If you are providing a scarce and valuable product, service and or relationship, why would you allow your client agreeement to be commoditised into a boilerplate language by Finance or Procurement?
Commodity Agreements
July 14th, 2026Staying In The Fight
July 13th, 2026
When two phenomenal servers meet in a Wimbledon Final, as Sinner and Zverev did yesterday, it is not hard to visualise success or failure is going to come down to a very small number of points. The margins of error are very tight.
In a business setting, particularly in front of a prospective client or investors, a small pool of elite individuals thrive, in those ultra competitive and tight “win/loss” situations, and the great masses fail or walk away blaming their lack of resilience on others’ shortcomings.
While skills, behaviours and expertise, are a huge deciding factor, I observe that the ability to maintain a positive mindset when you are “losing” and the requisite resilience, is the deciding factor. In tennis commenators such as Andre Agassi refer to it as doing what you have to do, to “stay in the fight”.
In tennis, you cannot win if you don’t do everthing to return the serve into the opponent’s court, preferably exerting pressure on the server’s game.
In a business or investment setting, give the other party a reason to challenge their assumptions, provide instant and compelling value, and offer pushback without fear of losing the business.
Play to win, not to lose. You might just surprise yourself with your “win-loss” ratio.
The Best Places To Live
June 29th, 2026
I am often asked having lived in nine cities on four continents in my adult life, “where is the best place that you have lived?”
My retort is comparisons are fruitless.
Indeed, I tell them “everywhere is as good as people that you meet at that time”. The work colleagues, friends, friends of friends, business acquaintances, fellow club members, visitors, school parents, the newsagent, gallerist or doorman, who gives a wave and so on.
In the late nineties while living in a loft conversion on 86th and Amsterdam in New York, one such figure was Andrew Gould. He resembled a seventies CBGB’s rocker with a receding hairline but a razor sharp Brooklyn wit. The ability to make a bitchy comment laced with a heartwarming smile. Andrew would stick his head out of the door on my walk home from his Upper West Side hair salon, New York Hair, and shout “Look at the Brit swagger!” The heads of his predominatly Jewish clientele, would swivel and he smile at them, “he loves it”. Andrew, friend of Ronnie Wood and assorted artists, and married to an adorable wife, Molly, just made life living in New York, fun every time you passed his place. I’d go back to his salon long after leaving New York just for the acid wit. Cruelly, the party ended tragically early for him in the early 2000s, as cancer claimed him. “Life’s a bitch, don’t you know it…” he would opine. No, you my friend made living in New York for a newly installed Brit expat, a one-of-a-kind experience.
The Entrepreneur’s Business Plan Sprint
June 25th, 2026
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S BUSINESS PLAN SPRINT
Summer Offer (available for all inbound inquiries to 31st August): In 90 days we create a complete, professional business proposal with guidance to advisers and/or investors. This will include your marketing platform, competitive analysis, presentation, and so on. I’ve had dozens of business plans result from prior Business Plan Sprints. I provide group and individual feedback based on regular assignments and we meet via Zoom. Fee: £3,999 (USD/EUR equivalent) plus taxes. Finally write, get that business plan in front of your ideal partners including investors, and convert interest into closed commitments fast. Write to me to apply: james@elliceconsulting.com I am beginning on 1st September the next cohort and I already have interest from people in Europe, US and Asia. All sessions are also recorded.
Uncommon Investment Talk
June 25th, 2026
Most first private investment conversations start with “we/I need A, in B timeframe, at C anticipated valuation for D needs, and E terms and conditions”. I can often count to “J” or “T” before there is any highly-personalised articulation of their ideal incoming investor(s) self-interests, and the discernible alignment with the potential investor’s financial capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital and social capital.
In an AI-world of OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity-generated investment pitches, decks and scripted processes, why are seller(s) first impressions so underwhelming? Assuming that you are speaking to a genuine seller, not a gatekeeper:
Talent and judgement.
“Talent” in the form of critical thinking, absolute credibility, the ability to build a seductive rapport and a compelling risk-adjusted return.
