest with me. How naive was I!

The first thing I realised was that as the Boss I got a filtered version of reality. People would be as nice as pie to my face and say “everything is fine'“. Then I would hear from another team member that this person was struggling and really stressed. A big learning for me is that people don’t always tell you what is going on for them. They tell you what feels safe or what you want to hear. To be fair to some of my team they could see how busy I always was, and I suspect they didn’t want to add another problem onto my already busy to do list.

There was one time when I realised that two of my employees had a private Whatsapp channel. You guessed it, they were not being complimentary about me at all. And these were people who were very pleasant to my face. I’d not have known there was anything wrong. One of the Whatsapp channel members was the same person who offloaded their stress onto other team members, but never said a word to me about how hard they were finding things.

When I found out about this Whatsapp group, I was angry and hurt. It felt like a betrayal and a rejection. But I had probably created the conditions for this back channel to thrive. After all, if my team thought they couldn’t be honest with me, then this was their outlet for their frustration. Or perhaps I am just being charitable?

A number of times a trusted member of my team has told me that my team are not my mates; I need to be their boss. That I need to step up and have the difficult conversations. After all, having a ‘light’, ‘we’re all in this together approach’ to my people management meant that my team didn’t have the structure and framework they needed to perform at their best. Whilst I thought they didn’t need it, they did need the proper performance conversations, the quarterly review of their objectives and the regular 1:2:1s with me. But that’s the problem, when we are new to running our own team in our own business we often assume wrongly that goodwill and paying someone’s wages is enough to guarantee a hard working employee.

I will always wonder how many of my former team members would have stayed for longer, performed better and caused me less problems if I had stepped up into that ‘boss’ mode sooner?

I had to reframe ‘being the boss’

It was clear that if my business was ever going to get the stability to scale I needed to keep my employees for longer. That meant addressing my personal hangup about being called the boss. I did need to step into being the boss; warts and all.

The first thing I had to do was forget about the sheer drudgery and pointlessness of the performance reviews (formal or informal) that I had ever had in corporate life. I needed to find a way to do this ‘boss’ thing as me. For me, a good way of thinking about it was that:

Being the boss is a role I need to play, rather than a personality type.
My team need the structure that comes when I am clear about what I expect
People want to know where they stand
Uncertainty is often unhelpful to people who like being employed. (Let’s be honest, someone who has opted to become self-employed probably thrives more on uncertainty and autonomy than someone who has a corporate job)

Then I needed to work out what were the right people management processes for our business. That I felt comfortable administering but gave my employees the structure and clarity they wanted. So, we don’t have a standard performance review form. But I do have:

A general flow for my quarterly reviews with each employee. For example setting objectives with them, asking them how they are finding things and how I can help them perform in their role.
Quarterly “all hands” meetings to go through our Growth Plan and financial performance.
Monthly leadership team meetings to monitor our business’s performance against the Growth Plan
At least one 1:2:1 every week with each of my direct reports

In summary

If you are going to get your business to go from growing to scaling whether you like it or not, you will need to become “The Boss”. This means you have to stop being the best technician in the room and become the person who creates an environment that others can thrive.

This becoming “The Boss”, particularly if you are not used to this role from corporate life is an identity change. It doesn’t happen overnight. After all, no one is born into it, you need to grow into it.

You're showing up. So why aren't the leads coming?

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:30:56 GMT

Does it ever feel like you’re shouting into the void? You’re putting content out, you’re showing up, and yet the reputation or the recognition isn’t coming. And let’s not talk about the lack of leads. Then you look at social media and there always seems to be someone crushing it with their content. So what are they doing that you’re not?

I worked with an accounting firm owner who was desperate to get social media right. His early LinkedIn posts were relentlessly salesy: it was all about him and what services you needed to buy from him. Being flippant the hero of every post was his call to action. When I explained why this was killing his brand, he listened. He changed his approach to his whole marketing, narrowed his focus, and then started sharing consistently what would be helpful to his ideal clients rather than what he sold. He realised that people buy people and it couldn’t just be relentless “buy from me posts”. You guessed it. 3 months after changing tack with his marketing his pipeline exploded with the right type of new business.

Two things have inspired this article, him, and how fed up I am of my feed being full of AI slop.

Mistake 1: Abdicating your voice to AI

What I’m seeing increasingly all over social media, even in Substack is AI slop. Where people are abdicating the voice to whatever AI spits out. For example, I follow someone in the accountancy profession who has been built a strong personal brand nationally. I read a recent Substack article she had supposedly written, and it didn’t sound like her. As always with AI slop or “mostly written by AI”, I got bored halfway down and clicked out of the article. Call me demanding but I wanted the real them. What they thought, their experiences and their conclusions. Funnily enough if I noticed, I am pretty sure her clients and prospects will have done too.

