Back to where we started.

Every business eventually needs an honest conversation with itself about what it actually is. Not what it says on the website, and not what it drifted into during a busy few years, but what it is genuinely good at and who it is genuinely for. We have just had that conversation at Creating Better, and this article sets out where it landed and why.

The short version is that Creating Better is returning to its roots as a strategic business advisory, working with owners, boards and investors on strategy, growth, turnaround and succession, with a specialist care technology practice sitting alongside. The longer version is worth telling properly, because the reasons behind the change matter more than the change itself.

How we narrowed without meaning to.

Creating Better began as a general business advisory, built on a simple idea. Someone who has spent a working life running, fixing and growing businesses can be genuinely useful to people facing the same decisions, especially when those decisions are hard and the room is quiet. Then care technology arrived and gradually took up more and more of the space. Co-founding Rainbow Sensors in 2023 took us deep into the world of sensors and connected care, the work with health, social care and housing providers grew steadily, and before long the business was describing itself as a vendor-independent sensor technology advisory.

There was nothing wrong with that work, and a great deal of it we are proud of. But descriptions have a habit of becoming boundaries. When a business tells the world it does one thing, the world believes it, and the phone stops ringing about everything else. Over time the label became smaller than the work, and smaller than the experience behind it.

Two reasons that turned out to be one.

The first reason is that the leadership work never stopped. Alongside the care technology, I was chairing a family manufacturing business through its succession, advising investors and the companies they back, and drawing every week on years spent as a group managing director with Hendrik Veder Group, as chief executive of Dundee FC, and in a retail career that started on the Sainsbury's graduate buying programme. That work was simply living under the wrong heading, and the people who might have needed it had no reason to look for it here.

The second reason is that care technology is far bigger than sensors. Anyone who followed the TEC Pathways series will know it runs from understanding the person and the place they live, through platforms, response and data, all the way to proving outcomes in terms a funder will accept. Sensors are one part of that journey, and an important one, but calling ourselves a sensor advisory undersold even the care technology work itself.

Put those two things side by side and the answer became obvious. Both halves of the business had outgrown the name we had given them, so the name had to change rather than the work.

What Creating Better is now.

Creating Better is now one company with two arms. The first is Strategic leadership, which is about running it, fixing it and growing it. It is for owners, boards and investors who need an experienced leader alongside them for a season, whether that season is a growth push, a turnaround, a sale, a succession or a gap at the top that needs filling while the right permanent answer is found. That help can be advisory, fractional or interim, and it comes from someone who has sat in the chair, made the calls and lived with the results, good and bad.

The second arm is Care technology, offering honest advice on technology in care. It stays vendor-independent, evidence-led and written in plain English, and it is delivered through Creating Better with UK Telehealthcare. It is the part of the business the sector knows us for, and it stays exactly as sharp as it has always been.

Running through both arms are the same four things we want people to feel in the room with us. We work alongside you, in the team rather than above it, with no juniors and no hand-offs. We talk straight, saying what we actually think and expecting to be argued with. We think sharply, getting to the point and then getting on with it. And we bring a quiet strength, staying calm and steady when it matters most, with the humour underneath rather than on top.

Why this matters to the people we work with.

Most advisory firms lead with their wins, and there is a place for that. But the honest truth about running businesses is that the hard days teach you far more than the easy ones. I have had to decide which people would keep their jobs when a football club went into administration. I have stood in front of a Dutch workforce and thanked the wrong people in the wrong order at my first Christmas. I have invested in stock on the strength of promises that were never kept, in markets that were not yet ready to buy.

None of that appears on a glossy slide, yet it is exactly the experience an owner needs beside them when the numbers turn, a family cannot agree on what comes next, or an investor starts asking questions nobody has good answers to. We can help in tough times because we have been in tough times, and we have learned that failure handled honestly is the most useful teacher a business ever gets.

What stays the same.

Plenty has not changed. The Creating Better name stays, as do the domain, the email addresses and the logo, which keeps its shape but has been recoloured. The new storm grey and moss green were chosen partly because they feel calm and grounded, and partly because the outdoors has always been where I do my clearest thinking. The vendor-independent stance stays, and so does the commitment to plain English and to being in the room ourselves rather than sending someone else.

One more thing stays the same. Creating Better is still being built, and that is deliberate. A business that claims to be finished has usually stopped listening, and we would rather keep shaping it around the people we work with and the problems they bring us.

Where this goes next.

Over the coming months these articles will cover the other half of the story, the strategic leadership work, alongside continuing care technology thinking. Expect honest pieces on succession, growth, recovery and the decisions that keep owners awake at night, written by someone who has lost sleep over most of them.

If you run a business, sit on a board or invest in one, and you would value a clear head alongside you for a while, we would be glad to hear from you. Sometimes the most useful conversation is simply the first one.

Harry MacLean is the Founder and Managing Director of Creating Better. He has spent his career making complicated things simpler and broken things better, and he has not finished yet. He has run businesses in Scotland and the Netherlands, led a football club through its hardest days, chaired a family manufacturer through succession and spent years helping health, social care and housing organisations get technology in care right, collecting some firm opinions and a lot of useful contacts along the way. Creating Better is where all of that comes together, and it is still being built.