“Judgement” in the form of understanding the potential investor’s comfort zones and brevity. Only asking and answering those critical questions that lead to the potential investor’s “lightning diagnosis”. Nothing more.
The “human touch” assisted by AI, not AI assisted by the human touch.
More genuine investor interest and confidence is lost in the first 5 minutes than in days and weeks of follow-on investment conversations.
The Intergenerational Wealth Transfer
May 29th, 2026
If you buy the $5 trillion baby boomer market opportunity, are you optimising the transfer of your clients’ assets or the transfer of your clients’ resilience?
There is a huge difference.
Most expert commentary focuses on the “assets” as if it will occur in a linear fashion when all the evidence today suggests that it will occur at a time that the heirs to the baby boomer wealth, are highly vulnerable to shocks and disruption (aggressive IHT changes, wealth taxation, currency instability and geopolitical changes).
The Authority
May 21st, 2026
In a world where social media has promulgated millions of so-called “experts”, it is time now as the smartest linguist I know, Alan Weiss, stated this week, to raise the bar. If you are in professional services, financials services, business services and are not seeking to be known as, quoted and cited as, and seen as, “The Authority” in your field, you are not trying hard enough. You need a new Personal Strategy.
With due attribution:
- Who do you want to be in a year? Known as the Authority to……
- What do you want to be doing in support of you want to be? (referrals, networking, speaking, publishing, hosting private events, Board or Charitable leadership roles etc)
- What do you need to move from where you are to what you’ve described? (what must you maintain/contine to support, what must you improve, what must you jettison, what must you acquire. Pick a small list, schedule in calendars, and start immediately).
Investing to Win
May 11th, 2026
The entrepreneurial risk-taking journey is not for everyone but one critical reason is often overlooked. The propensity of owner-managers to overestimate their ability to manage risks they are taking today and underestimate what can go wrong at the point of realising wealth.
When the risk-taker uses the business as a personal “cash machine” to fund their lifestyle (salary, dividends, drawings tec) a form of co-dependency arises until there is a weird screeching halt at the point of, and post, a sale of the business.
That familiar replenishing cash machine is no longer, you are now exclusively in the investment management business.
Yet a great many small and mid-sized business owners are not good managers of their own personal capital (cash, credit and investment), and many are poorly advised. They leave it too late to change their own mindset, and behaviour and preparation for their new life.
They act like gamblers rather investing to win.
It is like the guy who wins on the first race at the horse racing track but who freely gives it all back and more to the bookies while entertaining his friends, and walks out a loser after the last race.
If you are serious about building, nurturing and realising business wealth for a long and improved life, you need the discipline and skills of a professional investor not a punter.
Times Like These
March 26th, 2026
What are you doing in your business to turn current national and international volatility and disruption into attack? Clients feeling the force of oil, energy and fertilizer supply chain disruption and dramatic overhead rises, wildly swinging forecasts of lower to rising costs of capital, private credit gaiting and stress, AI-driven job losses, US government intervention in marine insurance, the increasing forecasts of stagflation in major global economies etc.
As the 2002-version of Dave Grohl’s hit record “Times Like These“, pronounced a return to hope, giving and loving, what are you doing right now to
- help your clients learn to live again (risk-taking decisions)
- give new and high-value reciprocal help (leads, insights and ideas)
- make them love you again (creating sticky clients and increased loyalty).
If the answer is not clear perhaps your strongest competitors are building a hidden advantage in the next 12 months? Can you afford the risk?
Checking In
March 23rd, 2026
A reminder today talking to a friend and business acquaintance separated from his family while working in Abu Dhabi after 3 weeks of sporadic missile alerts on his phone, and a constant need to quickly take “cover”.
The power of “checking in” on others’ wellbeing remains vastly underrated.
The sound of a familiar voice, offers of help with no expectations in return or sharing a little humour, are invaluable.
Who does this remind you that you promised yourself to call but haven’t for whatever reason? Why delay any further?