Month: August 2026

This series has explored why projects stall before they start, when planning gets skipped in the rush to act. But even when a project is well-planned, there is another failure mode that is just as common, and just as avoidable. It is the question of who, exactly, is responsible for making it happen.

The accountability assumption

In a small team, a lot goes unsaid. That is often a genuine strength. Growing businesses move quickly precisely because there is less bureaucracy, fewer sign-offs, and a higher degree of mutual trust and understanding between the people involved.

But that same informality creates a particular kind of risk in project work. When responsibilities are assumed rather than agreed, when everyone believes someone else has picked up a task, and when the shared understanding of priorities turns out not to be shared at all, projects begin to drift. And often nobody notices until the drift has become a delay.

This is not a problem that only affects large organisations with complex hierarchies. In many respects it is more acute in smaller businesses, precisely because there are fewer people, roles are less defined, and the assumption of alignment runs deeper.

We’re a small team, we know what we’re doing

One of the most common things I hear at the start of a project in a growing business is some version of: we do not need a lot of process, we all know each other, we communicate well.

And it is usually true, as a general description of how the business operates day to day.

But a project is not day-to-day operations. It is a temporary, specific piece of work with its own timeline, its own dependencies, and its own demands on people who are already busy doing other things. The informal communication that keeps the business running smoothly is not the same as the structured accountability that keeps a project on track.

When those two things get confused, the results are predictable. Tasks sit in the gap between people, each assuming the other has picked them up. Decisions that need to be made wait for a conversation that never quite happens. Priorities shift without the project team being told, because nobody formally owns the communication.

The priority problem

There is a related assumption that is equally dangerous: that everyone involved in a project has the same view of how important it is, relative to everything else they are doing.

In a growing business, most people are operating at or near full capacity. When a project is added to someone’s existing responsibilities, it competes with work that has immediate, visible consequences if it is not done. The project, by contrast, has a deadline that feels further away, and consequences that are less immediate.

Without an explicit conversation about priority, and without someone actively managing the project’s claim on people’s time, the project tends to lose that competition. Not because anyone decides to deprioritise it, but because the day-to-day always feels more urgent.

This is how projects that everyone supports in principle end up being the thing that everyone is too busy to move forward in practice.

The cost of assumed alignment

The damage done by unclear accountability is often invisible at first. The project appears to be moving. People are attending meetings, tasks are being discussed, progress is being reported.

But underneath the surface, the gaps are accumulating. Actions from the last meeting have not been completed. A decision that was discussed has not actually been made. A dependency that was flagged has not been resolved.

By the time this becomes visible, the project is weeks or months behind, and the effort required to recover is significantly greater than the effort that would have been needed to prevent it.

What clear accountability actually looks like

Clarity on accountability does not require a formal project management framework or a dedicated project manager. But it does require a few deliberate habits that smaller businesses often skip in the interest of moving quickly.

It means agreeing, explicitly, who owns each workstream, and what that ownership means in practice. It means documenting decisions and actions, not to create bureaucracy, but because undocumented decisions tend to be unmade decisions. It means having a regular, structured touchpoint where progress is reviewed against commitments, not just discussed informally.

And it means someone taking responsibility for the project as a whole, not just their piece of it. In corporate settings that is the project manager’s role. In growing businesses it can be anyone, but it needs to be someone.

The value of an outside pair of eyes

One of the things external support does particularly well in project work is providing the neutral accountability that internal teams find difficult to sustain.

When everyone involved in a project is also running the business, it is genuinely hard to hold each other to account without it feeling personal. An external coordinator does not carry those dynamics. They can ask directly whether an action was completed, whether a decision has been made, whether the timeline is still realistic, in a way that keeps the project moving without damaging the relationships that the business depends on.

Accountability does not have to be uncomfortable. But it does have to exist. And in many growing businesses, ensuring it exists is one of the most valuable things an experienced outside hand can provide.

If you are running a project and finding that accountability is slipping, or if you are about to start one and want to make sure it does not, I am happy to talk through how the right support can help.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

The Operational Edge, Post 3 of 4

Most businesses treat the end of a project the same way. Relief that it is over. A brief internal conversation about what went well. A vague intention to do things differently next time.

Then next time arrives and nothing is different.

The post-event debrief is the stage of event management that most organisations compress or skip entirely, usually while still running on adrenaline and the relief of having got through it. It is also the stage that compounds the value of everything that came before it.

Two kinds of review

There is a version of the debrief that most people recognise and most people avoid. It is the one that feels like a post-mortem: what went wrong, whose fault was it, how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again. Even when framed constructively, it is uncomfortable.

The debrief I run is different in purpose, though not in structure. The question is not what went wrong. It is what did we learn. Those two questions produce completely different conversations.

The first looks for problems to fix. The second looks for patterns to carry forward, improvements to embed, and things that went well that need to be protected rather than allowed to drift.

What the debrief actually looks like

Within two to three weeks of any event, I sit down with my client to review four things: the numbers (delegate attendance against target, revenue against budget), the logistics (what worked, what created friction, what we would handle differently), the feedback gathered from delegates, and ideas for next year.

That last category is the one most people underestimate. Capturing ideas for the following year while they are still fresh is not about planning too far ahead. It is about not losing the thinking that happens in the room but never makes it into the formal record.

I keep a running note system throughout every event, logging observations in real time as they arise. Not problems necessarily, just things worth revisiting. By the time I sit down for the debrief, I have a physical record of things I noticed on the day that would otherwise have faded. Small details, things a delegate mentioned in passing, moments where something worked better than expected. All of it goes into the conversation.

