Do you have a growing or established business - but aren't reaping all of  the benefits of owning it?

🙋🏽‍♂️ Is your team more focused on getting hours in than moving projects forward?
🙋‍♀️ Are decisions made with confidence and clarity or by hope and a gut feeling?
🙋🏻 Have other priorities taken a backseat?

Many owners are 🤩 at what they do, but 😩 to create the business and life they desire.  

Here’s why:

Doing the work and building a company requires two different skill sets. 

Most owners have years, if not decades, of experience and education in delivering their product or service.

Yet many struggle when it comes to:

❤️ Creating motivated employees that care
⚙️ Implementing business systems
🎯 Strategic planning
📈 Scaling profitable 

According to SCORE®, most business owners:

🔹 Don’t have a real plan (78%)
🔹 Overestimate revenue (73%)
🔹 Underprice their work (77%)

Over the last 20+ years of business ownership, I’ve experienced a lot.  In my last business, I built a team of 25 employees and, with their help, created a company that was growing 8x faster and was 4x more profitable than the industry when it was acquired.

✨ What Changed Everything for Me:

🏆 Positioning our brand so we didn't have to compete on price
😇 Creating a team of motivated employees that ran the business in my absence 
📊 Knowing our numbers and making strategic and profitable decisions based on the data
🧠 Creative problem solving


If you want things to change, here's what to do: 

➡️ 30 minute call 👉 HuddleWithAndrew.com 


What others have said:

"Working with Andrew was a game changer. He helped me significantly increase our profitability while building a business that works for me, not the other way around. His focus on KPIs and employee engagement was exactly what we needed." - John Riordan, P.E., S.E. President at Cornerstone Structural Engineering

"Working with you has unlocked my creativity and has given me a renewed sense of excitement in what is possible in my business." - Thomas Gore CPA, CFP, President at Core Advisors Ltd.

"I have renewed motivation and confidence in my abilities.  I look forward to building a great business with your help and guidance." Neal MacMillan, KBI Garage Door

"My business is growing and THRIVING and this is in large part from Andrew's guidance and support. I cannot thank him enough." - Kara Mumford LISW-S, Owner of the Trauma Therapy Company

➡️ HuddleWithAndrew.com to get started

Andrew Lamppa

Good design fixes poor leadership.

Most leadership challenges for small business owners are structural in nature, not personality or moral failures. Let me explain.

If you are nervous to step away because you don't trust the work of your team, you could think:

"Why can't they do it as good as I can?"
"Why do I struggle so often to hire great employees?"
"It's my business, who am I to entrust them when my name's on the door?"

These are all design issues. 

There is a good chance your standards and values haven't been communicated or enforced enough so you are relying on your leadership and, more importantly, your presence to do the heavy lifting.  This causes you to expense extra energy instead of the system, if it was designed properly. 

Instead of thinking, "I need to become a better leader," choose to become a better designer so when your leadership is needed, you have enough energy to do it well.

Wearing all the hats? Micromanaging everyone? Want employees who really show up and get it done 💪 — without burnout, chaos, or wanting to sell your business every Friday? We should talk.

Want to easily increase profitability and employee productivity?  Start with setting the expectation.

Changing your workplace culture starts with how you define culture…

Frustrated by an employee who doesn't think they can become better?

Motivation, incentives, discipline, criticism - none of these will work.

Why, because the problem is a belief issue not a performance issue.

To change this, you need to help them instill a new belief system and you do that by acknowledging them.

1. Clearly share what they did.
2. Acknowledge the effort or shift that took place
3. Communicate the results of their efforts
4. Empower them and others by sharing the impact it had

If you want the exact framework I use to build belief in teams and move them from victim to ownership, comment “Acknowledgment” and I’ll send it your way.

Why is your business so dependent on you?  

It’s because you allow it to be.

There are many things you do in your business that you may feel you need to do.  

I can assure you, many of those items, if you really explore and unpack them, do not require you.

If you want more freedom in your business, get really honest about why you do what you do and start thinking is there someone else that could do it.

Bonus: Eventually, they will be able to do it better, faster and it will cause them to achieve greater satisfaction in their work while you can focus on what you need to be doing as the owner and leader of your company.

Full calendars often mean misaligned effort - not business growth.

If your team is slammed, but margins are flat (or shrinking), the issue is rarely work ethic — it’s focus.

Busy teams often have low utilization: lots of activity, not enough profitable output because they're not focused on what matters.

And when people aren’t clear on the single result they own, effort spreads… and impact disappears.

The remedy:
 👉 Stop managing tasks.
 👉 Start managing critical results.

When every role owns one measurable outcome that actually moves the business, effort aligns with profit. 

Busy feels productive but clarity actually is.

If you want a simple way to assign critical results to every role, I’ve got a tool that makes it easy - comment CR below.

