Thirty years of getting it wrong enough to learn something.

I have started a Substack. I appreciate that in 2026 this is roughly as surprising as Trump announcing another invasion of a country with oil reserves, but bear with me, because the reasons are better than the announcement.

For thirty years I have run businesses, fixed businesses and occasionally watched businesses do things nobody could have imagined they’d do. I have been a graduate buyer at Sainsbury’s, which taught me that a supply chain was little more than a fight for pallet space in a warehouse. I was chief executive of Dundee FC, where success was measured in survival and how quickly that’s forgotten. Fifteen years on I recently sat down and recorded a podcast about it, partly to set the record straight and mostly to let it go, and I can report that it is possible to find some peace about a football club, though it takes a decade and a half and a microphone. I spent seven years with a Dutch company that made lifting slings, first in the UK and then as the first non-Dutch member of its board in the Netherlands, which is a sentence I never expected to write, and I chaired a family manufacturing business through a succession that’s going from strength to strength today, a result I would put up against most of the things on my CV.

Along the way I co-founded a sensor technology company and later sold my share of it, I have advised investors, boards and owners in more sectors than is strictly sensible, and I have spent the last few years working in and around health, social care, housing and the third sector, which is where the care technology arm of Creating Better now lives.

What all of that taught me

Mostly that the lessons are the same whether the thing in front of you is a football club, a factory or a care service. Understand the business properly. Decide with the 80% information you actually have rather than the information you wish you had. Stay long enough to find out whether it worked and never, under any circumstances, let the exciting part of a project decide the boring part.

That last one is the thread running through most of my disasters. The exciting part is the product, the deal, the technology, the new thing. The boring part is the baseline, the definition of success, the question of who is going to do what on a Tuesday morning when the consultants have gone home. I have watched a great many good ideas die because the exciting part was allowed to run ahead, and I’ve seen so many people watch the exciting part only to be run over by the boring bus.

So the writing is going to be about the boring part, told as entertainingly as I can manage.

Why Substack, and why now

Creating Better is being rebuilt as what it was always meant to be, a strategic business advisory for owners and boards, with a specialist care technology practice alongside it. That is a story worth telling slowly, and a fortnightly piece arriving in people’s inboxes is a better way to tell it than a website that most people visit once and a LinkedIn feed that forgets everything by mid-afternoon coffee break.

The Substack runs in three sections. Strategy covers growth, leadership and the decisions every board faces whatever sector it sits in. Care, Housing and Third Sector looks at the pressures, funding and choices particular to health, social care, housing and third sector organisations. Care Technology is vendor independent thinking on technology enabled care, starting with the person and the service rather than the device.

Everyone who subscribes gets all three, because in my experience the people who most need the strategy pieces are usually the ones who think they only need the technology ones.

What you can expect

A new piece every other Friday. It will be free, and it will stay free for at least the first six months and probably much longer. Some of it will be drawn from the TEC Pathways series I published earlier this year, reworked for people who do not have time to read ten articles. Some of it will be new, prompted by whatever has landed on my desk that fortnight, which lately has included a national tender, a family business succession, a Dutch investor’s growth plan and a care provider trying to decide whether its sensors are telling it anything useful.

There will be no jargon that needs a glossary. There will be graphs, but you will not need a PhD to read them, and if one ever does appear that needs a legend, a footnote and a lie down, I have failed and you should say so. There will occasionally be a story about something going badly wrong, because those are the ones people remember and the ones I learned most from.

And there will be questions. The best pieces I have ever written started with someone asking me something I could not answer on the spot, so if there is a question you would like worked through properly, send it. I read every reply.

The Substack is at creatingbetter.substack.com. Subscribe free and the first piece lands on Friday 17 October.