The small things that last longest

A few years ago, a delegate mentioned to me in passing that the event lanyards only had names printed on one side. When they turned around, as they always do, the name became invisible. Scanning badges, making introductions: small frictions, repeated throughout the day, across every delegate.

I fixed it. Every event I have run since has had names printed on both sides.

Recently, a director at one of my events specifically thanked me for it. He had noticed. He had no idea it had come from a delegate comment several years earlier. He just knew it was a detail that had been thought about.

That is what the debrief builds over time: a layer of small, considered improvements that accumulate into an event that feels genuinely well run, rather than just well intentioned.

Listening over assuming

There is a version of the debrief that confirms what you already believed. And there is a version that challenges it.

A client had been talking for some time about growing their annual event. Bigger venue, more delegates, exhibitor space. The assumption was that bigger meant better, and that attendees would welcome the change.

Throughout the event I had been talking to delegates, gathering feedback in conversation rather than through formal surveys. The picture that emerged was the opposite of the assumption. People came back year after year specifically because of the size. The conversations were good. They met people they actually wanted to meet. They could not have done that at a larger event.

That feedback shaped the following year’s planning in a way that no survey would have captured, because it came from the right conversations at the right moment, listened to and recorded rather than assumed away.

What this means for your business

The debrief habit is not just for events. Any significant project, campaign, or period of change in a business deserves the same treatment: a structured review, conducted while the detail is still accessible, with the explicit goal of carrying forward what was learned.

What makes it hard to build as a habit is the same thing that makes it valuable: it requires you to stop, at the exact moment when the instinct is to start the next thing.

The investment is a few hours. The return is a compounding improvement in how you work, built gradually, across every project that follows.

The final post in this series draws the thread together: what event management taught me about growing a business, and why the operational thinking I built over years of running conferences is the thing I bring most directly to the clients I support through Get Ahead.

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. You can download it below.

Our Event Planning Framework

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. Do let me know if you find it useful.


The Operational Edge: Event Planning and Debrief Framework

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

Ask most people when they started using AI, and they’ll suggest it was fairly recently, usually somewhere around when ChatGPT became the thing everyone at every social gathering wanted to talk about. I’d have given you the same answer, but it turns out it was wrong. 

I hadn’t appreciated I was already comfortably using AI 

I’ve spent enough time around technology, without ever being a techie myself, to know that solutions and products and acronyms get relabelled constantly, often referring to exactly the same thing under a different name. I’m still not sure if that was complete naivety on my part or simply a lack of awareness of what these different tools and services actually were. Probably a bit of both. What I hadn’t appreciated was that AI had already quietly become part of my life long before I consciously decided to “use AI” at all. Siri answering a quick question in the car. Alexa setting a timer while my hands were full. The autoreply suggestions that finish half my emails before I’ve decided what I actually want to say. Even the design suggestions PowerPoint offered when I was preparing presentations. 

All of it AI. None of it registering as AI at the time.

It’s hard, looking back, to pin down exactly when “before AI” was. It’s probably a couple of years ago now that I first knowingly turned to it, rather than just benefiting from it in the background, but the pace that it’s integrated into working practices, makes that feel like a much longer time ago than it actually is. 

The first thing I knowingly tried was ChatGPT, because it was the tool everyone was talking about. I dabbled with it, used it, challenged it, and still do. Early on, it frustrated me more than it helped. I’d ask for suggestions, and what came back wasn’t remotely in line with what I was thinking, so I’d ask again. More than once it felt like it didn’t like my corrections, or the fact I wasn’t satisfied with the output. A regenerated go would come back quicker and shorter, seemingly pi$$ed that I hadn’t liked its first attempt. I know that’s not really what was happening. But it’s exactly how it felt, and I don’t think I’m the only one who’s had that experience. 

So it wasn’t with a grand decision to embrace new technology, but with the slow realisation that I’d been living alongside it for years without truly acknowledging that I was subconsciously embracing the tools that worked for me to make life just a little bit easier. Followed by the slightly bumpy process of learning to use it properly once I did. I want to be honest about that whole process here: the point where it properly rattled me, what I’ve learned to trust it with, and what I never will, and where I’ve landed now that the initial cautiousness has worn off. 

The moment I worried AI would give me away

Once I’d got past some of the frustrations, (talking back at me like I’d offended it), I found something in AI that was so refreshing to me: a real second pair of eyes on my own thinking, rather than interrupting someone else or waiting on their reliable feedback. But it took me longer than I’d like to admit to work out why it only helped sometimes. 

My Mum always used to say to me when I was growing up, “you only get out what you put in.” I heard it about school work, hobbies, about tidying my room, friendships. I did not expect to hear it echo quite so clearly in my head while typing prompts into my new best mate AI tool twenty-odd years later, but there it was. The quality of what came back depended entirely on how clear and specific I was about what I actually wanted. Vague in, vague out. The tool wasn’t the variable. I was. 

You only get out what you put in.

That’s been the most useful learning on its own, and in a practical sense it still is. But still, I was noticing the first iterations were annoying me further, with the noticeable fingerprints everywhere in what it produced. The over-eager emojis. The elongated dashes AI seems to reach for constantly. Small things, but obvious once you know to look for them 

And in my noticing that, especially on other content I was consuming, came a real worry that if I used AI to help shape my content, my audience, the people who follow what I write because they trust it’s actually me, would spot those tells and start wondering how much of “me” was still in there. I run a business built on people believing what I tell them, so that element of doubt crept in and I wasn’t comfortable with taking the risk.  