If you own your business and am still handling every sales call - here’s why that’s a problem—and how to fix it.

When you do the selling, clients expect you on the project.

That means every new deal pulls you deeper into the weeds…
Instead of freeing you up, it locks you in.

But when your team can explain your value—clearly and confidently—work comes in at the right level and only escalates to you if needed.

Here’s how to solve that:

✅ Define who you’re for
✅ Name the transformation (stop selling deliverables—sell outcomes)
✅ Clarify your positioning:
Positioning is perceived meaningful differentiation.
• Perceived — what they think when they hear your brand
• Meaningful — why that difference matters to your customer
• Differentiation — what sets you apart (and how you prove it)

Your team can’t sell what they don’t believe.

So your job is to make your positioning real internally and obvious externally—until your people live it.

Because when your team can explain your value, they can close the right clients—and deliver without dragging you into every decision.

That’s how you build a business that runs without you—not because you hired a team, but because you trained them to carry the vision.

3 reasons paying out an annual bonus is a bad idea:

1. It doesn’t improve employee performance 
2. It frustrates owners because of ☝️
3. It can backfire if employees receive less then they expected. 

If you want help moving to a quarterly model that solves all three - let me know.

Your employees should know how they’re doing before walking in for their perfomancw review.

Want to build a better culture?

Set clear expectations
Meet regularly
Share in the winnings

Most small business bonuses don’t work because they are not frequent enough, not intentionally funded and poorly distributed. 

A proper bonus plan is paid out frequent, has financial thresholds, intentionally funded, and distributed based on results.

Most employees never know what their bonus could be or is going to be.  A projected payout table changes that.  This increases motivation and turns the intangible into the tangible.

Most leadership challenges in a small business are not leadership issues they’re  design issues. 

You can categorize most into one of four ways:

1. Decision rights
2. Unclear standards
3. Capability not yet trained for
4. Comfort dependency 

Good design can makeup for a lot of poor leadership.

If your highest-paid people are doing the lowest-value tasks, it’s usually one of three things:

- Lack of delegation standards (no clear rules for what gets handed off, when, and how)
- “It’s faster if I do it” (short-term speed that creates long-term dependence)
- Role drift (senior people slowly become the default catch-all)

And the business pays thrice:

- You overpay for the task.
- You underinvest in the strategic work only your best people can do (decisions, leverage, growth).
- You steal development from the next tier down—lower-skilled employees don’t get the reps that build skill, confidence, and ownership.

Quick fixes that actually hold:

- Make sure every employee has a Critical Result they own (a clear “this is what winning looks like”).
- Make sure every responsibility has an agreed-upon outcome (so delegation isn’t “do stuff,” it’s “produce this result”).

If you don’t define outcomes, you don’t have delegation—you have task dumping… and your highest-paid people will keep catching it.

Business ownership doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

😬 Avoiding annual performance reviews?

Change the cadence to quarterly and make sure your employees know how they’re doing BEFORE they walk in the room.

If you want your core values to start meaning something to your employees, talk about one per week at your team meeting and give a real life example of how that would be lived out as a core behavior.

Scared to let go because your unsure how your team will perform?

If what you care about isn't clear and reinforced, your team will resort to how they naturally think.  Not wrong - but possibly not the culture you want to create.

1️⃣ Pick one core value that’s not being lived
2️⃣ Define what it looks like in action
(e.g. “Proactive” = flagging issues early, not waiting for fire drills)
3️⃣ Normalize it through peer reinforcement
Ask: “Where did you show this value this week?” and keep it visible

Keep going through all of your core values and watch your culture shift.

"How the heck can my team be so unprofitable when we bill out at $200/hour and they cost $35/hour?!!"

If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone. 

Here's a real example: An employee billing at $200/hour, working 832 billable hours, bringing in $166K... sounds good, right?

But after write-offs, overhead, salary, and benefits, they're actually LOSING the company $11K per year.

The reality? This person spends over 3 days per week on non-billable work. That's 24.5 hours on emails, meetings, and admin tasks before they even touch client work.

The good news? Small improvements make massive impacts:
✅ Increase utilization by 10%
✅ Improve realization by 10%
📈 And suddenly you're on the path to real profitability

The first step is knowing your numbers. The second is setting clear targets.

Want the employee profitability calculator I walk through in this video? Comment "CALCULATOR" below and I'll send it your way.