Let’s be honest, your prospects and clients can already get the basics from their own AI tool. What they cannot get from a tool is your judgment, your experience, and your personality. If you significantly hand your content over to AI, you eliminate the exact thing that was supposed to make you stand out. I.e. it hurts your personal brand.

In the spirit of transparency: I used AI to help produce this article. Used well AI is a great tool. For example, I used Claude as a sounding board to draw out the key points, then as an outlining tool. Then I dictated the article on WispFlow. And finally then fed it back into Claude to edit and tighten. Before then doing a gentle rewrite to make it really sound like me AND eliminate any bits of AI hanging around like a bad smell. For example, Claude left me with this classic AI phase construction:

“That’s using AI as infrastructure, not as a ghostwriter.”

If I wasn’t using this phrase to illustrate a point I would have deleted it! The point I am making is AI should be your servant or enthusiastic intern. Not the master or speak for you.

Mistake 2: Changing your brand too often

There are people in the market, often coaches, who I’ve seen rebrand every 18 months to three years. There was one person who was networking for the banking industry, then they were business development for accountants, and then it was about running a mastermind for vendors to the accounting profession. That was in the space of 6 years. Every time you change your brand you have to rebuild your reputation and goodwill. This change in focus often confuses your audience and means you need to overhaul your network.

The example I have just talked about? When he was flip flopping his brand nothing quite stuck. So he flipped his brand positioning again. And so the cycle repeated. This is not an isolated example. I’ve seen many people change their brand far too quickly. What is important is that you give your brand time to land. Building a reputation takes years to reach full traction, not six months. My advice? Pick an audience and stay focused on their needs. Then think about sticking with this brand for years rather than 6 - 24 months.

Mistake 3: Disappearing for weeks or months at a time

When people get busy, they come off social media and stop their marketing. After all, it feels almost churlish to keep drumming up new business when you already have too much work. But being inconsistent with when you turn up means your audience forgets about you and the algorithm penalises you.

I am working with a client right now. They have generally managed to add on a few clients every quarter without doing much more than a good job with current clients and staying in touch with their 2 prized introducers. They have ignored social media or content marketing. After all they were busy with their team of 2 servicing their current clients. But as sometimes happens, a few clients have exited and they have a hole in their pipeline. As a result I have needed to focus them on starting to turn up consistently online and with their network to rebuild their pipeline. Basically a sustainable cadence of posting or being present at events beats every time heroic and sporadic bursts of activity. One post a week you can actually maintain is worth more than five posts a week you cannot.

Mistake 4: Being all things to all people

When you are new to running your own firm, the temptation is to keep your market as wide as possible. After all, you cannot afford to turn anyone down. But content that tries to speak to everyone lands with no one. I see bland messages like this all the time:

“Do you want more profit? Do you want to grow? Do you want clarity? Do you want financial freedom”

These are messages that you see all over websites and social media. There is nothing in them that makes the right prospect think: this person is talking to me.

I recently ran a webinar to upsell a high ticket training course. Out of the 4 people I spoke to who were interested in joining the course they all repeated back to me the messages that had hit home from the webinar. I had deliberately built the webinar for a very specific client persona. I wouldn’t have got that traction (10 - 15% conversion rate for the people that turned up) if I had decided to upsell a generic ‘manage your people’ course.

When I was early into running my own business I made this mistake myself. I very proudly thought I was being targeted in my ideal client by deciding not to work with charities and not-for-profits. That still left individuals, corporates, and small businesses. Of course, the benefit of hindsight has shown me that my targeting was FAR too wide. And this was why the leads were not coming in. A sales expert told me bluntly to stop chasing everyone and go back to what I actually knew: owners of professional services firms, and individuals within those firms looking to make partner. Within eight to twelve weeks of tightening that focus, leads started to arrive consistently. You’ll be amazed how quickly leads can turn up when you are tightly focused on who you really want as a client.

Mistake 5: Hiding behind the firm brand

When I started out, my first brand name was The Efficiency Coach. I went on Twitter as The Efficiency Coach. After a while I realised: people buy people, not logos. They wanted to know Heather. By the time I decided to lead with my own name, another Heather Townsend had already taken the handle, and I was @HeatherTowns forevermore. (True story!)

When you decide to turn up and engage as your firm name it feels safer, more professional. And isn’t that what we have been taught since we were new into our profession? The need to be professional? But this creates distance at exactly the moment in your marketing where you need someone to start trusting you. Have your firm as a separate profile by all means, but you need to be in the marketplace personally. That is who people are actually buying.