So, quietly, my enthusiasm for it cooled. I pulled back from anything client or audience facing and redirected it somewhere that relied less on ‘me’ when generating the output. Data. Numbers. Research. A lot of people know I have always loved Excel, in a bit of a geeky way, so double-checking pricing calculations, or getting help on formulas “help” function couldn’t cope with, felt like a solid way to embrace AI, improve efficiency and to gain trust in the process.  

This marked a real shift in how I thought about AI: not as a shortcut to lean on without thinking, but as something that needs real judgement applied to it, and to sanity check my own thinking. 

What I’ll trust AI with, and what I won’t

By the time my reservations had eased, I’d recognised that the more useful question is what I’m actually prepared to trust AI with, rather than ‘should I use AI’. 

The answer came partly from getting caught out. More than once, I’ve seen incorrect or unreliable outputs with a date wrong, or a figure that didn’t match what I knew to be true, sitting right in the middle of something that mattered. Nothing catastrophic, because I always check. But enough to teach me, firmly, that AI is not something I can hand full confidence to. It’s excellent for polishing, for proofreading, for giving me a starting point when I’m staring at a blank page. It is not something I sign off without reading properly first. 

That same caution is mirrored by some of my own clients,Some of them want their Virtual Expert nowhere near AI when it comes to writing copy or creating content. They want what lands in front of their audience to be real, unmistakably them, and they see AI-flavoured content as the fastest way to undermine that. I understand that completely, because it’s close to the exact worry I’ve felt and described. 

Others take the opposite view entirely. If a Virtual Expert who knows how to use AI well can complete a task in a quarter of the time it would take without it, that’s not a shortcut to them, it’s more value delivered, more capacity freed up, more actually gets done. The clients who think this way tend to be the ones already looking hardest at sustainable, innovative ways to grow, and AI is simply one more tool in that thinking rather than something to be nervous of. 

Neither view is wrong. What’s interesting is that both are making the same judgement I make myself, just landing in different places: where does AI help, and where does it get in the way of the thing you’re actually trying to protect? 

Part of what makes that judgement easier, for me, is being able to spot AI content that’s crossed the line into generic. You’ll have seen the the restaurant offers that turn up in every other Facebook post, with its Maccy D’s style menu that’s interchangeable and indistinguishable from a hundred others, that says nothing that actually differentiates the business behind them. That’s the version of AI I would actively avoid, and it’s a useful test I apply to my own output too. 

If it could belong to absolutely anyone, it isn’t good enough.

None of this has stopped me finding real, everyday uses for it that I wouldn’t have predicted a year or two back. Proofreading, obviously. Scheduling. Bouncing around design ideas. And, more than I expected, research and searching, to the point where it’s now often my first go to over and above a Google search. It’s earned its place in my workflow, it just hasn’t earned my full trust, and I don’t think it should. 

Be the one in the driving seat

After all of my naivety, doubt, learning and appreciation. I’m happy with how I find AI helps me, and now wonder what I’d do without it. There are things I’ve decided, firmly, to keep human (me!). A proper conversation still means picking up the phone or writing an email myself, even if that email gets a once-over for typos afterwards, which is really no different to the spellcheck and Grammarly habits I had long before any of this. Some things aren’t about efficiency. They’re about actually connecting with the person on the other end. 

That’s part of why AI phone bots unsettle me more than almost anything else in this space. Some are obvious the moment they answer, which is almost fine, because at least you know where you stand. Others are impressively good enough now that I can’t always tell whether I’m talking to a person or not, and that ambiguity is the part I struggle with. If I don’t know who or what I’m talking to, something about the whole exchange feels wrong. 

If someone starting out today asked me whether they should be worried or excited, I’d tell them to be excited. We’re living through an extraordinarily fast-moving period, and AI is there to be used to your advantage, not treated as a threat creeping up on you. It will never replace you as an individual. Your strengths, the ones that make you different from everyone else doing similar work, are exactly what will keep setting you apart, the same as they always have. AI doesn’t change that. If anything, it puts a sharper spotlight on it. 

AI gives us access to intelligence most of us could never reach without it. We can now tap into that, quickly, on demand. Used well, that doesn’t make us lazy, it makes us sharper, provided we’re the ones deciding how to use it, not the other way round. 

Driverless cars are already taking hold, and I’m not going to lie, I still get a flicker of nerves just using cruise control, so I can only imagine how my palms would sweat in a driverless car.  

So my advice, Go at your own pace. Use what helps. Stay wary of what doesn’t. 

Whatever you decide, make sure you’re still the one in the driving seat.

That’s the arc of this piece in a sentence: from not realising I was using AI at all, to worrying it might expose me, to learning exactly what I will and won’t hand over to it, and now, finally, to feeling settled in the driving seat.

Get Ahead has been named Business Support Service of the Year 2026/27 at the Prestige Awards.

Founder Rebecca Newenham collected the award, joined by Natasha Doran, one of Get Ahead’s franchisees, at a ceremony celebrating businesses across the UK and beyond.

Rebecca said:

“It’s recognition not just for me but for every single person across the Get Ahead network who shows up for our clients day in, day out.

Thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey – clients, franchisees and the wider Get Ahead family. This one’s for you!“

Rebecca singled out Natasha as someone who embodies what the award represents: hard work, a strong interest in the local business community, and a real wish to see the businesses she works with thrive.

The award also marks something of a milestone. Rebecca started Get Ahead from her kitchen table sixteen years ago. Since then it has grown into a UK-wide network, built on the same values that shaped it from day one: reliability, flexibility, and a focus on the people behind the business.

