Real World Entrepreneurship

You might not have a strategy document, a vision statement or a slide deck, but you do have a strategy. Every hour you spend and every pound you invest is a strategic choice. So the real question is whether you chose it, or whether it chose you.

With end-of-year planning season upon us, Alan and Bhairav dig into what strategy actually means for a small business. Do you really need one? Why do so many end up in a drawer? And what does a bad one look like?

Everyone already has a strategy. Look at where your time and money go, and that’s your strategy. Trying to do everything for everybody is still a strategy, just not a very good one.

Strategy is about what you don’t do. Alan points to Apple, which spent billions exploring an electric car before deciding to walk away and focus on what it does best. Saying no to a good opportunity is often the most strategic decision you’ll make.

Without focus, the loudest voice wins. At Team Rock, Alan’s plan was to do three things really well. They ended up doing 22, and the money went to whoever shouted loudest at the time. Without a strategy, you have no way of deciding whether an opportunity is good or bad.

Your strategy shouldn’t change every week, but your action plan should. If interest rates jump for three months, that’s a reason to adjust your plans, not to tear up your ambitions. Strategy is where you’re heading, and the action plan is how you deal with the weather on the way.

The chaos story is the better story. Founders on stage love to say they made it up as they went along, because it makes for a great tale. In reality most of the "troubles" businesses face are just events you'd normally expect in the course of running a business.

Hold yourself to account. At Atom CTO, Bhairav ran yearly strategy reviews to check whether we were still on track for our ambition. You don’t need a board to do this. A non-exec, a mentor or even your own honest review will do the job, as long as someone asks whether you’re doing what you said you would.

What a bad strategy looks like:

• It’s a compromise designed to keep everyone happy
• It’s a list of KPIs and objectives rather than a direction
• It runs to pages and pages when it should fit on one or two
• It’s full of fluffy, big words that nobody can act on
• Nobody is held accountable to it

Bigger isn’t always better. A strategy is about being what you want to be, not about being the biggest. If it isn’t what you really want, you won’t keep going when it’s pouring with rain.

Should a strategy make people uncomfortable?

• Alan: If a strategy doesn’t make some people uncomfortable, it isn’t a very good strategy.
• Bhairav: It’s the opposite. People may not like a strategy, but if they aren’t comfortable with it, they won’t follow it.

Did the big success stories really wing it?

• Bhairav: The founders on stage all say it was chaos and they made it up as they went along.
• Alan: Chaos makes a better story. “We had a plan and stuck to it” doesn’t get a round of applause.

Is choosing the mountain the strategy?

• Alan: The fundamental decision is which mountain to climb, because you can’t get three quarters of the way up and switch.
• Bhairav: Choosing the mountain is the ambition. Strategy is what you do when the weather turns and the food runs low.

Look back at last month’s calendar and bank statement. Where did your time and money actually go? That’s your real strategy. Now ask yourself whether it’s the one you’d have chosen.

If you’ve ever written a strategy and then forgotten about it, or never written one at all, this one’s for you. Listen to the full episode, then tell us in the comments: what’s one thing your strategy says you won’t do?

Real World Entrepreneurship is co-hosted by Bhairav Patel and Alan Clarke of The Business Growth Partnership (tbgp.co.uk).

You tell an AI agent where you want to go on holiday, give it a budget, and let it search, compare and book. No salesperson, no brochure, no conversation. So who exactly was the seller selling to?

That’s the question Alan and Bhairav wrestle with in this episode. If agents start doing the buying, does everything we know about selling go out of the window? Or does it make the human side of selling more valuable than ever? We didn’t fully agree, which is half the fun.

Your facts are now table stakes. If an agent is doing the searching, the basics of what you offer have to be out there, clear and easy to find. If it isn’t stated, as far as the AI is concerned it doesn’t exist.

Sell the qualities, not just the specs. Facts get you onto the shortlist, but the qualitative and emotive parts of your offer are what make someone choose you. Generic, AI-generated copy promising to “save 80%” won’t do that job.

Efficient isn’t the same as effective. Alan remembers a time when a letter took days to get a reply, so every word was considered. Email made communication faster, but not necessarily better. AI may follow the same pattern, unless we use the time it saves to have better conversations at the point where it matters.

The line between “AI can handle this” and “you need a human” is moving. Commodity sales, such as tickets, food, hotel rooms, look set to be automated, while anything involving judgement, atmosphere or fit should keep a human in the loop. Alan described ChatGPT telling him which part of Barbados would suit him better. If AI is already making qualitative calls, where does your business sit?

What about reviews? Today we lean on reviews for the qualitative side, but reviews are weighted, gamed and inconsistent. If an agent is reading them on your customer’s behalf, how much should it trust them, and how much should you rely on them?

