The Matt J Hanham Show

Abracadabra. One popular reading of where it comes from is Aramaic, and it roughly means: I create as I speak. The origin is argued about, and I don't really mind, because the idea is right. What you say out loud has a habit of becoming the thing you create.

This episode is about the stories business owners tell about their own business, and why they tend to come true.

In this one:

• Star Trek, the flip phone, and why stories aren't predictions, they're blueprints
• The Jetsons, and how much of that future is arriving right now
• Why decades of dystopian fiction train us to expect the worst and aim low
• The small business version: What happens when we say things like "winter's always slow," "nobody round here pays for quality," "I tried social media, it doesn't work for me"
• Hearing your own repeated lines, and saying the opposite out loud

The best way to predict the future is to create it, and it starts with what you say out loud.

Over to you: what's the line you're going to start saying from today?

Most of the businesses I sit across from aren't bad businesses. They're good businesses nobody can see. Not the customers, and a lot of the time, not the owner either. I know that one from the inside.

My business is literally called Visible. And there have been whole stretches where we weren't. Not posting, not advertising, not at events, stop-starting the podcast. Doing it for clients, not for ourselves.

In this one:

• The irony of running a business called Visible and not showing up
• Two kinds of invisible: invisible to the market, and invisible to yourself
• Why the constraint you can't see is the one you keep throwing effort at
• Why a face in your marketing has gone from nice to have to close to non-negotiable
• Why I am the face of this podcast

Getting visible isn't louder. It's clearer.

Over to you: are you invisible to the market, or invisible to yourself?

I've written a story I haven't released yet. It's called The Donkey and the North Star. In it, the donkey doesn't walk perfectly north. He heads in the direction of the star and keeps taking the next step towards it. The thing about the North Star is nobody ever gets there.

For years I treated deciding like I had to know the destination first. You don't. You need a direction clear enough to say no to other things. Other directions.

In this one I discuss:

• Productive procrastination, and why so much of what we call research is fear in a sensible jacket
• The $5k laptop I sat on for months, and why the decision never mattered as much as the direction
• What a North Star actually does. It tells you which way is forward, and more usefully which way isn't
• Why AI multiplies whatever you point it at, and what happens when you point it at nothing, or everything
• Pivoting when you should have doubled down, and why swapping north stars is the real failure

Nobody reaches the North Star. That's not what it's for.

Over to you: What's your North Star right now, and can you take one step toward it?

You used to ask Google a question and get ten links. Now you ask AI one question, and behind the curtain it asks itself twenty. It looks each one up, grades what it finds, and decides who to recommend. You never see any of that. You just find out whether you made the answer or you didn't.

This episode is about how AI search is changing the way customers find small businesses, and what still works when there's no single ranking to chase.

In this one:

• How one question becomes five, ten, twenty behind the scenes
• Why more and more searches end without anyone clicking through to a website
• Why two people asking the same question can now get different answers
• A business owner with strong Google rankings and great reviews, and the AI that told people to be wary of him
• What AI looks for when it decides who to trust. Reviews, real people, depth, consistency

Trust was always the strategy. AI just stopped letting you game it.

Over to you. Ask your AI of choice who it would recommend for what you do, in your town. Did you show up?

I've written three versions of the same novel. The first draft went out in 2021. The second took four years. The third took less than twelve months. Same book, same bloke, and I was working on it the whole time.

So the difference wasn't effort. The difference was that in the last twelve months I kept putting myself on the hook.

This episode is about manufactured deadlines, external accountability, and why projects with nobody waiting on them quietly take years.

In this one:

• Sending the first manuscript out in 2021, and what came back about how the story was written
• Why the second version took four years, and which part of that time was actually necessary
• Carving the David out of the stone, and the difference between distilling and drifting
• Work with no external deadline expands to fill whatever time you've got, then takes the rest

How the last twelve months got made? Setting the date, telling the editor, booking and paying before I was ready, saying it out loud on this show

Why the work isn't the work, and the real discipline is manufacturing the consequence

Why the final stretch was taking words out, not adding them

Nobody hands you a deadline. You go and create one, and then you have to live with it.

Over to you. What's the thing you're working on that nobody is waiting for?

Three weeks ago on this show I said I was sitting at 95% on something, and that the last 5% had taken three times the work of the first 95. Today it went to my editor. It's a book I've been carrying for five years.

This episode is about the gap between finished and sent, and what actually happens in it. It isn't procrastination and it isn't dread. It's bargaining. One more pass. I'll send it Friday. Monday's fine, I'll express post it.