Mark Firth

Founder → $3.2m Revenue | Millions more driven for B2B Consultants & CEOs - Helping Them STOP Chasing Clients | 100's of Client Results on markfirthonline.com | WE'RE HIRING |

Quickly found out I wasn't cut out for a life in a 9-5 after a stint at IBM, Siemens &amp; then GlaxoSmithKline.  Quit my job in London 2010 and after 10 years in Colombia made it into Florida through the business On a mission to change the lives and businesses of 100k B2B consultants and professional service providers We are not an agency or coaching programYou told us that you had enough of 'one size fits all' agency services and that you don't have time to do another group coaching programSo we combined the 2 and added in our proprietory tech pl; platform so you don't need to do any of that either Anyway, enough of me talking - we prefer to let results do the speaking and you can check them out here www.markfirthonline.com(I do not signify any affiliation with or endorsement by LinkedIn® Corporation or its affiliates)

Consultant

Had a dream, found a mission.  Wanted to give my kids more than I had growing up and at the same time to help B2B Businesses to find consistent sustainable growth.  It all began in 2016 

Started out not knowing what the hell I was doing and then after making a lot of mistakes we grew the business and made it into Florida

Over the holidays we decided to break up...

I haven't felt in the right mind space to post about it

And this is taking a lot of effort to write

We sat down and talked about our 2 kids

And the unpredictability of the US immigration system

And how a cross cultural marriage (Colombia / UK)

makes everything difficult

And that's why we decided to break up with the traditional model of aging

We refuse to disappear into retirement after spending 40 years in a cubicle

We refuse to let AI diminish our skills and capabilities and will use it to amplify our impact

and MOST of all we refuse to teach our kids what they SHOULD do in life

While SHOWING them something totally different through our actions

They learn by watching not through what we say

I'm a 1981 baby and i'm seeing a real change in the way people are viewing mid-life

Are you?

p.s. shameless hook, i know

Mark  Firth

Thought Leadership Systems For Experts 40+ | 30k YouTube subs + 1.2m Views | 12 Yr Entrepreneur - former IBM, Siemens, (& Fast Food Server)

Well my post about getting divorced got 9k views:

And also a few visits from the ‘this platform is for professional content only’ police

Let me say it loud for those who can’t hear me over their blue sirens 

I get to define what ‘professional’ means to me 

And so does everybody else 

It’s not 1860 anymore 

Peace 

P.s I’m not getting divorced - see said post below

P.p.s I was in London last week and it was COLD

No alternative text description for this image

I just passed 30k subscribers on YouTube! I cracked the algorithm - 1.2million+ views and I haven't posted consistent, 'standard' YouTube videos for YEARS. ..

Want the free bundle on how I did it?

Here's how to make interesting content and it NEVER fails..

And once you realize it, you'll never be able to look at any 'course' the same way again

are you ready?

it's one line

never ever ever ever goes wrong

here we go

if you want to make interesting content then BECOME an interesting person.

done

saved you 10k

happy friday

Did Tony Robbins teach Alex Hormozi how to 'feel'?

This was a fascinating interview 

This came out of it clearly:

- Alex lives in his head (analytical) rather than his heart

- He's built a "push" motivation system (duty, obligation) rather than a "pull" system (genuine desire)

Tony helped him and at times Alex admitted he didn't get it

Most valuable content i've seen in years and makes you realize why the feed here can be so soulless

Did you see it?  Are you a hustle fan?

Uber charges more if your phone battery is below 25%

Kroger sets grocery prices based on area 

Soon to be based on time of day

This is called ‘survelience pricing’ 

All thanks to Ai 

and the people that gladly share all their data with it

Often say something like this in a righteous tone:

'‘I don’t mind I’ve got nothing to hide’’

Thanks Dave - great job

Your beer is now 300% more expensive

Keep sharing

Do you shut off data sharing?

Steal my Gemini prompt for thumbnails that generate 1m organic youtube views

Hi gemini, today you you are an expert thumbnail designer

Please make me look super pretentious and serious, think Seth Godin + Blippi having a baby

Don't forget to make me look as punchable as possible, 

Output 16 by 9 please

Don't hold back....bro
_____

there we go

thats what i wrote

This is at 2.1k views in less than 24 hours

The fly, the window and the paragraph that changed my life:

A fly is frantically trying to escape the room by flying into the window

 because it can see the tree's outside but doesn't have the vision to see the window pane

It doesn't know its there

And here's thing

ALL It needs to do is turn around and fly out the open door on the other side of the room

And it's free

That RIGHT there WAS a metaphor for my business and I got it form my fave book (in comments)

And last year and then I received a gift from the universe and only discovered my open door 

It was a 'cease and desist' from one of the big social media platforms

We had gotten so big, we were on the radar

I restructured the business starting last summer 

And the last 6 months have meant less work + way more profits 

Sometimes the open door in your life is staring you right in the face and you just can't see it 

I couldn't see it 

I'll be documenting it on my new substack

We already did 1m views on youtube  and I love it because its 10-15m and i can really teach and build community

and i'm feeling called to write deeper, about what we went through making $4m revenue while bringing up kids

And the truth about hustle and it's limits 

reach out if you want a link 

And what was your open door in life?  We all have them?

p.s and the book is you2

p.s.s the biggest change was moving from platform based positioning to something else that's 'protected from ai'

Dont miss it

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