Built to Keep (or Sell)

The bigger your business gets, the less of it you'll ever see with your own eyes again. Instinct only works on what you can personally observe. Once you can't watch it all yourself, some of what matters gets filtered before it reaches you, tidied up before you see it, or quietly lost to rework and discounting on jobs you're not involved with. Some of that costs you before you see it...

Most owners can name every project they’ve started in the last two years. The systems upgrade went in. The new product launched. The bottleneck hire is in post. On paper, everything delivered. But is the business meaningfully different than it was two years ago. For may, in practice, the business looks much the same – similar performance, similar problems, similar Sunday-evening dread. This episod...

The owner is the best salesperson in the business. That's how it got to where it is. It's also why it can't get any bigger, why the pipeline runs like a sine wave, and why a buyer one day will offer you significantly less than you think the business is worth. Being the best salesperson works beautifully for a while. The owner understands the buyer's problem better than anyone i...

What Client Concentration Actually Is Most business owners know client concentration is a risk. Fewer can tell you what the threshold actually is — or why the percentage is the wrong thing to focus on. In this episode, Richard McMullan breaks down what client concentration means in practice: where the 15% guideline comes from, why the real threshold depends on your margins and business model, and...

From the outside, the business looks successful – multi-million sales, decent profits, loyal customers and team. On paper, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. And if you’d asked the owner five or ten years earlier what they were trying to build, this is probably very close to what they had in mind.  Most owners would expect, at that point, for things to start to feel easier, less stressfu...

At first glance, it looks like our UK manufacturing and engineering businesses are growing  strongly as the number of companies doing between £10m and £50m turnover has increased from 7,550 in 2019 to 9,535 in 2025. The growth seems impressive, doesn’t it? But don’t be fooled. Those revenue bands don’t allow for inflation, which was 28.3% over the period. If you’d been doing £8m a year in 2018 and...