In this one:

Why the last 5% of a project is almost never writing or building, it's decisions

The tell that a pass has stopped being about the work. You can't say what it would actually change

Why the name of the book changed in the final two months, after five years

Also in this episode, shipping Visible OS in beta, things breaking the week we went live, and why five years ago I wouldn't have done it this way

Why the speed of AI has forced a different standard of ready

Beta isn't a lower standard. It's an agreement that some of the finding out happens in public

You can ship it and find out, or you can polish it and never know.

Nothing improves in a drawer.

Over to you! What have you got that's finished but not sent?

Leads are down. So you're looking at the ads, or the website, or whether it's time to find a new agency. Before you spend a cent on any of that, check three things, because nine times out of ten what people call a marketing problem isn't one.

This episode is about lead generation, marketing strategy and follow-up for small business owners and founders. Two of the three fixes are free and don't need an agency at all. The third one is going to annoy you, and it's the one that actually matters.

In this one:

Why people walk in having already diagnosed themselves, and why it's like asking a doctor for a specific script

Fix one: your offer isn't clear. If nobody can tell what they get, what it costs and why it's worth it, traffic won't save you

Fix two: your follow-up is slow, or landing in a sales inbox that everybody checks and nobody owns

Fix three: you're not willing to be in it. No face, no voice, no opinion, no time

Why generic input produces generic leads, and why that isn't the agency's fault

What the numbers in my own business look like across the years I showed up and the years I didn't

Generic in gives you generic out.

Over to you. Be honest, are you actually in your own marketing? Or are you paying someone to be a cardboard cutout version of you?

There's a thing on your desk that's 95% done. Has been for weeks. The website that needs one more page. The proposal that needs a number in it. The offer you've nearly finished writing. And you've been telling yourself you're nearly there. You're not.

This episode is about finishing, follow through and shipping for founders and business owners, and why the last 5% of any project is a completely different job to the first 95%. The first 95% is creation. It's fun, it's yours, nobody is watching. The last 5% is admin, final decisions and exposure. Nobody warns you that halfway through, the work changes on you.

In this one:

- Why the last 5% is a different muscle entirely, and why it can take three times the work of the first 95 - The real reason projects stall at 95%: potential feels safer than a verdict - Why ten things at 95% is worse than zero, not close to done - Naming a finish line someone else could verify, instead of "improve the website" - Why the last 5% belongs in somebody else's diary - The team version: 55 blog posts written, none of them live

95% finished is 0% delivered. The last 5% is 100% of the result.

Over to you: what's sitting at 95% right now? You know the one. Name it, and tell me what the actual finish line looks like.

In April 2019 I recorded an episode called How To Start A Podcast. In the description I wrote:

"90% of podcasts only have 7 episodes. Why is this?"

I diagnosed the exact problem, publicly, confidently, on the record. Then I did it five times.

This episode is about consistency, discipline and accountability for founders, and why restarting is the most reliable way to never finish.

My publishing runs since 2019: four episodes then dead. One then dead. Three then dead. Seven then dead for twenty months. Eight then dead. I landed on the exact number I'd warned everybody else about. Twice.

In this one:

- The receipts, read out loud, from my own back catalogue - Why it felt better to restart than it felt to hold the discipline of continuing week on week - Why it isn't motivation, and it isn't even the system - The trifecta: someone who notices, the system itself, and an audience you actually want to show up for - What happened when I dropped guests and nobody was booked in the diary any more - When to get outside support, and when to kill the darling instead

You don't have a starting problem. You've got a starting habit.

Over to you: what have you restarted more than three times?

You've been getting clarity on this for months. The thinking is done, the notebook is full, you've had the conversations. And the thing hasn't moved an inch. This episode is about clarity, decision making and focus for business owners, and why the thing you've been waiting for doesn't hand you a bigger plan. It hands you a shorter list. But you must decide.

It's in the word. Decide comes from the Latin decidere. De, meaning off. Caedere, meaning to cut. To cut off. Same root as incision.

Same root as homicide. A decision isn't a conclusion you arrive at.

It's an amputation you perform.

In this one:

- Why clarity subtracts instead of adding, and why that makes it so much harder than it sounds

- The etymology of "decide", and what it tells you about what a real decision costs

- Why softly working towards a whole bunch of goals means working on none of them

- The hedge: half in, sort of in, mostly in, never quite anywhere

- Why planning, journalling and running sessions can feel responsible while doing nothing at all

- The test: a real decision leaves a "body"

Clarity isn't a mood. It's a cut. If nothing died, you didn't decide.

Over to you. What's the thing you've been getting clarity on for three months, or twelve? Name it. Then tell me what you'd have to cut for it to actually start. Or whether that thing is the very thing that needs cutting.