The Business Strategist With Adam Strong

Two founders. Same skill, same twenty years, the same ideas. One charges three times more, is booked out a year in advance and has a waiting list as long as my arm. The other is the best kept secret in the industry. Their work is barely different, so why does one get all the attention and the other gets ignored? I've always believed the people with the best ideas rise to the top. Turns out that's...

What if the one thing killing your business isn't the market, the economy or a competitor, but you? This week I finally got my mate John Castro on the show, a year in the making. Back in 2020 John walked into a dying events business, then convinced the founders to let him try something mad. He took it to nearly 18 million in sales, then went away for two years and watched it keep growing. We got i...

Most founders I speak to are sitting on a business they believe will fund their freedom. Then a buyer turns up, makes an offer, and the number lands nowhere near what they hoped for.  In this solo episode, I walk you through the exact five-step process I use to take a business from founder dependent to actually worth selling. Not in five years. This week. I share the difference between a service t...

Why does your strategy look perfect on paper but fall apart the moment you step out the room? In this episode I sat down with Kyle Harkema, researcher, executive leader, professor and author of Strategic Clarity, to unpack why so many founders feel like the only one who actually cares about the plan.  Kyle has spent two decades inside real businesses figuring out why growth stalls, and his answer...

What if the thing quietly draining thousands from your business every year isn't your salary bill, your software stack, or even your team... but the hundreds of tiny decisions you make before lunch? In this episode I sit down with Barry Cryan, founder of Do More Better, who's coached over 6,000 entrepreneurs on how to work less and grow more. Barry's journey into this work didn't start in a boardr...

What if everything you've built over the last 15 years was only worth a fraction of what you thought? And what if the reason had nothing to do with how hard you worked? In this episode I sat down with Matthew Pohl, founder of the ReWild Group, author of 16 books and the guy who took 30 years of research across 1,500 businesses and turned it into something every founder needs to hear. We got into t...

Ever wonder why you're grafting harder than ever and the needle just won't shift? Dr Rebecca Homkes is back on the show after one of our most popular episodes of 2025. She lectures at London Business School, advises Fortune 500 companies, and wrote the bestseller Survive, Reset, Thrive.  We got into why most founders are stuck in the wrong mode without realising it, what the data is actually sayin...

Ever wondered why most board seats seem to go to the same handful of grey-suited blokes, while the rest of us are told to go off and buy a certificate? I sat back down with Callum Laing for a conversation that quietly flipped a few of my own assumptions. We got into how boards actually work behind the closed door, why most of what you've been told about landing one is nonsense, and the simple move...

Most founders are convinced they're ready to scale. Most of them aren't. So how do you actually know the difference? The leads are coming in. The team's growing. Revenue's up. Then six months later you're more exhausted, more overwhelmed and somehow further from where you wanted to be. Sound familiar?  In this solo episode I'm walking through the five indicators I actually look for before I tell a...

12 exits. $925 million. And Gregory Shepard told me the one thing that nearly destroyed every single one of them was something no founder ever sees coming. Gregory Shepard is a serial entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and author of The Startup Lifecycle who has spent five years researching why over 90% of startups fail using 210,000 case studies.  He walked me through the whiteboard technique he used to...

What if the reason your team won't step up is because you keep stepping in? I sat down with Elizabeth Lotardo, bestselling author of Leading Yourself, Harvard Medical School Institute of Coaching Fellow and the brain behind a LinkedIn course that's been taken by over two million people worldwide. We got into something I think every founder secretly wrestles with but rarely says out loud. The trap...

What if the habits that built my business are the exact ones holding it back? I sat down with John Spence, one of the world's leading voices on leadership and the former CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation, to find out why so many founders hit an invisible ceiling they can't punch through. We got into the four silent killers behind every stuck business, the uncomfortable truth about why most founder...

8 years ago I packed up my life in the UK and moved to Sweden to start a family. I thought my business would run without me. It didn't. Everything fell apart and it forced me to confront something most founders never want to admit.  In this episode I'm getting brutally honest about what actually happened, the mindset shifts that changed everything and the three things I'd do differently if I was s...

