1. Stop thinking of yourself as the boss. Think of yourself as the customer 

The culture of telling people what to do because you’re the boss is dangerous . First it removes accountability from people taking decisions and creates a safety net to fall back on. Ultimately it came from you so  you can’t really argue withe the ‘you told me so’ argument. If you’re the customer on the other hand, define what really matters to you and its their job to deliver it or step out

2.  Get out of the office

Today I spend a lot more time working out of cowering spaces, hotel lobbies , coffee shops and anywhere else i happen to be. Its the beauty and freedom that cloud computing bestows on us . I find that when im in buzzier more happening and serendipitous surroundings i think better, focus more and get more done while tiring less.

3. Block time in your calendar to think 

Funnily enough things like appointments and meetings get slotted in the calendar for most people but more important things like  thinking about real complex  problems don’t. We subconsciously think to ourselves we will turn to them when we have time, or because there is no physical event we just procrastinate and don’t see the need to slot them in. In the end they keep getting pushed back and never happen. Block time to think about the things that really matter

4. Press the reset button every morning 

I found that backlogs are very contaminating. They contaminate the past present and future. You never clear them out and in  the end you are constantly playing catch up with yourself. I changed this by wiping my backlog clean every day. I wake up with complete amnesia of what i didn’t manage to complete yesterday and i ask myself  ‘whats important today’ . Helps you reset priorities to what matters now not yesterday

5. Have no more than 3 priorities 

Priorities are often confused with to do lists. Your to do list may be endless but your priorities at any point in time should not be more than 3.  if you have trouble selecting exert the stress test: go through the list one by one and ask yourself: if i had to get rid of this item today would the world come to an end? You will find that for most the answer is no. They are not priorities they are nice to have’s continue reading »

A lot of entrepreneurs think they can ramp up on marketing to accelerate growth and just see how it goes. They make the mistaken assumption that they can always switch off and go back to the nice organically drive growth they were enjoying before. That’s a mistake. The below example illustrates it in simple math. (and I speak from experience here as we witnessed this at my company PeoplePerHour)

Let’s assume you have a business that’s generating nice continued linear organic growth (defined here as new customers you acquire from word of mouth and referral).

Then one day you start spending – either you raised money or from retained profits.  You do your math and you see that Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is way in excess of your Cost of Acquisition, so you are acquiring profitably. You get excited and start spending more each month.continue reading »

I gave a fireside talk earlier today for London Innovators at Google Campus in London to a group of vibrant entrepreneurs which was most enjoyable. A few of the questions I got asked are questions I  keep getting quite often, so I’d like to share the answers I gave  below

How important is it to differentiate yourself when you start off ?

This is obviously a question that preoccupies entrepreneurs quite a lot. Sometimes too much so. I found myself citing an analogy which I often do.

If you were say BMW in the1920s and pitching the idea of creating a car, most likely the response would be “you’re late. Henry Ford and Mercedes Benz have already done that. Go home”continue reading »

This recent Essay by Paul Graham took me back to the beginnings of PeoplePerHour. I read it with nostalgia remembering those early days of insanity, of doing things that don’t scale and make little sense at the time. Yet make all the sense in the world tpday 5 years in.

PPH began as an experiment from an older business I started which was in essence an offline version of what we do today. We were an old fashioned ‘outsourcing shop’. Initially for consumer services and later for business. We’d go to companies (mainly small businesses) and say “give us all the crap you don’t want to do and we’ll do them for you”. We charged £25 per hour. The model was simple: I hired ex-secretaries, and as long as I kept them busy for 70% of their time I covered their costs. The 30% was my profit.

One day, I had an insane idea. I thought  “why am I paying for these people and hiring them out instead of  creating a website for them to hire themselves out directly?”. It was one of those profound ideas where your next thought is “why on earth didn’t I think of this before”.continue reading »