Rebecca Newenham at the Prestige Awards
ReNatasha Doran at the Prestige Awards
Rebecca Newenham at the Prestige Awards

If you’re running a growing or owner-led business and want the kind of support this award recognises, get in touch with the Get Ahead team to find out how we can help.

A room full of people who actually listen to each other is still worth more than any amount of scrolling

I hosted my first networking event in 2011, back when “networking” wasn’t something founders talked about doing strategically, it was just something you did or didn’t do. It was called Ladies at 11, launched for one of my early clients: an all-women group, membership-based, visitors welcome, monthly, with the classic elevator-pitch-round-the-room format that most business networking still ran on at the time. The business behind it folded after about eighteen months. By then I’d worked out that I loved hosting networking events far more than I’d expected to.

So I didn’t stop. Ladies at 11 morphed into a partnership with The Best Of Guildford to become Guildford Ladies, another all-women, paid, structured group, which I ran alongside Sally Castro-Gouveia for several years. Around the same time I helped Paul Bridgland get Connect Surrey off the ground: fortnightly breakfast networking, paid membership, elevator pitches again. Different rooms, different formats, but the same underlying instinct each time. Get people talking to each other properly, and good things tend to follow.

Where the free, informal version came from

In 2019 I noticed something the paid, structured model wasn’t covering. I’d been along to LinkedIn Local Farnham and liked how informal it felt against everything I’d run up to that point. No membership fee, no pitch round, just people who’d connected online finally meeting face to face. I brought the format to Guildford, and it grew quickly enough that we soon outgrew our first venue.

With that growth came the realisation that I had a great way to put a spotlight on local venues that deserved more footfall. Over the years we’ve built genuine partnerships with a real range of venues: hotels like The Harbour, the Holiday Inn and The Mandolay, pubs and clubs, co-working spaces, restaurants and cafes such as Mandira’s Kitchen, even a care home and a golf club. The full list is probably a post of its own, but the aim behind it hasn’t changed: give a local venue a room full of potential new customers, and give the meeting itself a fresh setting each time.

Another interesting change came a little later. Those early LinkedIn Local meetings were all evenings, and I started noticing who wasn’t in the room anymore: many of the women who’d been core to Ladies at 11 and Guildford Ladies simply weren’t showing up. So we added morning meetings. They turned out to be some of the most successful sessions we run, especially for women, and it’s probably the single change I’m proudest of making to the format over the years.

This was also the catalyst for Get Connected, set up by our Get Ahead Regional Directors Kristy Roff and Suzanne Evett. In collaboration with Metro Bank the Get Ahead team now run more than twenty free networking meetings a month across the country.

Keeping the room together through lockdown

When lockdown hit, I made a decision that shaped everything that came after. Rather than let years of momentum and connection quietly evaporate, I moved LinkedIn Local entirely online. We used Zoom’s breakout room function, with trusted regulars hosting their own rooms, and one of our GAVA Virtual Experts facilitating in the background so the technology never got in the way of the conversation.

Networking during Lockdown. That could have been a Talking Heads song...

(Networking during Lockdown by Talking Heads)

Those online meetings became a genuine monthly highlight for a lot of people, at a point when very little else was. They also did something I hadn’t expected: they pulled in people from well beyond Guildford, since geography stopped being a barrier the moment the meeting was on a screen rather than in a room. When lockdown finally ended, we came back in person with a community that had properly bonded through a difficult stretch of time together. If anything, we came back stronger than we went in.

What’s stayed the same

A handful of small habits have become part of the fabric of these meetings over time, and I don’t think any of them were planned so much as noticed and kept. Handwritten name badges rather than printed ones. Someone on the door at every meeting, so nobody arrives and has to work out where to stand on their own. An explicit no-pitching rule. None of it is dramatic, but it adds up to a room people come back to because they made a friend last time, not just a contact. That’s really the belief underneath all of it: these meetings are about connections and friendships first, and business, when it comes, comes as a byproduct rather than the point.

Vicki Moore is a wonderful example. She runs a branded chocolate bar business called All About The Wrapper, and I met her at a Guildford networking meeting years ago. She’s become a truly supportive friend since, not just a name in my contacts list.

Client relationships have started the same way. KJ Smith are one I can name, with our first meeting in a LinkedIn Local room rather than through anything that looked like a sales conversation.

What founders get wrong about networking

The two mistakes I see most often are related. Some people arrive expecting to walk out with business in hand from the first meeting, and get discouraged when that doesn’t happen. Others get so anxious about their own thirty seconds, wherever the format still calls for a pitch, that they stop listening to anyone else’s. Both come from treating the room as a transaction rather than a relationship.

The other thing I’d tell any founder starting out is that not every networking event suits every person. Some people thrive somewhere more formal, BNI is the obvious example, and that’s completely fine. Part of getting real value from networking is finding the room that actually suits how you work, rather than assuming the first one you try is the one that should fit.

The bit I don’t usually say out loud

One honest downside: some people assume that hosting is simply my job, something I do because it’s work rather than because I choose to. It isn’t, and managing that assumption, gently and repeatedly, is something I still have to work on.

Still evolving

In the last few years we’ve introduced sponsorship into the format, and put real thought into it. We built a proper sponsor pack, designed to help a sponsoring business get the most out of what’s still a small investment. It works because the audience behind it is real: our Linked In page alone has grown to nearly three thousand followers, and our mailing list means a sponsor gets seen well beyond whoever happens to be in the room that day. It’s a way of keeping the free, no-pitching spirit of the meetings intact while still giving something back to the businesses that help make them possible.

Our evolution hasn’t stopped. We’ve recently gone live with our new Link Up brand, the next step on a journey rather than a departure from anything that came before it. The name changes. The reason I keep turning up consistently for every meeting doesn’t.