Mistake 6: Talking about what you do rather than what you know

The accounting firm owner I mentioned at the start was making this mistake. His early posts were essentially a service list: management accounts, tax returns, here is what we do, give us a call. When he switched to focusing on property investors and developers, and started sharing his knowledge about the intersection of tax advice, business growth, and accounting for that specific audience, the effectiveness of his marketing changed drastically. For example as a result of the regular videos he did, he was asked to become a property expert on Sky TV.

Buyers in a crowded market are not searching for a service list. They are looking for someone who understands their problem. The question to ask about every piece of your content is: does this show what I know, or only what I sell?

Mistake 7: Confusing activity with positioning

Posting consistently is not the same as being known for something. Content that jumps between topics because something felt topical this week does not position you in anyone’s mind. Before posting, think about your content pillars: the two or three themes you want to be associated with. Some can be professional, some personal.

For example there is a great accounting firm in my network run by two sisters. They focus on early stage business owners and often coaches, trainers and consultants. They specialise in 1 minute videos. These are often hilarious, but they get over a serious message. For example, can you claim having your hair done as a business expense? They are not trying to attract the more savvy business owner with a large team of people.

Every piece of content should earn its keep. That means reinforcing what you want to be known for, not dilute it.

Mistake 8: Being too professional rather than human first

Professional services culture trains people to scrub personality out of their communication. In some instances I can understand why: if you are a litigator, you do not want to hand the other side anything they can use against you. But for most firm owners, the instinct to sound polished at all times is working against them.

People follow people they find interesting, not just useful. The accounting firm owner who inspired this article was excellent at mixing the personal with the professional. For example as well as writing about stuff that property developers need to know about, he wrote about celebrating Ramadan, birthday meals and taking the team for coffee. His audience got to know him as a person, and that is what unlocked the leads.

In summary

There are a number of key messages in this article. But I would sum them up as:

Stay focused on who you serve and how you help them. Avoid chopping and changing this too often.
Focus your content on your content pillars which go across your personal and professional life. Remember you need to turn up as human first, professional second.
Be consistent with when and how you post.
Don’t abdicate your voice to AI

How to finally have the conversation you've been too scared to have

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:30:48 GMT

There’s a conversation you’ve been putting off. You know the one. It’s been sitting on your to-do list for three weeks, maybe longer, and every time it floats to the top you find a reason to push it down again. You tell yourself you’re too busy. Or maybe it’s not the right moment. Maybe it’ll resolve itself.

It won’t. It never does.

Here’s the thing: the conversation you’re avoiding is almost certainly costing you more than having it would. The team member whose performance you haven’t addressed is still underperforming, and your other staff are watching how you handle it. The client who queried your fee is still querying it, and now there’s a risk they wouldn’t pay the fee and disengage. The supplier dispute you’ve been hoping will go away has just landed in your inbox with the word “legal” in the subject line.

We avoid these conversations because we’re afraid of what happens when we’re in them. After all, what happens if we lose our composure, say the wrong thing or make it worse. And that fear is completely understandable and very normal. This fear, whilst its your brains way of keeping you safe, is holding you back from doing what you need to do. i.e. have that conversation.

What follows are four things that will help you approach that difficult conversation with more confidence and get the outcome you need.

1. Write a talksheet before you go in

I’ve had to lead some difficult formal meetings over the years, including disciplinaries where the outcome could have ended in an employment tribunal. Before one particularly high-stakes meeting, i.e. it was for gross misconduct with a former employee who had undiagnosed ADHD and mental health issues, my executive assistant was clear with me: go off script and we are in serious trouble. So I didn’t go off script. I wrote what I now call a talksheet.

A talksheet is not a script. You’re not memorising lines, after all you don’t want to sound robotic. It’s a single page that covers the key points you need to make, a rough flow for how the conversation should go, some notes on how you’ll respond if they push back hard. It is likely to include some personal reminders, written in your own words, to help you stay in control of your emotions. e.g. to breathe slowly and listen rather than react.

Being prepared to listen intently in a hard conversation is difficult. After all, your instinct is to fill every silence and counter every point. Particularly if we think we are in the right and they are lying. The talksheet is a physical reminder that your job in that room is not to win an argument. It’s to get to a specific outcome. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Decide what a good outcome looks like before the meeting starts

Most difficult conversations go badly because the person leading them hasn’t been clear, even with themselves, about what they’re actually trying to achieve. They walk in wanting to be heard, or wanting the other person to admit they were wrong, or wanting the whole thing to be over. And you guessed it: none of those are outcomes you can control.

