People are great at zero to one, others at one to many. There are two types of people in business, people like founders, who are great at taking an idea and executing it, and then iterating on that till they find product market. They're great with that experimentation stage of a business where you are taking something that is pretty ephemeral, like an idea, and actually getting it out to customers and testing it out in the marketplace.

Having a thousand batshit crazy ideas means nothing if you can't execute. I'm someone who loves the creative process. I love ideating. In fact on this podcast, I'm often told my, by my producer, to stop winging it because the reality is that execution means everything. Ideation is only important at the very earliest stage.

Privilege exists. Recognize yours and check it. So without going into a huge amount of detail, I come from a massively privileged background. I went to the right schools, the right universities came from the right family and grew up in the right area. I have friends and family members who are well off, and I am very fortunate to have been able to travel the world and see things that many people haven't been able to.

Start a podcast or write a blog to learn and to share, not because of what it might get. So over the last couple of years I've been podcasting and I've recorded well over a hundred episodes across the podcast that I currently have. When I first started them, I did it because I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from people with whom I have great relationships and great respect for, and who have been through things and challenges that I have not seen in my own life.

Just because Xero says that everyone can do their accounts doesn't mean that everybody should. So SaaS tools like Xero have democratized access to finance or certainly accounting. For many small businesses, it's meant that with very low effort, one can get their accounts up and running. But there is a reason why accountants trained for many years.

Assume your job will be replaced by AI within the next decade and act according. So we're going through a bit of a golden age of AI right now, but over the last several years we've seen AI grow at an immense pace. It went from being able to beat chess Masters to then being able to beat go masses to today where we have things like chat, GPT, and Dalle, able to provide conversational AI and even generate images for you.

Just because a VC is your friend doesn't mean that they'll invest in you. I have scar. It'll come as no surprise to you that I have a huge number of relationships and even really strong ones with people within the venture capital industry. And when I went out to raise for my business last year, whilst I was able to get in the door, I wasn't able to raise.

You may despise politics, but any organisation over a certain size is gonna. Now we've all seen the sitcoms and dramas that deal with off office politics and the reason that they are great fo, no wait, start again. 63. You may despise office poli no, 63. You may despise politics, but any organization over a certain size is gonna have it.

As a CFO, live and die by this rule. Sh*t in equals sh*t out. As a cfo, your role is to take information, synthesize it, put it into context, and help leaders make decisions. But if the data that's coming into your system is questionable, then the decisions that come out the other end are equally going to be questionable.

A players know how to lift others up. B players only know how to put them. We've all worked with B players in our careers. These are the guys that always step away from blame. They're the first to point fingers, deride and insult other employees and just sort of do their job whilst moaning as they do it.