Fifteen years on from a hired room in Guildford and a membership-only ladies’ group, my conservative estimate is that I have hosted in excess of 250 networking meetings in that time. The thing that hasn’t changed since 2011 is the reason I keep doing it. A room full of people who actually listen to each other is still worth more than any amount of scrolling.

In my last piece, I wrote about the missing keystone in change projects: the coordination layer that so often determines whether a programme moves or quietly drifts. Today I want to go one step further back, to the moment before any of that coordination begins.

Because in many cases, the real problem starts even earlier.

The pull towards doing

There is a particular kind of pressure that exists in smaller businesses. It is the pressure to be seen to be moving.

When a decision gets made, a new system, a process change, a restructure, the instinct is to start immediately. To assign tasks, hold a kick-off, begin. Planning can feel like a delay. A luxury. Something larger organisations do because they have the time and the people, but not something a growing business needs to spend weeks on.

I understand that instinct. In fast-moving businesses, momentum matters, and stopping to plan can feel like losing it.

But in my experience, both in large-scale corporate programmes and in the work I do with growing businesses across Yorkshire, skipping the planning phase does not save time. It borrows it, at a very high rate of interest.

What planning actually means

When I was working in Sales and Operations Planning at Morrisons, the entire discipline was built around one idea: before you commit to doing something, you need to understand what it will actually require.

Not in theory. In practice.

What are the resource implications? What does it cost, fully, not optimistically? Who is affected, and how? What has to stop, or slow down, in order for this to happen? What does success actually look like, and how will you know when you have reached it?

These are not complicated questions. But they are uncomfortable ones, because answering them honestly sometimes means adjusting the scope, the timeline, or the ambition of a project before it has even begun.

In large organisations, there are people whose job it is to ask these questions. Project managers, finance business partners, operational planners. They slow things down deliberately, because they know what happens when those questions do not get asked.

In most growing businesses, nobody has that role. And so the questions do not get asked, or they get answered quickly and optimistically, in a meeting where everyone is already committed to the idea.

The compounding cost of under-planning

The consequences show up later, and they compound.

A project scoped without proper resource planning runs out of capacity halfway through. A budget set without understanding the full cost of change gets exceeded before the hard work has even started. A timeline built without accounting for business-as-usual pressures slips, then slips again, until the original deadline becomes a source of embarrassment rather than a milestone.

And because the planning was not done at the start, each of these problems has to be solved in real time, under pressure, by people who are already stretched.

The project that was supposed to reduce the load on the leadership team ends up adding to it.

Why this happens more in smaller businesses

It would be easy to frame this as a discipline problem, as though business owners simply need to slow down and think more carefully. But that is not quite right.

The real driver is structural. In smaller businesses, fewer people are involved in any given decision, and roles are often less clearly defined. There is no one whose specific job is to challenge the plan before it becomes a commitment. The person who had the idea is often also the person leading the project, which makes it psychologically difficult to pump the brakes.

There is also a resource tension that is different from the corporate environment. In a large organisation, a planning phase has dedicated time and people attached to it. In a growing business, planning competes directly with the day-to-day work of running the business. It rarely wins that competition.

So projects begin underprepared, not through carelessness, but through a combination of pressure, structure, and the very real demands of keeping everything else moving at the same time.

What good planning looks like in a growing business

The answer is not to import a corporate planning process wholesale. That would be its own kind of mistake: too slow, too formal, and disconnected from the pace at which smaller businesses actually operate.

But there is a middle ground. A planning phase that is proportionate, practical, and focused on the questions that genuinely matter before work begins.

At minimum, that means being clear on scope: what is in this project, and what is deliberately out of it. It means understanding the resource picture honestly, who is doing what, alongside what else, and whether that is actually feasible. It means having a realistic view of cost that accounts for the indirect and hidden implications of change, not just the headline numbers. And it means agreeing what done looks like before anyone starts moving.

None of that requires a planning department. But it does require someone to hold the space for those conversations, and to keep holding it when the urge to just get on with it becomes hard to resist.

The value of an outside perspective

One of the things I find most useful when working with clients on change projects is simply being the person who asks the uncomfortable questions at the start.

Not to slow things down for the sake of it. But because I have seen enough projects, both at scale and in smaller businesses, to know which questions, left unanswered, tend to cause the most damage later.

An external perspective also helps with a problem that is surprisingly common in owner-led businesses: the difficulty of challenging your own assumptions when you are also the person most invested in the outcome.

Good planning is not pessimism. It is the work that makes everything that follows more likely to succeed.

Before the doing, the thinking

The urge to do is understandable. In growing businesses especially, action feels like progress, and planning can feel like its opposite.

But the projects I have seen succeed, at every scale and in every sector, share a common characteristic. Someone, at the beginning, made the time to ask the hard questions. To understand what the project would actually require. To make the plan before making the commitment.

That step does not guarantee success. But skipping it makes failure significantly more likely.

And the cost of going back to do the planning that was not done at the start, once a project is already in motion, already over budget, already behind, is always higher than doing it properly in the first place.

If you are approaching a change project and want to make sure the planning is solid before work begins, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team can support the full planning phase, from scoping and resource planning to cost modelling and stakeholder mapping, as well as the delivery that follows.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

The Operational Edge, Post 2 of 4

Events have a way of expanding to fill all available time. That is not a criticism of events. It is a structural problem with how most businesses approach them.

The issue is rarely that running an event is too difficult. It is that the wrong people end up running it. And when the wrong people are managing the logistics, the right people stop doing what they are actually there to do.

