Hey :) You don’t have a nine-to-five. Which means you don’t actually have to live like someone who does. Sometimes I think people like me — owners — accidentally drift into behaving like employees. We structure our day the same way everyone else does. We start around nine. We finish around five. We sit at the desk all day. We rush arou...

Hey :) As a coach, I think one of the most important qualities I need is the ability to meet someone where they’re at. Every client is different. Different strengths. Different blind spots. Different pace. Some move quickly for six months and then stall. Some move slowly and steadily. Some surprise you. Some frustrate you. My job is to...

Hey :) I used a simple challenge with a client the other day. He said something I’ve heard a lot: “I just can’t say no.” And to be fair to him, the reason was completely human. He genuinely wants to help people. When someone’s struggling, he feels that pull. I get it. Most decent people do. But the problem isn’t whether helping people ...

Hey :) Here's what we shipped in February: Book: The 4 Pillars of Breakthrough Marine Sales Communication Book: The 4 Pillars of Breakthrough Home Improvement Sales Communication Blog: Best Sales Training Companies for Home Services Workbook: Own The Open - The questions to ask in the first 20-minutes of a sales appointment Workbook: B...

Hey :) Last year we started working in six-week sprints. I mapped them across the year so they line up with school terms. Most terms are about 12–13 weeks with a break in the middle, so it made sense to split them in half. A sprint for us is fairly intense. The first week is a bit scrappy as we get into the work. Then we find our rhyth...

Hey :) Up to now, I’ve been thinking out loud about leverage, the quality of work, and the discipline it takes to protect time for the things that really matter. There’s one more layer to this that feels unavoidable. You are one person. You have one brain. And your work life and personal life aren’t actually separate. They bleed into e...

Hey :) When you develop your own strategy — and your goals come from that strategy — you can ignore what everyone else is doing. It genuinely stops mattering. Other people’s output, their announcements, their pace, their noise — it has no bearing on your work. You know what you’re doing. You know why you’re doing it. And because of tha...

Hey :) In the last post, I was thinking out loud about the quality and value of the work you choose to do — how moving closer to strategy and decisions tends to increase leverage over time. There’s a third piece to this that feels very practical, and very unglamorous. Even when you know what your highest-value work is, it takes a surpr...

Hey :) In the last post in this series, I was thinking out loud about leverage over time — how, as your career progresses, doing good work becomes less about hours and more about what you choose to spend those hours on. There’s another part of this that feels just as important. It’s not only about control over your time. It’s also abou...

Hey :) There’s something that worries me about how quickly we default to other people’s ideas. A client has a problem. We immediately go and buy the books. Download the podcast episodes. Search for frameworks. And just to be clear — I love books. I’m in the middle of a couple right now because I’ve got some fairly serious challenges ah...

Hey :) Here are five quotes that have inspired me recently: “To yell at your creativity, saying ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away…” - Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic "You'll use everything you ever knew." - Steve Martin (quoting...

Hey :) I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to do good work over a long period of time. Not intense bursts. Not heroic sprints. But turning up year after year and still liking the work you do. This short series is probably most relevant for people who have a high degree of leverage over their time. Owners. Knowl...

Hey :) You’re going to die with things on your to-do list. It sounds morbid, but it’s true. You’ll die with plans to grab a coffee with a friend next week. You’ll die with projects unfinished, ideas half-formed, and tasks you never got round to. Everyone finishes their days and weeks with things left undone. That’s life. So you’ve got ...

Hey :) How often have you said to someone, “I’ll get that to you by the end of the day,” or “I’ll have it to you by the end of the week”? You say it without thinking. It sounds right — like what people want to hear. But as soon as those words leave your mouth, you know what’s coming. You’ve just created a problem for yourself. You’re g...

Hey :) A partner said to me recently: “None of this would have been done if it wasn’t for you, Marr.” It was a great compliment. But what it really confirmed for me was this: someone has to be the one who ships things. Someone needs to take ideas, run with them, and actually get them over the line. And the truth is, it’s not any easier...