And who’s watching? Alan points out how much talk there now is at government level about controlling AI. That might be the clearest sign yet that people are realising how fast this is moving.

Is this just digital all over again?

• Alan: AI feels like the move to digital and the dot-com boom. Both were exciting and terrifying, and both turned out to be brilliant in parts and horrendous in others.
• Bhairav: Digital made information easier to reach, but we stayed in control. With AI, the bit we least understand is the loss of control.

Who stays in the loop?

• Alan: People buy from people. A friend who runs a travel agency isn’t worried, because she adds the personal touch that AI can’t.
• Bhairav: That’s true until agents are talking to agents with access to bank accounts and credit cards. At that point the human isn’t in the loop at all.

Who adapts to whom?

• Alan: Technology will ultimately bend around human behaviour.
• Bhairav: We’re already changing our behaviour for AI, right down to the way we write and communicate.

Ask an AI tool to find a business like yours, the way a customer might. Does it find you? Are your facts right? And does anything of what makes you different come through, or do you look like everyone else?

We don’t claim to have the answers, but if you sell anything to anyone, this is a conversation worth having. Listen to the full episode, then tell us in the comments: are you selling to the customer, or to their AI?

Real World Entrepreneurship is co-hosted by Bhairav Patel and Alan Clarke of The Business Growth Partnership (tbgp.co.uk).

Culture is one of those words that gets thrown around in business without anyone pinning down what it actually means. In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, Bhairav and Alan dig into why culture is always set from the top, why most businesses have a culture they didn't deliberately choose, and what happens when nobody addresses the one person who doesn't fit.

Bhairav shares a story about working under a CEO whose shouting could be heard from down the street, and how that behaviour cascaded through every layer of management beneath him. Alan draws on his experience working across businesses led by very different personalities and offers a simple definition: culture is what a business tolerates, rewards, and prioritises.

Together they explore what it takes to actually shape culture rather than inherit it by accident, how to deal with outliers who undermine it, and why the real test of a company's culture is what happens when something goes wrong.

What We Cover

• Why culture is always top-down, driven by the leader's behaviour rather than posters on the wall
• The difference between culture by accident and culture by design
• How toxic leadership patterns get absorbed by junior staff who don't have the experience to recognise them
• Why values on a balanced scorecard often mean nothing in practice
• Dealing with cultural outliers: when to coach and when to manage someone out
• The generational dimension: how different age groups experience and expect workplace culture
• Why the real measure of culture is how problems get handled, not how things look when everything is going well

Key Takeaways

• Every business has a culture. The question is whether it was built deliberately or inherited by default.
• Culture is what you tolerate, reward, and prioritise. If you tolerate poor behaviour, that becomes the culture.
• In small businesses and startups, the founder's personality is the culture. There is no separation.
• Young employees in their first or second role often can't see a toxic culture because they have nothing to compare it to.
• Avoiding a difficult conversation about a cultural outlier doesn't make the problem disappear. It makes it structural.

Links

Bhairav Patel — https://bitsbytesandbusiness.com

Alan Clarke / The Business Growth Partnership — https://tbgp.co.uk

Fear is the dominant emotion of running a business, and almost nobody talks about it. In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, Bhairav and Alan confront the thing that sits behind every decision a founder makes: the constant anxiety of not knowing whether it's all going to work out.

Bhairav reflects on his eight years running Atom and realises that fear was the thread running through the entire experience. Fear of losing customers, fear of running out of money, fear of making the wrong call. Alan breaks entrepreneurs into three types: those who use fear to stay sharp, those who are overwhelmed by it, and the most dangerous group of all, those who don't feel it at all.

Together they explore why fear is actually useful when you act on it, how to turn vague anxiety into something concrete you can deal with, and why the entrepreneurial world's obsession with success stories makes it harder for founders to admit what the job actually feels like.

What We Cover

• Why fear was the overriding emotion across eight years of building and running a business
• Alan's three types of entrepreneur: fear as fuel, fear as paralysis, and the dangerous absence of fear
• How to turn abstract anxiety into something actionable by writing it down and breaking it apart
• The difference between fears you need to deal with now and fears you can park for later
• Why the fear of AI is actually simpler to address than most founders think
• The role of advisors, mentors and peer networks in managing fear you can't see past on your own
• Why entrepreneurship's highlight reel of mega-successes makes the reality harder to talk about
• The fine line between fear as a power tool and fear that stops you performing

Key Takeaways

• Fear is normal. Every honest founder Alan has worked with has admitted to feeling it.
• Most fear comes from uncertainty. Making the unknown specific and concrete is the first step to managing it.
• The most dangerous entrepreneurs are the ones who feel no fear at all, because they take everyone else down with them.
• Action is what separates useful fear from debilitating fear. If you act on it, it sharpens you. If you sit with it, it freezes you.
• The entrepreneurial world doesn't talk about fear enough. Normalising it would help more founders than another success story ever will.

