Not All Money Is Good Money
I joined Coach Harlan on The Courage to Lead for episode 296. We got into leadership, branding, AI, and the thing I've come to believe most strongly: your business ends up looking like you, whether you intend it to or not.
The company that looked successful from the outside
A few years back I was finishing up some consulting work for a company. The owner was very successful and genuinely unpleasant to be around.
What stayed with me wasn't him. It was the staff. I remember replaying the conversations I'd had with his people, the complaints and the resignation in them, and realising that from the outside this looked like a company doing everything right. Strong growth, real money. Inside it was decaying.
Years later the decay caught up and the business shrank dramatically.
That's when it landed for me that I did not want to build something without the capacity to last. And that meant I had to change, because a company doesn't absorb your values by accident. I had to take my beliefs, my pace, my standards, and force them into the DNA of the thing until they were codified there.
The effect is that we now have a personality, partly mine and very much my team's, and it does something useful: it attracts the people we want to work with and repels the ones we don't.
Not all money is good money
That's the line I keep coming back to. Not all money is good money, and not all growth is good growth.
I've had clients who paid well and whose values I couldn't stand behind. I've had a partnership go badly wrong and end with a large unpaid balance and a long lesson attached. Three things came out of that one:
Trust, but verify properly. Not a glance. A deep look.
Be diligent about collection. Being good at the work doesn't collect the invoice.
Never believe in someone's dream more than they do. That one cost me the most.
I'd add a fourth that's less comfortable. When something like that happens, it's worth asking what in you let that person in. The world is more of a mirror than a window. People like that are always around; the question is what made you accept one into your space.
Where the courage actually came from
Harlan asked where I found the courage to build my own thing. The honest answer is my mother.
She worked two full-time jobs for years. Nine to five Monday through Friday, then a second job Thursday through Sunday, starting at seven in the evening and running through the night. We weren't rich and we didn't live in a fancy part of town, but she got me into good schools and made sure I was around good people.
When people hear the word courage they picture something bold and cinematic. Mine has never looked like that. It has looked like staying consistent when nobody is watching, and continuing when everything is telling you to stop.
Branding is what people say when you're not in the room
We talked about what cuts through when everyone has AI and the internet is flooded with content. My answer is brand, and I don't mean logos and colours.
Branding is what people say about you when you're out of the room. Someone gets a nail in their tire and a friend says, there's a guy on 10th, been fixing my car for ten years, honest, won't jerk you around. No company name in that sentence. No logo. That's branding.
Which means every interaction is branding. Every email, every text, every time you answer the phone, every invoice you send on time or don't. What experience are people having with you, and what can they count on?
What I look for in a leader
Sacrifice, scrappiness and heart. The best leaders I've been around are there to remove obstacles for the people under them, and to improvise when the plan breaks.
Heart matters because part of winning is losing. A broken clock is right twice a day; winning consistently takes the will to get back up, look honestly at what went wrong, and fix it.
If you asked my team, I hope they'd say I'm focused on winning and that I'm patient. Those two sit together better than people expect. We build things constantly, and a first attempt almost never solves the problem. So I demand excellence and give people room to grow into it.
Watch the full episode
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Episode 296, The Courage to Lead with Coach Harlan, produced by iB4E Coaching. Published 9 December 2025. Runtime 54 minutes.
Thanks to Harlan for the conversation and for a set of questions I hadn't been asked before.
If your business only works when you're in the room, that's a structural problem rather than a personal one. Ignite Funnels exists to fix that part.