70% of her revenue was tied to one person. The buyer walked away. I sat across the table from a founder a few months ago. Seven-figure business, great team, 25 years of graft. Within 20 minutes of looking under the hood, I had to tell her the business was essentially worthless to a buyer. Not because the numbers were bad — because she was the business. When the buyer dug into due diligence, they d...

Blockbuster asked how do we make more money. Netflix asked how do we give people better entertainment. One question built an empire. The other killed one. So which question is your business asking right now? In this episode I sit down with Lisa Earle McLeod, the woman who literally wrote the book on purpose driven business. She's worked with Google, Hilton and some of the smartest founders on the...

What if the real reason your business is stalling has nothing to do with your strategy? I sat down with Michael King, executive coach, keynote speaker and recording artist with over 100 published songs. The leaders he works with, the ones hitting burnout, losing sales and watching their teams fall apart, they all share the same root problem. And it's not what you think.  Michael has spent close to...

Less Than 18% of Businesses Ever Sell. Will Yours Be One of Them? I sat down with Bill Snow, a 30 year veteran of mergers and acquisitions, author of Mergers and Acquisitions for Dummies, and someone who has been in the trenches of hundreds of deals across multiple industries.  What he told me completely changed how I think about buying and selling businesses.  If you are planning an exit or looki...

What if two broke brothers with just £18 between them could build a multi-million pound agency in under three years, almost entirely through LinkedIn? I sat down with Niall Ratcliffe, 24, who along with his brother Morgan did exactly that, starting from a spare room in Burnley with no investors, no fancy degree and no safety net.  In this episode Niall pulls back the curtain on the exact LinkedIn...

Have you ever noticed how your leadership style flips under pressure—sometimes you micromanage, sometimes you retreat, sometimes you charge ahead like you're putting out fires?  That reaction isn’t random. It’s driven by an invisible operating system that's been with you since birth. In this eye-opening episode, I sit down with Rory Kilmartin—relationship researcher and founder of the Archetypal R...

The LinkedIn Top Voice badge is the most addictive distraction on the platform. The real question is how much time, energy and opportunity have you already lost chasing it? I held the LinkedIn Top Voice badge for over two years and recently lost it. My first reaction? It felt like my credibility had been stripped away overnight.  But then something unexpected happened. My business grew. Better cli...

What if the reason you are not growing has nothing to do with your product and everything to do with the fact you sound like every other business in your space? In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Les Evans, who I have called the marketing disruptor for years. He has spent two decades transforming misfits, mavericks and outsiders into businesses that cannot be duplicated.  We unpack wh...

Why are we buried in Slack messages and back-to-back Zooms but feeling lonelier than ever? Dr. Michelle K. Johnston just co-wrote a book with Marshall Goldsmith that exposes the hidden crisis destroying teams—and it starts with you. Dr. Michelle K. Johnston's back with a warning: we're going down a dark path. She just co-wrote The Seismic Shift in You with legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsm...

What if the thing making you feel most needed in your business is actually the thing stopping it from growing? I sit down with Bill Flynn, someone who's survived IPOs, acquisitions and proper business chaos, to unpack the hero trap. If you're the one who fixes everything, closes every deal and makes every decision, this one's for you.  It feels productive. It feels like leadership. But it quietly...

Most founders are wasting a fortune on tools promising to shift the needle but instead it is quietly killing their growth. This episode exposes why personality testing, competency models, and culture fit interviews often fail and what to replace them with if you want a team that actually delivers. In this episode, I sit down with Barry Wolfe, an HR veteran with 30 years in the trenches helping fou...

Let’s be real for a second: Law school, the accounting bodies, the professional exams they never actually taught you how to run a business. They taught you how to be a technician. Now, you’re stuck in the trading time for money trap, thinking that being hardworking and professional gives you an edge over the competition. It doesn't. That’s just the baseline.  In 2026, relying on those standards is...