Step 7 of Building a Better Business

Anna Stubbs • August 2, 2023

Get someone independent to hold you to account

Have you ever set a New Year’s resolution and then reset the same one again the following year? It's widely recognised that approximately 80% of New Year's resolutions fail. How can we increase our chances of successfully achieving our goals? Accountability.



The most foolproof way of ensuring you complete the actions you’ve committed to is to give someone nagging rights to follow you up. This may be your personal trainer at the gym who makes sure you show up at 6am, or it could be your accountant who checks in on you every 90 days to make sure you’re on track to completing your actions and achieving your business goals.

A soft coach will encourage soft results.

If you think about the type of coach a successful sports team would benefit from, would it be a hard coach or a soft coach? It’s no different in business. We all need someone with the backbone to hold us firmly to account and follow through on consequences for failure to act (‘give me 100 burpees!’).

A soft coach, maybe a life partner or a friend, is likely to worry they’ll upset you if they nag about inaction. They’re likely to accept your excuses. Whereas a hard coach isn’t going to worry about hurting your feelings and they won’t accept excuses. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a heart. Great coaches have backbone and heart; they just care more about your results than your excuses.

If you really want to achieve your goals, seek accountability from a coach who’ll console you after you’ve done the burpees, one who discourages inaction, and enables you to achieve. We can help.

“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, and has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you can be.” - Tom Landry

The Man on the Moon Principle

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
In 1961, President John F Kennedy famously announced his goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out. As we know, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon, and were brought back to Earth safely, achieving JFK’s goal.  At a time when most people hadn’t even been on an aeroplane, landing on the moon would’ve felt unachievable and overwhelming. However, such a massive goal united people with a purpose; the story goes that even a cleaner mopping the floor at the space station said his job was to help put a man on the moon. So, how did they make the goal achievable? They broke it down into milestones, with each one taking them closer and closer to achieving their ultimate goal. The first milestone was to achieve lift off. So, they set about resolving this challenge. The next milestone was to reach orbit, so they had a team working on this milestone. Then, they had to reach the moon’s atmosphere, land safely on the moon, take off from the moon, enter Earth’s atmosphere and land safely back down to Earth. You can see how breaking the goal down into milestones gave everyone a more achievable objective to focus on which was less overwhelming. Those milestones were then broken down into the actions which needed to be completed. Each action was essentially a small step towards reaching the ultimate goal.

5 signs you’re undercharging

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
Are you undercharging for your services? It can be hard to tell, particularly if you’re in a niche industry or you’re a contractor. Costs have been rising, so it may be time to rethink your own pricing.

Understanding your revenue drivers

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
For your business to make money, you need to generate revenue. You produce revenue through your usual business activity, by making sales, getting your invoices paid, or taking cash from paying customers. So, the better you are at selling your products/services and bringing money into the business, the higher your revenue levels will be. But what actually drives these revenue levels? And how do you get in control of these drivers?