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14d •
If you're the founder everyone turns to... Who do you turn to?
That question has followed me for the last eight months. Not from a boardroom. From a swimming pool in Mexico. Some afternoons I'd collect my son from school in a moto taxi. We'd head to the pool and play Marco Polo with Balam and his 8-year-old friends. A quiet life on the outside. He'd go to bed. I'd open my laptop and build until two in the morning. AI agents. Memory systems. Research. Founder conversations. Every week I thought I was getting closer. Every week I realised I still hadn't answered the question. Who does a founder talk to when they're the one everyone else talks to? Every time something didn't feel right, I assumed I hadn't built enough. So I built another AI agent. Another workflow. Another memory system. I thought the answer was better AI. It wasn't. The more conversations I had, the more I realised founders weren't asking for another tool. They were looking for somewhere they could think. Someone who could challenge their assumptions before they made the next big decision. I built. I deleted. I started again. Over and over. Then one night it clicked. None of the things I'd built were the destination. They were all pieces of something bigger. I hadn't been building another AI company. I'd been trying to solve a founder problem. Everything I'd built suddenly made sense. Sales wasn't the product. Marketing wasn't the product. The AI wasn't the product. They were simply the engine. The real product was building the thinking partner I'd been looking for myself. That's why I'm launching 1% Founder. Not another AI company. A thinking partner for founders. Because I don't think founders need more AI. I don't think they need more tools. I think they need a better place to think. So I'll leave you with the question that started this whole journey. If you're the founder everyone turns to... Who do you turn to?
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3d •
“$250,000 left on the table this year. And potentially every year after.”
That's a much harder pill to swallow than 30% dropping to 19%. A couple of days ago, I shared a story about a client's close rate falling from 30% to 19%. Daniel Street, a fractional sales leader, jumped into the comments. His point was: "The aggregate number tells you something changed, but not where. Break it down by lead source, salesperson, opportunity type and stage. Then turn the percentage into dollars. Most owners don't feel 30% dropping to 19%, but they understand what it means if they're losing another $250,000 a year." That made me realise something. I'd been asking the number to give me an answer it couldn't give me. 30% to 19% wasn't the diagnosis. It was where the investigation should start. Because until you understand where the change happened and what it's actually costing you… You don't know what the problem is worth fixing. Or how much it's worth investing to fix it. A $250,000 leak deserves a very different decision than a $25,000 one. But first, you need to know where the leak actually is. That's where the numbers start becoming useful. Not because they give you the answer. Because they help you decide where your money, time and attention should go next. What number in your business have you already turned into an explanation, that could be wrong?
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4d •
“We’re growing, and I’m unsure of the next move. Do I hire, or invest in AI?”
One of my Irish clients introduced me to a friend of his back in Ireland. So I jumped on an early call from Mexico with my coffee in hand. His business was growing. But some of his team were working until 7 or 8 at night. People were stretched. Something clearly had to change. Hiring meant more capacity. AI potentially meant getting more from the capacity they already had. Both were reasonable options. But before we got into either, I asked: “What are they actually doing until 7 or 8 at night?” He didn’t know. “That’s the first thing we need to know.” So instead of deciding whether to hire or invest in AI, he went back to his team and got them to map what they were actually spending their time doing. And that’s when the problem started to look different. Some of his highest-value people were spending their time doing admin. The question had started as: “Should I hire or invest in AI?” But we’d been trying to choose the solution before we understood the problem. If your business is growing and your team is stretched, what are your best people actually spending their time doing?
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8d •
"What happens to the company if something happens to me?" That question hits differently after you've had a stroke.
This Founder built a successful company. Around $4M in revenue. And much of the business still relied on him. His judgement. His relationships. His decisions. Then he had what he described as "a bit of a stroke." "No real damage." But it forced him to: "reset, realign and figure out what the hell I'm going to do now." One thing became clear. Far less time committed to working. He was going to start walking away from his desk in the afternoons. And suddenly, revenue wasn't the only measure of what he'd built. For years, being needed had looked like success. Customers wanted him. The team relied on him. He was the person who could make the difficult calls. But the stroke forced a different question. What happens when he's not available? He'd built a $4M company. But he'd also built himself deeply into how that company worked. Being indispensable had always felt like an asset. Now it looked like a risk. The question was no longer: "How big can I build this?" It was: "What exactly have I built if it still needs me this much?" Sometimes life shows you something about your business that the numbers can't. If you disappeared from yours for 30 days tomorrow, what would stop?
9d •
Another founder built in months what had taken him years.
That bothered him. He had spent almost two decades becoming exceptional at his trade. He knew the work. He understood the customers. He had built a respected home-service company doing around $3M a year. So when he met another founder in the same industry who had grown much faster, he started asking questions. What was this guy doing that he wasn't? The answer was uncomfortable. The other founder wasn't better at the trade. He barely came from the trade at all. He was better at building the business. That changed how he saw his own company. For years, he had assumed becoming better at the work would eventually make the business better too. It had helped him get this far. But it wasn't necessarily the skill required for what came next. He had been looking at the company through the eyes of a tradesman. So he started learning a different job. Strategy. People. Training. Building capability instead of personally being the capability. Over the following three years, the company grew from roughly $3M to more than $10M. Plenty of decisions contributed to that growth. But one belief had to crack first. The thing that got him here wasn't automatically the thing that would get him there. What if the thing you're best at is also shaping the problem you can't see?
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