Will Coombe

I met a gardener on Mon who's stopped answering calls from new customers. He's not full. He charges the same whether there's parking outside or if he has to carry a mower through the house. Every new call feels like a risk. Fix the price, and the phone stops being the enemy.

Your website says "Free estimate." So does every competitor. Nobody picks you for something everyone else offers. What can only you say? • Same-day quotes? • Owner turns up himself? • A guarantee nobody else dares make? Shout about it.

Most owners can tell you their biggest problem. Most of them are wrong. Fix the real one and growth feels easy.

You business doesn't have priorities. It's got a priority. There's always one thing you can be doing that'll move you forward more than anything else. The hardest part is not the doing. It's working out what to do.

Up to $1M / year, your job is to: • sell ONE product • to ONE type of person • using ONE marketing channel

My failed freelancer SARA cycle: Shock: "This work is awful" Anger: "How is this acceptable?" Resistance: "I'll just do it myself" Acceptance: "I'm the problem, not them" Outsourcing gone wrong? Check your brief before you blame the freelancer.

Want to find the part of your business that's broken? Start with the part you enjoy the least: • Hate numbers? Check your metrics • Struggle with empathy? Check your messaging • People pleaser? Check your management

Over the last 6 years I recorded 709 videos answering SEO questions from business owners. Almost none of them had an SEO problem. Here's what was wrong: • not niche enough (75%) They were trying to target everyone, so convinced no one. • too many products (15%) Amazon started as a niche online book store. You're not Walmart yet. • marketing channel & product mismatch (5%) Search only works when people already know what to look for. • SEO (5%) The rare one where the fix was actually technical. Most owners think they have a traffic problem. It's usually a focus problem. What do you think yours is?

Roleplay isn't just for bored, married couples. Once a month, pretend you're a stranger landing on your site: ▪︎ Open your site on your phone ▪︎ Land on your best-selling product ▪︎ Ask: would I buy this, from this page, today? I guarantee you'll find something to fix.

You started 6 projects this quarter. Ads. Website redesign. A hire. TikTok. Email. A price change. Revenue barely moved. Most founders can't work out why. You can make progress on six things and still get the same result, because none of them was the thing holding you back. Every business has one bottleneck at a time. If leads are the constraint, a better website changes nothing. If delivery is the constraint, more ads just means a longer backlog. So work sequentially, not simultaneously: Find the bottleneck. Fix 80% of it. Stop. Find the next one. One plate spinning at 80% beats six plates wobbling at 30%. What's the one thing capping your business right now?

You've got 99 problems. 98 of them are symptoms.

Find your bottleneck. Kill it. Repeat. Business is that simple.

If you're stuck at $20k/mo and working 70 hours a week: You don't need another marketing tactic. You need to remove the bottleneck choking your growth. I run live 45-min business breakdowns with real founders to find and clear theirs. Want one? DM me "BREAKDOWN".

Delegate, don't abdicate. If you don't understand the task you're outsourcing, you can't judge if it's being done right. You waste time, burn cash, and must fix their mistakes anyway. Know the workflow first. Then hand over the keys.

I’ve flown aircraft from 200lbs to 200,000lbs. The biggest lesson? Small errors compound fast at high speed. In the cockpit, checklists prevent disaster. Yet most $5k–$50k/mo founders run their business on pure memory and feel. If you don't systemise, you crash.

Alcohol doesn’t change you. It reveals you. AI does the same to a business. Focused founder + AI = a steeper growth curve. Scattered founder + AI = the same mess, faster. Know what you're amplifying before you pour it on.

After my SEO book, I offered to answer any reader’s SEO question on video. Thousands took me up on it. It was almost never an SEO problem. The site was rarely the problem. The business behind it was. These days I look at the whole business which fixes far more, far faster.

Where's your business stuck? The 3 Golden Questions: ① If orders doubled, would delivery cope? ② Do most serious enquiries end up buying? ③ Are enough of the right people finding you? Your first “no” is the bottleneck. Work on nothing else until it’s a “yes”.