The Three Best Pieces of Business Advice I Received Came in the Last Three Months
I thought I had it in place.
The business was working. The network was strong. Clients were getting results. The reputation built across 17 years was doing the work it was supposed to do. By most reasonable measures, things were in good shape.
And then, within the space of three months, three different people told me three things that dismantled a comfortable story I had been telling myself and replaced it with something considerably more honest and considerably more useful.
None of them had anything to gain from saying what they said. One of them, a client, actually talked his own wallet into spending more money as a direct consequence of the conversation.
People with nothing to gain are the most valuable source of honest perspective available. They are also the rarest. When they speak, the only intelligent response is to listen.
Here is what they said. And here is why it applies to every man reading this, not just in business but in the broader context of what this site has been building the case for across every blog in this series.
You Are Undervaluing Yourself
The first one landed quietly. The kind of statement that takes a moment to process because the initial response is to disagree and the honest response, the one that arrives slightly after the defensive one, is to recognise that it is true.
Undervaluing is not the same as underselling. Underselling is a pricing conversation. Undervaluing runs deeper than that. It is the gap between what you are actually providing and the mental model you have built around what that provision is worth. It is the habit of measuring your value against the market average rather than against the specific and genuine difference you make to the specific people you serve.
Seventeen years of working with elite athletes and executives at the top of their industries. A clinical network that spans Thailand, UK, Sweden and beyond. A coaching model built on the kind of individualisation that the scare tactic influencer blog on this site makes the case has almost no equivalent in the mainstream. A client biobank of data from nearly two decades of programmes that informs every new programme with a precision that generic coaching structurally cannot produce.
That is not average. And pricing and positioning it as though it were average is not humility. It is a disservice to the people who need what it actually is rather than what the market has priced the category at.
The man who told me I was undervaluing myself was not flattering me. He was applying the same clear eyed assessment to my situation that I apply to clients when I tell them the honest thing rather than the comfortable one. He was doing what the manifesto blog on this site describes as the coach's primary function: telling you what you need to hear, not what you want to.
The question this raises for every man reading it is not about business specifically. It is the same question applied wherever it is relevant. Where are you undervaluing yourself? Where are you measuring your contribution, your capability, or your position against a standard that does not reflect what you actually bring? Where has the habit of modest self assessment become a structural constraint on what you allow yourself to build?
The answer is rarely nowhere.
Why Are You Not Going All In on the Longevity Clientele?
The second one was the most uncomfortable. Because it pointed at something I already knew but had not yet acted on with the level of commitment the knowing warranted.
The psychographic that this site has always been building for, the high performing, time poor, longevity obsessed man in his 40s who understands that his body is the primary asset and is prepared to treat it accordingly, is not the whole of the market. It is the specific part of the market where the work is most meaningful, the results are most significant, and the alignment between what I do and what the client genuinely needs is most complete.
Going all in does not mean ignoring everyone else. It means stopping the halfway position of serving the right audience while also hedging toward the broader market in case the specific positioning is too narrow. It means trusting that a specific, deep, genuine fit with the right person is more valuable than a broad, shallow, approximate fit with many people.
The lone wolf blog on this site makes this argument for health decisions. The same logic applies to business decisions. The mainstream always offers a larger apparent audience. The specific positioning always offers a more genuine one. The coaches who try to serve everyone tend to serve no one particularly well. The coaches who commit to the specific audience, build everything around them, and resist the temptation to dilute the positioning for the sake of the larger apparent market, are the ones who produce the results and the reputation that the right clients can find and trust.
The question was why are you not going all in. The honest answer at the time was a version of hedging dressed up as prudence. The honest response to that answer was to stop hedging.
For every man reading this the same question applies in whatever context is relevant. Where are you doing the halfway version of the thing you know you should be committing to fully? Where is the hedge that feels like sensible caution but is actually the avoidance of the commitment that the thing you are building actually requires?
Create a Business That Scares You
The third one is the one I am still sitting with.
Not because it is the most complex. Because it is the most expansive. Create a business that scares you is not a prescription for recklessness or for abandoning the intelligence and the evidence based rigour that runs through everything on this site. It is the recognition that the comfortable version of what you are building is by definition not the full version.
The business that does not scare you is the business you are already capable of building. It is the natural extension of where you already are, doing what you already do, for people who already know you, at a scale and an ambition that fits comfortably within your current self image. It is safe. And safe, in the context of building something genuinely significant, is the most dangerous thing available.
The business that scares you requires a version of yourself that does not yet fully exist. It requires the expansion of the network into contexts that are genuinely new. The positioning that feels presumptuous until it does not. The ambition that is just far enough beyond the comfortable that sitting with it produces a specific quality of discomfort that is different from the discomfort of a problem. It is the discomfort of a direction.
