If you've followed my work for a while, you'll know I'm passionate about making the complex straightforward. We often associate growth and progress with intricate strategies and sophisticated solutions. But what if the opposite were true? What if simplicity held the key to genuinely exceptional outcomes?
Great success doesn't necessarily come from complexity—quite the opposite. It often stems from stripping things back to their essence, focusing on clarity, purpose, and doing fewer things remarkably well.
Complexity: the hidden cost of ambition
When we start a business or aim to scale it, our natural inclination can be to add more: more features, more options, more markets, and more strategies. But each layer of complexity brings hidden costs—more decisions, slower action, diluted focus, increased stress, and reduced clarity of purpose.
Early on, like many entrepreneurs, I wanted to offer everything to everyone. Soon enough, I realised our message was becoming cluttered. Complexity was slowing us down. We needed a different approach.
The reason it creeps up on you is that complexity doesn't add, it multiplies. Four services, three price points and two delivery models isn't nine things to manage — it's twenty-four possible combinations, each with its own proposal wording, delivery path, margin and set of things that can go wrong. Nobody decides to run twenty-four variants of a business. You arrive there one reasonable-sounding yes at a time.
And the cost lands somewhere invisible. Not on a line in the accounts marked "complexity", but in longer proposals, slower onboarding, more questions from your team, more rework, more things only you know how to do. It shows up as a business that feels heavy for its size.
The complexity audit: putting numbers on it
Feelings aren't a management tool. Here's how to make the cost visible in an afternoon.
List every service you sell. Against each one, put the last twelve months' revenue, the hours it consumed, and its gross margin. Then sort by margin and look at what you've built.
Illustrative example — invented figures, used to show the method. A professional services firm sells seven things:
- A — £62,000 revenue, 420 hours, 64% margin
- B — £41,000, 300 hours, 58%
- C — £22,000, 260 hours, 31%
- D — £14,000, 210 hours, 22%
- E — £9,000, 150 hours, 18%
- F — £6,000, 120 hours, 25%
- G — £4,000, 90 hours, 15%
Total: £158,000 of revenue and 1,550 hours. Now split it. A and B produce £103,000 — 65% of revenue — from 720 hours, and £63,460 of gross profit. That's £88 of gross profit per hour.
Services C to G produce £55,000: 35% of the revenue, 54% of the hours, and £13,620 of gross profit. That's £16 per hour. Five services, more than half your working year, and 18% of the profit.
Redeploy even half those 830 hours into the work that earns £88 an hour and you generate about £36,500 of gross profit against the £13,620 you gave up. The honest caveats: it only works if demand for A and B genuinely exists, some of those small services may be feeding the big ones, and your fixed costs don't fall when the revenue does. Test all three before you cut anything. But the arithmetic is usually far more brutal than owners expect, and it explains something that otherwise makes no sense — how a business can grow its turnover every year and feel worse.
The simplicity paradigm
So, we deliberately started pursuing simplicity. We asked: What do clients actually value? Where do we add the most value? How can we simplify processes to create more clarity and reduce stress?
By consistently challenging ourselves to simplify, we noticed immediate improvements: enhanced customer satisfaction, increased efficiency from streamlined processes, and more meaningful innovation because we had clarity around the core areas we should improve rather than chasing every shiny opportunity.
Simple is not the same as simplistic
This distinction is worth holding onto, because it's the objection people reach for when they don't want to cut anything.
Simple means the complexity has been absorbed by you rather than handed to the client. A fixed monthly fee is simple for the buyer; behind it sits careful scoping, a decent grasp of your own costs, and a rule for what happens when a job runs long. Simplistic means the complexity has just been ignored — a flat price that loses money on half the jobs, or a "we do everything" promise with no boundary.
The test is where the difficulty ends up. Good simplification moves the hard part inside the business, where it can be systematised once and reused a hundred times. Bad simplification pushes it out to the client, who then has to work out which of your options they need and what it'll actually cost. If your client has to think hard to buy from you, you haven't simplified — you've delegated.
The UK reality: complexity has a literal tax bill
Structural complexity is the expensive kind, and British company tax makes that concrete. Corporation Tax is charged at 25% on profits above £250,000 and 19% at or below £50,000, with marginal relief in between (GOV.UK). What most owners miss is the next line on that page: those limits are "proportionately reduced for short accounting periods and by the total number of 'associated companies' your company has".
In plain English, running three companies where one would do means the thresholds are shared across the group, so profits that would have sat comfortably in the small profits band can end up in marginal relief territory. Add three sets of accounts, three filing deadlines, three sets of penalties for missing them, and intercompany transactions somebody has to reconcile.
Sometimes a group structure is genuinely the right answer — different risk profiles, different owners, a business you intend to sell separately. Often it's just complexity that accumulated because incorporating another company felt like progress. It's worth asking your accountant which one you've got.
Practical steps for achieving simplicity
- Question everything: Regularly review your business activities. Ask: "Is this essential, or is it clutter?"
- Limit your focus: Choose a few key objectives rather than numerous small goals. Excel at these priorities before adding more.
- Simplify communication: Communicate clearly and concisely. Whether dealing with your team or clients, simplicity breeds trust and understanding.
- Set a one-in-one-out rule: Nothing new — service, tool, report, meeting — starts until something existing stops. It forces the trade-off into the open at the moment you're most likely to duck it.
- Delete a step a month: Take one process, walk it end to end as a client would, and remove the step that exists only because it always has. Twelve steps a year is a different business.
- Kill the reports nobody reads: Ask each recipient what decision a report changes. If there isn't one, stop sending it and see who notices.
Simplicity drives exceptional experiences
By adopting the 'They Ask, You Answer' approach and the philosophy of 'Best Service is No Service', we've reduced friction dramatically, ensuring clients can find answers quickly and effortlessly. The results? Greater client loyalty, stronger relationships, and an organically growing business.
Both ideas point the same way. Answer the questions buyers actually ask — including the awkward ones about price and what you're not good at — and publish the answers where they'll find them. Then treat every inbound question as a defect: not a nuisance, but a signal that something upstream was unclear. A business that has to explain itself over and over has a design problem, and each explanation is a tax on your week.
Where simplification goes wrong
- Cutting the wrong layer. Trimming the range while leaving the delivery process untouched gives you a tidy price list and the same chaos behind it.
- Simplifying by hiding. Removing the price from the website makes the page simpler and the buyer's job harder. That's not simplification, it's evasion.
- Doing it once. Complexity regrows. Without a standing review it comes back within a year, usually as favours to good clients that quietly became products.
- Cutting revenue with no plan for the hours. If you drop five services and don't redeploy the freed capacity, all you've done is shrink.
- Confusing fewer options with less thought. Simplicity is the output of harder thinking, not less of it.
Do this week
- List every service with last year's revenue, hours and gross margin. One page.
- Circle everything below half your average margin per hour. That's your candidate list.
- Pick one process and walk it end to end. Delete one step today.
- Ask your accountant whether your company structure is earning its complexity.
- Write down the three questions clients ask most often, and answer them properly on your website.
Your simplicity challenge
Over the next month, pick an area of your business (or life!) and apply simplicity. Reduce unnecessary steps, remove complications, and communicate more clearly. Watch what happens. I promise you'll be surprised at how significantly simplicity can amplify your impact.
If you want the operational version of this — the promise, the path, the pricing and the weekly rhythm — read simple beats clever. If you'd rather have someone work through the audit with you, that's what advisory is for.