The question that has to come first

Before any venue is booked or speaker is confirmed, there is one question that determines whether an event will be worth the investment: why are you running it, and how will you know if it worked?

I have seen events drift badly because nobody agreed this upfront. Marketing runs with enthusiasm. The original commercial objective gets diluted. Nobody is quite sure, afterwards, whether the event was a success or not, because nobody agreed what success looked like at the start.

This is the first conversation I have with any client. Not what do you want, but why do you want it. Delegate numbers. Leads generated. Relationships deepened. Profile raised with a specific audience. Agreeing this at the commissioning stage is what makes every subsequent decision easier, and what gives you something meaningful to review in the debrief.

The mistake that costs the most

A client I work with is now in its fifth year of running an annual conference. I did not run the first year. They did, using their own marketing and business development team.

They swore never to do that again.

Not because the event failed. It did not. But their business development team, the people whose job is to build relationships and convert conversations into business, spent the event day running logistics. Checking people in. Managing the catering. Pointing delegates to the right room. None of that is what a business development team is for.

The event happened. The return on the event did not.

The real cost of running an event yourself is rarely whether it goes smoothly. It is your best people doing the wrong job at exactly the moment when doing the right job matters most.

The decisions only you should make

There are things in any event that should not be delegated. Agreeing the budget and who has final sign-off. Deciding why the event is being run and what a successful outcome looks like. Choosing the format and the audience. These are strategic decisions that belong with whoever owns the commercial objective.

Everything else is operational. Venue liaison, delegate communications, logistics, supplier management, on-site coordination: all of it is delegatable. More than that, it needs to be delegated if the people who should be working the room are going to be free to do so.

What trust looks like when it builds

One of the most meaningful moments in a long client relationship came at the end of an event I had been running annually for several years. The director who had commissioned the work thanked his team, then mentioned, in passing, that he had had nothing to do with the event that year. He had simply arrived as a delegate.

He said it as a compliment.

In the early years of our working relationship, he had been closely involved in every decision. He wanted to understand the process, check the detail, stay across the logistics. That is entirely reasonable when you are entrusting something important to someone new.

By year three, we had developed a shorthand. If I swapped two speaker slots the day before, I sent him a brief note. No explanation required. He had enough experience of how I worked to know that if I had made a change, there was a reason for it.

That level of trust does not come from a contract. It comes from consistently doing what you say you will do, communicating only what the other person actually needs to know, and not creating work for them when the situation does not require it.

What this means for your business

Owner-led businesses often underestimate how much they are carrying themselves. Not because they have not thought about delegation, but because explaining something and managing someone else doing it can feel like more effort than doing it themselves.

Sometimes that calculation is right. For routine, low-stakes tasks, perhaps.

For an event, it is almost never right. The preparation required to brief someone properly is an investment that pays back on the day, when your commercial team are free to do what they are actually there for.

The next post in this series takes a slightly different angle: not what happens during an event, but what happens after. Specifically, the debrief most businesses skip, and why skipping it costs more than it saves.

The first post in this series, which discusses the planning required for a successful event, is here.

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

Understanding your brand voice

Your brand voice is the personality of your business expressed through communications. It is the way you sound across every touchpoint: your website, emails, proposals, social media, marketing campaigns, customer service, internal updates and day-to-day conversations. Even podcasts! Your voice shapes how people perceive your brand, what you stand for and why they should trust you.

Voice is the consistent character behind your communications, while tone is how that voice changes depending on the situation. A brand needs to be clear, confident and helpful, but the tone used in a sales brochure will naturally feel different from the tone used in a customer apology, a LinkedIn post or an internal announcement. We can help you to understand the difference. Our experts are UK based and ready to meet on-line or in person if feasible. They understand the terminology needed to succeed in the marketplace.

Why voice matters in business

A strong brand voice helps a business communicate with clarity, consistency and confidence. When every piece of communication feels joined up, customers and clients know what to expect. That consistency builds recognition, strengthens trust and makes the business feel more credible, memorable and human. Helping you to seamlessly achieve your goals.

It also helps teams work more effectively. Clear tone of voice guidance gives people a shared way to write and speak on behalf of the brand, whether they are creating marketing content, responding to clients, pitching for new work, managing social media or communicating internally. It reduces guesswork, speeds up approvals and makes every message feel more purposeful. Read our blog to find out more about tone of voice and creating guidelines.

Building effective communications with your organisation’s voice

Effective communication starts with understanding how you want your organisation to be perceived. Your organisation’s voice gives every message a clear foundation, helping you turn business goals into content that speaks with clarity. From campaign headlines and landing pages to email marketing, social media posts and sales materials, a defined brand voice helps your marketing work harder because it gives people a familiar way to connect with you.

When communications are SEO-led, the aim is not just to include keywords. It is to create useful, well-structured content that answers the questions your audience is already asking. By combining search insight with a friendly, human tone of voice, you can improve visibility while still sounding like your organisation. The result is content that feels helpful to readers and clear to search engines.

  • Start with the audience: understand their needs, questions and decision-making journey.
  • Use the right keywords naturally: build search terms into headings, introductions and body copy without losing warmth or clarity.
  • Keep the voice consistent: make sure every channel sounds recognisably like your organisation.
  • Adapt the tone: use a more reassuring tone for service updates, a more persuasive tone for campaigns and a more conversational tone for social media.
  • Make every message useful: focus on clear value, practical information and a strong next step.
UK based experts, who understand your business

To discover how our team can help you find your voice with our outstanding UK based virtual experts – get in contact to speak with someone who listens and makes the best of your business.

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 3 OF 4

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support. 