This is the same principle the Special Forces blog on this site describes at the individual level. The persistent persistence of moving toward something genuinely difficult rather than the comfortable consolidation of what is already achieved. The longevity lie blog makes the same argument about healthspan: the goal worth building is the one that requires a version of you that does not yet exist. The purpose blog makes it about what the years being extended are actually for.
Create a business that scares you is not a business instruction. It is a life instruction applied to the professional domain. And the honest response to it is not to immediately build the scary thing. It is to acknowledge that the comfortable version was always an underestimate of what was possible, and to begin closing the gap.
The People With Nothing to Gain
The three people who gave me these pieces of advice had one thing in common beyond what they actually said.
They had nothing to gain from saying them. No commercial interest in the direction they were pointing me toward. No relationship that would benefit from telling me what I wanted to hear rather than what I needed to. One of them, as I said, cost himself money in the short term by the directness of what he offered. He talked himself into a larger commitment as a consequence of being honest about what my situation actually warranted.
People with nothing to gain are the most honest sources available. They are also the hardest to find and the easiest to dismiss when you do find them, because the honest thing they say is almost never the comfortable thing and the comfortable thing is what most of the people closest to you, who have something to protect or something to maintain in the relationship, will default to.
The business advisors you pay have an interest in your continued payment. The friends who know you have an interest in the friendship remaining comfortable. The colleagues in your industry have an interest in the competitive landscape remaining as it is. None of this makes them dishonest. It means their honesty is filtered through their interest in a way that the person with nothing to gain is not filtered.
This is the value of the frank assessment from outside the inner circle. The client who has achieved enough in their own right to speak without agenda. The contact met through the network in an adjacent field who sees your situation clearly precisely because they are not embedded in it. The mentor who has built what you are building and whose investment in your success is genuinely unconditional because the cost of your success to them is zero.
Find those people. Listen to them differently from how you listen to everyone else. The manifesto blog on this site describes the value of someone who will tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to. The people with nothing to gain are the civilian version of that. They are the honest perspective that the inner circle, however well intentioned, is structurally prevented from delivering.
3 Action Points: Apply the Three Questions to Your Own Life
Action Point 1: Ask Yourself Honestly Where You Are Undervaluing Yourself and by How Much
Not in relation to the market average. In relation to what you actually bring and what that actually produces for the specific people you serve. The market average is a useful reference point and a dangerous ceiling. If your capability, your experience, your results, and the genuine difference you make to the people you work with are above average, pricing and positioning yourself at average is not modesty. It is the suppression of something that the people who need it most deserve to be able to find at the level it actually is. Identify one area of your professional or personal life where the honest assessment of your value and the position you have allowed yourself to occupy are not aligned. Start there.
Action Point 2: Identify Where You Are Doing the Halfway Version
The half committed position, the hedge dressed as prudence, the specific thing you know you should be doing fully that you are currently doing partially, exists in most people's professional and personal lives in at least one significant place. Name it. Not in general terms but specifically. The relationship you are investing partially in because the full investment feels exposing. The business direction you know is right but are pursuing alongside the safer alternative as insurance. The health investment you are making at the wellness level when you have the means and the knowledge to make it at the longevity level. Whatever the halfway version is in your specific life, name it clearly and then ask honestly what the full version requires that the halfway version is currently protecting you from having to do. The answer to that question is the work.
Action Point 3: Seek Out One Person With Nothing to Gain and Ask Them the Question You Have Been Avoiding
Not someone in your inner circle. Not someone whose response is filtered through a relationship that benefits from your comfort. Someone who has built something you respect, who has no commercial stake in your direction, and who you trust to be honest because their honesty costs them nothing and gains them nothing. Ask them the question about your situation that you have not been asking the people closest to you because the people closest to you will answer it with the filter of their interest in the relationship intact. The question does not need to be dramatic. It needs to be the one whose honest answer you are not yet sure you are ready to hear. Those are the questions worth asking. And the people with nothing to gain are the only ones who will answer them cleanly.
Three months. Three conversations. Three things that were already true before they were said and that became actionable the moment someone with nothing to protect said them out loud.
The business was working. The network was strong. The comfortable story was internally consistent. And the comfortable story was also, in the specific ways those three people identified, a version of what was possible that had quietly settled below what was actually available.
That is the nature of the honest outside perspective. It does not find things that were hidden. It names things that were visible and not yet said. And the moment they are said, the comfortable story and the honest one can no longer coexist.
You are undervaluing yourself somewhere. You are doing the halfway version of something that deserves the full commitment. And there is a version of what you are building that scares you for exactly the right reason.
Find the person with nothing to gain. Ask the question. Listen to the answer.