Before you go into any conversation that has the potential to go sideways, ask yourself one question: what does a genuinely good outcome look like here? Then what can I control?

If it’s a fee conversation with a client, a good outcome might be the client understanding the new rate and agreeing to continue, not the client apologising for ever querying it. If it’s a performance conversation with a team member, a good outcome might be them leaving the room with a clear picture of what needs to change and a belief that they can change it, not a confession that they’ve not been pulling their weight. If it’s a supplier dispute, a good outcome might simply be getting to an actual conversation about the invoice rather than the supplier stopping talking to you.

When you know what you’re aiming for, it’s easier to have the right conversation and remain in control of your emotions and behaviour. For example, you stop needing the last word. After all, if you’ve got the outcome, what does the last word add?

3. Listen properly, and watch your face

I know what you’re thinking: of course I listen. You wouldn’t have got this far in your professional life if you were not a good listener. But there’s a difference between listening and waiting for a gap to make your point. Most of us, when we’re in a tense conversation, are doing the latter. We’re tracking the other person’s words just enough to know when they’ve paused, and then we’re in.

Genuine listening means you’re trying to understand what’s actually driving their reaction, not building your counter-argument while they’re still mid-sentence. And here’s the practical reason to do it: it’s very hard for someone to stay escalated when the person opposite them is calm and paying close attention. Not impossible, but harder. After all, you’re not feeding their anger or giving them nowhere to go with the anger.

Your face is also doing more than you think. For example a raised eyebrow at the wrong moment, a flicker of frustration, a half-suppressed smirk. These often leak out and send a message to the other person. I’m not saying you need to practice your poker face. But a steady, neutral expression tells the other person you’re not rattled and in control of your emotions and words.

4. Know when to pause, and give them a way out

There will be moments when the conversation needs to stop. Not because you’re avoiding it, but because continuing in that moment will make things worse. Often you can feel it: the tone is escalating, someone is about to say something they can’t take back, the temperature in the room is climbing and nothing useful is being achieved.

Pausing is a decision, not a signal that the conversation is over. You can say:

“Let’s take a step back and pick this up tomorrow morning when we’ve both had time to think.”

Or:

“I want to make sure I’ve got the full picture before we go further. Can we come back to this on Thursday?”

A short pause gives both of you time to reset, and it signals that you’re in control of the conversation rather than at the mercy of it.

One more thing on this, and it’s something I learnt the hard way early in my career. If you realise mid-conversation that you’ve backed the other person into a corner where their only exit is a full admission that they were wrong, you need to give them a way out. Take some of the responsibility, even if it’s a stretch. A conversation that ends with the other person’s dignity intact is far more likely to produce a real resolution than one where you were completely right and they knew it. A wounded bear with no way out of the corner will come out fighting. That’s not what either of you needs.

In summary

The conversation you’ve been avoiding isn’t going away. The longer it sits there, the more expensive it gets: in time, in team morale, with your headspace. Whereas, what you need to do is just have the conversation. With the right preparation you may find that it was easier than you thought it would be. However the conversation goes, you will be relieved that you’ve had it.

Start Up To Grown Up

Your revenue has dried up. Here's how to fill your pipeline fast

Don’t panic

Look at the seasonality of your business

Work out your cash survival time

Reignite your pipeline of new business

Start with your warm relationships

If ‘having a chat’ feels a bit icky

Go back to your pipeline that has gone cold

Network your socks off: 60 in 60 days

Give your team targets for new business

Don’t discount

Use the quiet time productively

In summary

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Outsource or hire

Start with a ‘do-er’

Add in a manager

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Put your happiness and health on your business dashboard

In summary

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References:

10 tactics to reduce your stress levels that you wouldn’t find in a text book

My story

What really is stress?

What has worked for me to reduce my stress levels

Do the normal stuff

Take your holidays

Give someone else your diary management

Have 1 day per week that is a no meetings day

Measure your stress levels

One day a week completely ‘off-off’.

Find a serious hobby

Get expert advice

Step up and own your situation

Look for certainty

In summary

Related reading:

AI and LinkedIn broke my marketing (this is what I did next)

It all got pretty bleak

Invested in paid facebook ads

A paid website SEO audit

Tightening up our email marketing

Getting granular with our pipeline of new business

You have to make your attention match your intention

Keeping my team accountable

Training my team

In summary

Related reading

How to make a clear decision even when your brain's in panic mode

No decision is a decision

Look for certainties

Research the possibilities

Consider the agenda of the stakeholders involved

Take advice

Look for danger signals

Work out your next few actions