Links

Bhairav Patel — https://bitsbytesandbusiness.com

Alan Clarke / The Business Growth Partnership — https://tbgp.co.uk

Most business advice is about getting started. The harder question, and the one Alan and Bhairav dig into here, is what it actually takes to still be standing in twenty years.

In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, the two of them step back across their earlier conversations with Richard McCombe, who has run a Glasgow print business for two decades, and use his story to unpack a broader theory of durability. The result is less a recap and more a working map of what a lasting business looks like, and the challenges that quietly try to knock it down.

Richard McCombe is Managing Director of Graphic Warehouse, Scotland's largest independent large format print company. In this conversation, Richard talks candidly about the loneliness of running a business, the cost of having no one to hold you accountable, and the nearly ten-year relationship with an external advisor that changed how he leads and how the business runs.

This episode is about why the instinct to escape having a boss is exactly what leaves so many business owners without anyone in their corner, and what changes when that gap gets filled properly.

Richard McCombe is Managing Director of Graphic Warehouse, Scotland's largest independent large format print company. In this conversation, Richard takes us through twenty years of building and rebuilding the business, from early vehicle graphics work to a decade of consumer products that never quite scaled, through to the pivot that finally made everything click and the AI tooling he's building now.

This episode is about the real cost of innovating without commercial clarity, and what it actually takes for a traditional industry to stay relevant.

In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, Bhairav and Alan dig into a question every business owner wrestles with: what's actually worth worrying about? Between cash flow, co-founders, market reception and the things you genuinely cannot see coming, it's easy to spend energy in the wrong places. Alan and Bhairav talk through how they've each dealt with the unexpected over the years, including a deeply personal story from Alan about a cancer diagnosis that tested everything he believed about planning and control.

• Why detailed planning gives a false sense of control, and why that's not actually a problem
• The difference between risks worth preparing for and risks not worth the effort
• How COVID exposed which businesses could adapt and which couldn't
• Why Eisenhower's two quotes on planning are more useful than any risk register
• How Bhairav's experience selling Atom challenged his own assumptions about strategy
• Why founders should run a "hit by a bus" scenario on themselves, not just key staff
• Alan's personal account of being diagnosed with cancer two weeks after buying a company
• What the "trough of disillusionment" is and why it hits most founders around six months in
• How to tell the difference between problems worth carrying yourself and problems you can hand off
• A simple test for deciding whether something is actually worth worrying about

"No matter how thorough your risk register, things will happen that you've not even thought of." — Alan Clarke

"That is not very convenient." — Alan Clarke, on being told he'd be off work for six months following his cancer diagnosis

"You're the one living it, no one else is doing it for you. You've built up all those years of experience. Trust yourself, back yourself." — Bhairav Patel

"I worry about everything, and seldom did any of it ever happen. The things that I really, with hindsight, should have been worried about were the things I never saw coming." — Alan Clarke

This episode opens with a simple premise. Founders spend a huge amount of energy worrying about business risk, but most of that worry is misdirected. Alan and Bhairav use Eisenhower's two famous quotes on planning, that no plan survives contact with the unexpected, and that planning itself is invaluable even when the plan isn't, as a frame for the whole conversation. They walk through real examples, including COVID and Bhairav's own experience selling Atom, to show that the businesses which fared best weren't the ones with the most detailed contingency plans. They were the ones able to adapt quickly when circumstances changed.

The conversation takes a more personal turn around the halfway mark. Alan shares that seventeen years ago, two weeks after buying a company, he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and told he'd be off work for six months. It's a candid, unguarded section of the episode that grounds the whole discussion in something real. Bhairav uses it to raise a question most founders avoid: what happens to your business if you, personally, can't show up?

From there the discussion moves into founder fatigue, the point around six months into a venture where the initial energy fades and the gap between expectation and reality starts to bite. Alan and Bhairav both offer practical ways of testing whether something is genuinely worth worrying about, including a method Alan picked up from a former boss: ask whether it will still matter in a year.

This is worth listening to if you've ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that could go wrong in your business. Alan and Bhairav don't offer a formula. What they offer instead is a more honest, more useful way of thinking about risk, and a reminder that resilience matters more than any plan ever will.

