The business I have today looks nothing like the one I started nineteen years ago in a spare bedroom in Australia with a three-month-old beside me and no business experience.
It evolved because I kept running into problems in my own business that I didn't know how to solve, and I had to figure it out.
That's the part I want to talk about.
The Tools Came From the Problems
Early on, I created a vision, mission, and values for my own business. I needed something to anchor my decisions when everything felt uncertain.
Then I started implementing culture systems for clients and kept hitting a wall. Without a vision, mission, and values underneath them, culture systems don't work. They're just activities. That realization became a critical part of our offering - something I'd already tested on myself before I ever brought it to a client.
That's the story behind almost everything wattsnextpx does. Outcome Profiles exist because my own people didn't know what success looked like and I needed to fix that. The org design work exists because my org chart wasn't helping me and I had to find a different way to think about it. The performance frameworks exist because I was managing people and learning, often painfully, what worked and what didn't.
None of it came from a book. All of it came from being in the problem and needing a way out.
The Business Coach Couldn't Answer This
In the early years I had a number of business coaches, and for a while they helped.
But when the decisions stopped being formulaic - when it stopped being about following a process and started being about judgment calls with real stakes - they ran out of answers. They could tell me what the framework said. The difference wasn't what they knew - it was that they knew what it felt like, and that changes everything about the advice.
I stopped working with business coaches and started seeking out mentors who had actually built something themselves. People who had made the wrong hire and had to fix it. People who knew what it was like to have their house on the line.
This isn't specific to business coaches. Any advisor in any field can only take you as far as their own experience goes. The most technically capable person in the room still has a ceiling if they've never had to make a call with everything on the line. That's not a criticism - it's just the reality of what experience actually gives you that knowledge alone doesn't.
The Saturday Barbecue
I'm part of Entrepreneurs' Organization, and at my last forum meeting someone was sharing a win - something significant they'd pulled off in their business. They mentioned they couldn't talk about it at a Saturday barbecue with their friends. Their friends would either think they were showing off or just wouldn't feel the weight of it.
In that room, with other founders, everyone understood. We celebrated it the way it deserved to be celebrated.
It works the other way too. When you're worried you might not make payroll, you can't say that at a barbecue. But you can say it in a room full of people who have felt that specific dread and know exactly what's sitting behind that sentence.
When the business started to visibly succeed, I lost some friendships. People who had been in my life stopped being able to relate to where I was going. And during the hard times, it was the opposite problem - I had to show up and lead like everything was okay when it wasn't. Both of those things are part of building something real, and neither of them shows up in any business book.
I wouldn't change any of it (well maybe some of it!). Every one of those moments taught me something that no coach, no book, and no certification ever could.
Why This Matters for the Work
When a founder sits across from me and says "I've got good people but they're just not performing the way I know they could" - or "I keep getting good people and then losing them" - I don't just understand the problem intellectually. I remember the specific discomfort of being that founder. I know what it takes to fix it and I know what happens if you don't.
When someone tells me they're not sure they can trust their senior person to lead without them, I know that feeling. I've been that founder. I've also been on the other side of it watching what happens when a founder can't let go, and what it costs the business and the people in it.
That's not something you learn from a methodology. It's something you carry from having been there.
Every time I've tried to move away from this work - other businesses, other ideas - I've been pulled back. Because I know how much it matters to have someone in your corner who isn't guessing. Who has built something themselves. Who has paid the dumb tax in full and knows exactly what it brought them.
When your business coach hits a wall, they tell you to follow the process. When your mentor has been there, they say: "I know what everyone else is telling you. Don't do that. Just don't do that."
That's the difference. And it's the whole reason I do this work.
P.S. I'm here to solve your people problems. I know how to do that and I do it well. But I'm also just here if you need someone who isn't going to judge you for what's happening in your business - and will most likely say "I know exactly how that feels." Because I probably do.