One of the things buyers get asked most often, in my experience, is why they said no. 

Not to a bad product. Not to something obviously wrong for the range. But to something that, on the surface, looked perfectly reasonable. Good quality. Competitive price. A supplier with a solid track record. And still, the answer was no. 

The reason is almost always the same: it was right, but it wasn’t right for us. For now. For this customer. For this part of the range. The product itself wasn’t the problem. The fit was. 

Learning to make that distinction clearly, and to trust it even when the pressure was on to say yes, is one of the most valuable things a buying career teaches you. 

Good product, wrong fit – the most expensive mistake in buying 

In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you eIn retail buying, ‘good product, wrong fit’ is one of the most common and most costly errors a team can make. It happens when the selection process focuses on the product in isolation rather than in context. Is it well made? Yes. Is it priced correctly? Yes. Will our customers want it, in this store, at this moment? That’s the question that gets skipped. 

The consequences show up a few months later. Slow sales. High stock levels. Markdown pressure. The product takes up space that a better-fitting product could have occupied, and the margin takes a hit that could have been avoided. Not because the product was poor, but because it was chosen for the wrong context. 

The discipline of evaluating fit over features, of asking ‘is this right for us?’ rather than just ‘is this good?’, is something that has to be actively maintained. There is always pressure to fill a gap, to take the available option, to move the process forward. Standing still long enough to properly assess fit requires confidence in the judgment and a willingness to be patient when patience feels uncomfortable. 

When I walk away from something I like 

Some of the decisions I’m most comfortable with in my buying career are the ones where I said no to something I genuinely liked. 

Not products that were obviously wrong. But products that were interesting, well-presented, commercially attractive, and still not the right fit for what we needed. Walking away from those required a kind of discipline that got easier with practice but never became entirely comfortable. There’s always a part of you that wonders whether you made the right call. 

In retail, I walked away from products I liked all the time. Not because they were wrong, but because they were wrong for us, for now. That judgment is one of the most valuable things buying taught me. 

What made it easier was having a clear picture of what ‘right fit’ actually looked like. Not a vague sense that something wasn’t quite right, but a specific understanding of the customer, the range gap, the context into which a product needed to fit. The clearer that picture was, the more confident the no became

Fit over features in business support 

The same principle applies, with striking consistency, to the work I do now. 

When a business owner is looking for a Virtual Expert, the temptation is to focus on the capability list. Can they do social media? Bookkeeping? Executive assistant work? Those are the features. They matter, but they don’t determine fit. 

Fit is about something more specific: whether this person, with this particular style of working, will actually mesh well with this business owner, at this stage of their business. Whether their pace matches the pace of the business. Whether their communication style will work in a remote relationship with limited briefing time. Whether they’ll ask the right questions or wait to be told what to do. 

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW 

It’s worth naming this directly, because there are now platforms that use AI to match businesses with freelance support based on skills, availability, and budget. They’re efficient. They remove friction from the process. And they are, almost entirely, feature-matching rather than fit-matching. 

They can tell you who can do the work. They can’t tell you who will work well with you. That judgment – the quieter, more contextual, more human assessment of fit – is something that still requires a conversation. And it’s one of the reasons the matching conversation matters as much as it does. 

A Virtual Expert who is talented, experienced, and highly capable can still be the wrong fit for a particular business. And a wrong fit, even with the best intentions on both sides, tends to produce frustration rather than results. The hours get spent. The tasks get done. But the relationship never quite settles, and the business owner ends the arrangement without being entirely sure what went wrong. 

What went wrong, almost always, is that the fit wasn’t properly assessed at the start.  

Why the right fit protects everyone 

Getting fit right at the outset isn’t just good for the client. It’s good for the Virtual Expert, and it’s good for the working relationship between them. 

A well-matched arrangement allows a Virtual Expert to do their best work. They understand the business, they understand the owner’s priorities, and they can contribute with genuine confidence rather than constantly second-guessing whether they’re approaching things the right way. That confidence is good for the work and good for the relationship. 

A poorly matched arrangement does the opposite. It creates friction that nobody wanted and that drains energy from both sides. No amount of goodwill on either side fully compensates for a fundamental mismatch in working style or expectation. 

This is why the conversation I have with business owners before any matching happens matters so much. Not because I’m trying to complicate a simple process, but because taking the time to understand the context, the business, and what ‘right fit’ actually looks like in this specific situation is what makes everything that follows more likely to work. 

A Final Thought

Buying taught me to trust the no as much as the yes. 

Not every good thing is the right thing. Not every capable person is the right person for every role. Fit matters more than features, and knowing when something doesn’t fit, even when it looks good on paper, is a skill worth developing. 

For business owners making decisions about support, the question worth asking isn’t just ‘can they do the work?’ It’s ‘will this actually work, for us, right now?’ Those are different questions. And the second one is the one that matters most. 

If you’d like to think through what the right fit for your business might actually look like, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. I’m always happy to explore it with you

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. 

Next in the series: The Weight of the Decision.

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

  1. The Art of the Brief
  2. Relationships are the Real Margin
  3. Knowing when Something doesn’t fit
  4. The Weight of the Decision

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 4 OF 4

Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support. 

There’s a particular feeling I remember from the end of a range sign-off meeting. 

The decisions have been made. The spreadsheets are updated. The suppliers have been briefed. And then, in the quiet after the meeting, comes the weight of it. The awareness that those decisions will show up on shop floors across the country in a few months’ time. That customers will engage with them, or they won’t. That the business will make money from them, or it won’t. That your judgment was sound, or it wasn’t. 