Bhairav Patel recently achieved a significant milestone with the sale of Atom CTO, a venture that exemplifies the culmination of strategic planning and resilience in entrepreneurship. In this discourse, Alan and Bhairav delve into the intricate journey leading to this exit, elucidating the factors that propelled the company towards acquisition. Bhairav reflects on the initial vision he and his team held for Atom and the evolution of that vision amidst changing circumstances and personnel dynamics. The conversation also highlights the unpredictability inherent in the entrepreneurial path, particularly regarding exit strategies and timing, and emphasizes the importance of delivering value to clients to attract potential buyers. Ultimately, this episode serves as a profound exploration of the realities of entrepreneurship, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of business growth and the nuances of exiting a venture. The dialogue between Bhairav Patel and Alan Clark delves into the intricate narrative surrounding Bhairav's recent divestiture of Atom CTO, a venture that epitomizes strategic foresight and meticulous planning in the realm of entrepreneurship. The conversation unfolds with Bhairav articulating the foundational intentions that guided the inception of Atom, wherein the initial deliberations encompassed the dichotomy between cultivating a lifestyle business versus orchestrating an enterprise poised for acquisition. Through a methodical examination of the evolution of Atom, Bhairav illustrates a trajectory that was not merely circumstantial but rather a calculated progression towards an eventual exit. He reflects on the various transitions, including personnel changes and the inherent challenges that accompanied the scaling of the business, emphasizing the necessity of alignment among the founding members to mitigate conflicts and maintain a coherent vision. As the discussion progresses, Bhairav elucidates the pivotal moments that crystallized the notion of an exit. He recounts the organic evolution of relationships with other companies, particularly Taybridge, demonstrating how these partnerships were not just opportunistic but foundational to Atom's growth narrative. The conversation also touches upon the unpredictable nature of market dynamics and the realization that an exit strategy is often contingent upon external factors rather than solely the entrepreneur's aspirations. Bhairav candidly acknowledges that while they harbored ambitions for growth and influence, the eventual sale was as much a product of timing and circumstance as it was of deliberate strategy. The episode culminates in a reflective discourse on the notion of success and the disillusionment that can accompany the sale of a business. Bhairav candidly shares that the experience of selling Atom was not marked by a grand celebration but rather a series of administrative procedures that lacked the dramatic flair often associated with entrepreneurial exits. This revelation serves to demystify the entrepreneurial journey, presenting it as a continuum of challenges and triumphs rather than a singular, climactic event. The overarching message resonates with aspiring entrepreneurs, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, resilience, and the understanding that the journey is as significant as the destination itself.

Takeaways:

1. Bhairav Patel discusses the strategic planning involved in the sale of Atom CTO, emphasizing that the exit was always a part of their vision.
2. The journey to successfully exit a business often involves navigating various challenges and aligning the interests of all stakeholders involved.
3. Bhairav reflects on the importance of building a company that provides exceptional value to clients, which can ultimately lead to acquisition opportunities.
4. The conversation highlights the unpredictable nature of business exits, where timing and market conditions play a significant role in determining outcomes.
5. Bhairav and Alan emphasize that a business exit is not a grand, climactic event but rather a natural progression in a founder's journey.
6. The episode underscores the notion that the narrative surrounding business exits is often romanticized, when in reality, it is a complex process that requires careful consideration and planning.

This podcast episode elucidates the intricate landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and its multifaceted applications in contemporary business. Alan and Bhairav engage in a profound discourse aimed at demystifying the often nebulous concept of AI, highlighting its pervasive presence in modern discourse while acknowledging the widespread uncertainty surrounding its practical implementation. They emphasize the necessity for clarity amidst a cacophony of expert opinions and grandiose claims, advocating for a pragmatic approach that prioritizes tangible solutions over mere hype. The episode further delineates the various subsets of AI, such as machine learning and neural networks, and underscores the importance of data quality in harnessing AI effectively for business purposes. Through this dialogue, we aspire to equip listeners with the insights needed to navigate the evolving AI landscape with discernment and strategic foresight.

Takeaways:

1. The episode emphasizes that artificial intelligence (AI) is not merely a tool but a complex concept encompassing various subsets such as machine learning, neural networks, and computer vision.
2. AI's current proliferation is largely attributed to advancements in chip manufacturing and data processing capabilities that enable more sophisticated computations.
3. Business owners often face the challenge of discerning the practical applications of AI amidst the overwhelming hype and grand visions presented by purported experts in the field.
4. Effective AI implementation requires a clear understanding of the specific problem it seeks to solve and the quality and relevance of the data available for training models.
5. The conversation highlights the importance of due diligence when utilizing AI tools, as reliance on their outputs without proper verification can lead to significant errors and consequences.
6. Lastly, the discourse underscores that while AI presents remarkable opportunities for efficiency and innovation, it also necessitates a cautious approach to mitigate potential risks and biases inherent in its applications.