Perspectives

Worth ten minutes.

Tools, opinion and reading. Free, no sign-up, published one at a time.

The case for each offering

Why engage me at all?
Answered in writing.

One honest case per offering — the argument I would make across a table, written down so you can test it before we ever speak.

Opinion

Broader reads.

Tools

Published here one at a time.

Worth knowing

Numbers worth
a minute each.

One data point at a time — each one relevant to any owner-led business, with the source attached. Added as they earn it.

$29,000

What being paid late costs the average Australian SME per year — cash funding your customers’ businesses instead of yours.

OneBook SME Cash Flow Report, 2026
76%

How far company insolvencies are running above the five-year average — with ATO enforcement a material driver. The quiet businesses outrunning their reporting are the ones with time to act.

ASIC, year to 28 February 2026
90%

The share of SMEs using their adviser mainly for compliance and admin — not strategy or growth. The tax return tells you what happened last year; nobody is paid to say what should happen next quarter.

Findex SME Growth Index, 2026
Favourite reads

The shelf I actually
go back to.

Eight books that changed how I price risk, judge management, read a cycle, keep changing, and stay calm through all of it.

The Outsiders
William Thorndike

Eight unconventional CEOs who beat the market by treating capital allocation — not operations — as the CEO’s real job. The best short course on what a great owner actually does.

Goodreads ›
This Time Is Different
Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff

Eight centuries of financial crises, and the same four words spoken before every one of them. The reason I hold cash discipline above growth stories.

Goodreads ›
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty

Two centuries of data on one quiet law: when the return on capital outruns growth, wealth compounds to the owners of assets, not the earners of wages. Whatever you make of the politics, it is the strongest case ever assembled for owning the business rather than just working in one.

Goodreads ›
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman

Why smart people make predictable mistakes with numbers — anchoring, overconfidence, loss aversion. Every negotiation I sit in is this book, live.

Goodreads ›
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Decades of research on when life actually feels best — and it is never leisure. It is absorbed, stretching effort with a clear goal and instant feedback. Meaning lives in the doing, not the finishing.

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The Brain That Changes Itself
Norman Doidge

Case studies of brains rewiring themselves at every age — they read like fiction and are not. The reason I don’t believe in fixed people, fixed habits, or fixed businesses.

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Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl

A psychiatrist in the camps discovers the last human freedom: choosing your response. The deepest answer to what actually makes people change — not pressure, a reason.

Goodreads ›
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius

Private notes from a man running an empire, never meant to be published. Two thousand years old and still the best manual for staying calm while everything demands a reaction — control what you can, let the rest pass.

Goodreads ›