Hey :) This idea of the competency trap comes up all the time in my work with business owners. I originally picked it up from Jay Papasan. At its simplest, the competency trap looks like this: Because you can, you do. Not because you should. Not because it’s the highest-value use of your time. Just because you know how. If you know how...

Hey :) I was working with a client recently and we spent an entire day just thinking. And I really do mean that. Our laptops were open for maybe fifteen minutes in total. The rest of the day was a whiteboard, pens, a bit of pacing around the room. Eight hours. Break for lunch. That was it. At the end of the day, the client said somethi...

Hey :) A couple of years ago, I was pretty frustrated with how I was taking notes. I used index cards. Post-it notes. Yellow legal pads were actually my favourite. Yellow legal pads and a thick Sharpie Pro. That was my setup. That’s how I took notes on calls, ideas, client stuff — everything. The problem wasn’t taking the notes. The pr...

Hey :) I keep coming back to this mental model, especially in client work. Most people arrive locked into a very specific way of seeing the problem. It’s usually binary. All or nothing. Right or wrong. Zero or one. “If I can’t do it properly, I won’t do it at all.” “If it’s not perfect, it’s pointless.” “I need to go from where I am no...

Hey :) I had to laugh at myself earlier. I remembered this thing from when I worked in an agency. As a team, we had to fill out one of those “getting to know you” questionnaires. One of the questions was something like: what’s something that really bugs you? Or what’s important to you that, when it’s not done, annoys you? I can’t remem...

Hey :) This is a letter I sent to my business partners after a planning session we ran together. I could have shared this in a meeting, but this is how I tend to think things through — in writing. I find it gives people space to read, reflect, come back to it, and form their own view before we talk it through together. It also gives me...

Hey :) I’ve realised over the years that I rely on a small handful of mental models again and again in my work. Not because I read them somewhere and decided to adopt them, but because I kept bumping into the same problems with clients and needed a way to think clearly when things felt stuck. One of those models is inversion. I come ba...

Hey :) I’ve learned a lot about the conditions I need to do my best work. I like having a lot of space in my day. Space to think. Space to sit with ideas. Space to let something take the time it actually needs to reach a high standard. I don’t want someone breathing down my neck. I don’t want artificial urgency. And I don’t want a stac...

Hey :) Here are five quotes that have inspired me recently: "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then w...

Hey :) I’ve been a fan of 37signals for a long, long time. I think it started when my dad gave me a copy of Rework when it first came out. Not long after that — around 2011-ish — I set up my very first monthly membership business. And I built it on their tools. Back then, that meant Basecamp… and Campfire. (For anyone who remembers Cam...

Hey :) One capability I’ve built over the years—maybe you could call it a skill—is the ability to get things finished. Not just started. Finished. A lot of people describe themselves as “starters.” They have ideas. They get excited. They begin things. And they often assume that not finishing is just part of their personality. I’m not c...

Hey :) I’ve been thinking a lot about ownership lately. Not ownership in the legal sense, but what it actually feels like to be an owner—especially when you’re building something with other owners rather than on your own. One of the first lessons I’ve learned is that, as an owner, nobody really owns the ideas. You might come up with so...

Hey :) Here’s a lesson in strategy I keep coming back to. A few years ago, I made a pretty significant shift in my work. I moved from coaching businesses to coaching coaches. Before that, I was a They Ask You Answer coach — working with seven-, eight- and nine-figure companies to roll out the framework across their sales and marketing ...

Hey :) I’ve been thinking a lot about why copying other people’s tactics so often leads to frustration. You see someone doing something interesting. A new offer. A content format. A growth tactic. A way of structuring their week. And it’s tempting to think, maybe I should do that too. But the more I sit with it, the clearer this become...

Hey :) One thing I’ve always found interesting about goals is how often I catch myself judging other people’s. You know the moment. You’re scrolling Instagram, someone shares their goals for the year, and your immediate reaction is: “That’s just too much. Too many things to change.” For a long time, I thought my issue was the number of...