No one talks about that feeling very much in a corporate buying environment. The culture tends to reward confidence and forward momentum. But the weight is always there, underneath. And over time, I came to think of it not as a burden but as information. A signal that the decisions mattered. That the accountability was real. 

What high-stakes decision-making actually feels like 

InSenior buying roles involve a particular kind of pressure that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. You’re making decisions that will affect stock levels across hundreds of stores, supplier relationships, hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment, and ultimately the trading performance of categories that the business depends on. You’re doing this with incomplete information, under time pressure, often in the face of conflicting signals from the market. 

The decisions themselves are rarely straightforward. The data gives you part of the picture. Your instinct gives you another part. The brief you’ve established, the relationships you’ve built, the context you’ve accumulated over years in a sector, all of that feeds into a judgment call that is, ultimately, yours to make. 

You get better at it. But you never stop feeling the weight of it. And I think that’s right. The moment a decision stops feeling weighty is probably the moment you’ve stopped taking it seriously enough. 

Why that experience changes how I listen 

When a business owner sits down with me and starts to describe what’s going on in their business, I notice things that I’m not sure I would have noticed without those years in buying roles. 

I notice when someone is carrying more than they’re saying. The slight tension in how they describe a situation that they’re framing as manageable. The decisions they mention in passing that are clearly not small at all. The gap between how things look from the outside and how they’re actually feeling from the inside. 

Running a growing business involves a version of the same pressure I experienced in senior buying roles: high-stakes decisions, incomplete information, real accountability, and often very few people around you who truly understand the weight of what you’re carrying. The specifics are different. The texture of it is remarkably similar. 

When you’ve sat in rooms making decisions that affect entire product ranges and entire teams, you understand what business owners are carrying. That’s not something you read about. It’s something you feel. 

That recognition matters, I think, in the conversations I have with clients. Not because I want to project my own experience onto theirs, every business is different, and every business owner’s situation is specific to them. But because having genuinely experienced that kind of pressure means I don’t underestimate it. I don’t treat the mental load of running a business as a side issue or a lifestyle complaint. It’s a real thing, with real consequences, that deserves a real response. 

The difference between support that completes tasks and support that eases the load 

There’s a version of business support that is essentially transactional. Tasks come in, tasks go out. The diary gets managed, the inbox gets sorted, the social media gets scheduled. Everything on the list gets done. And the business owner is still, somehow, exhausted at the end of the week. 

That’s not because the support wasn’t competent. It’s because the support was addressing the visible surface of the problem rather than the underlying one. The tasks were getting done, but the mental load wasn’t shifting. The decisions were still all sitting with one person. The weight hadn’t moved. 

Good support does something different. It doesn’t just take tasks off a list. It takes decisions off a desk. A Virtual Expert who truly understands a business can start to carry some of the cognitive weight of running it: anticipating what’s needed before being asked, flagging things that need attention, making judgment calls within their area of responsibility so the business owner doesn’t have to make every one themselves. 

That shift, from task completion to genuine decision support, is where business support becomes genuinely valuable. It requires a level of trust that takes time to build. But when it’s there, the difference is significant, not just in what gets done, but in how the business owner feels at the end of the week. 

On asking for help 

One of the things I noticed in corporate buying environments is how rarely people asked for help openly. The culture rewarded self-sufficiency, confidence, the appearance of having everything under control. Asking for support felt like admitting a gap, which felt like weakness, which felt like professional risk. 

It took me a while to understand that the opposite is true. The most commercially effective people I’ve worked with have been the ones who are clearest about what they know and what they don’t, about where they need input and where they can run independently. That clarity isn’t weakness. It’s good judgment about how to deploy limited resources, including your own energy and attention, for maximum effect. 

For business owners, I think the same reframe is worth making. Bringing in support isn’t a sign that the business is struggling. It’s a sign that the business is being run well. It’s the decision to direct your energy toward the things only you can do, and to trust capable people with the things they can do better or faster than you. 

That’s not giving something up. It’s making a smart call about where the real value of your time lies. 

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW 

A word on AI, since it’s increasingly part of the conversation about how businesses reduce the pressure of decision-making. Used well, it genuinely helps: better information, faster analysis, more options surfaced more quickly. I use it myself and I think the businesses that learn to work with it thoughtfully will have a real advantage. 

But it doesn’t carry the weight. It doesn’t feel the accountability. And it can’t make the judgment calls that depend on context, relationship, and the kind of accumulated experience that comes from years of getting decisions right and wrong. 

The decisions that matter most in a growing business, the ones about people, direction, investment, trust, still need a human in the room. Someone who understands what’s at stake, who will sit with the discomfort of uncertainty, and who will own the outcome. AI can support that person. It can’t replace them. 

Which is, in its own way, an argument for exactly the kind of support this series has been exploring: the right people, chosen carefully, trusted over time. 

A Final Thought

Retail taught me that the weight of a decision is proportional to what’s at stake. And what’s at stake, when you’re running a business you’ve built, is considerable. 

The business owners I work with are carrying real responsibility. Real pressure. Real accountability. Not to a line manager or a trading director, but to themselves, to the people who work with them, and to the clients who depend on them. 

That deserves to be taken seriously. And the right support, brought in at the right time, is one of the most practical and most honest responses to it. 

Not because you can’t manage alone. But because you don’t have to. 

If you’re carrying more than you should be, and you’d like to explore what the right support could look like for your business, I’d love to have that conversation. 

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. 

Next in the series: Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit. 

What Retail Taught Me About Business

What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.

  1. The Art of the Brief
  2. Relationships are the Real Margin
  3. Knowing when Something doesn’t fit
  4. The Weight of the Decision