Business coaching anchored to the Wheel of Business. Stronger, more profitable, more resilient — and less dependent on you.
Most owners are busy but tense — brilliant at the craft, held back by how the business operates. We work the Wheel of Business to find the real constraints and fix them.
This is coaching, not done-for-you. If you'd rather an operator rolled up their sleeves and built it with your team, that's my Fractional COO work.
A business does not perform at the average of its ten areas. It performs at the level of whichever area the work has to pass through and cannot. Brilliant marketing feeding a delivery process that can only absorb four new clients a month is not a marketing success. It is a queue, and a queue eventually becomes churn.
That is why the Wheel of Business is a constraint finder rather than a report card. The score to care about is the lowest one that everything else depends on. Fix that and the whole wheel turns more easily. Improve a 7 to an 8 while a 3 sits upstream of it and you will have worked hard for nothing you can measure — which is how owners end up believing that improvement work does not pay.
The second reason to score everything is that most businesses are not broken, they are leaking: time, money and energy, in small amounts, continuously. I wrote about that in marginal gains. The leaks rarely appear as a line in the accounts, because the work was done by people you were already paying and the money was never invoiced in the first place.
One thing to be clear about. This is coaching: you and your team do the work, and I make sure it is the right work and that it actually gets done. If you would rather somebody was in the engine room every week building it with you, that is the fractional COO route instead.
A business that performs — and gives you your time back.
You understand and improve the numbers that actually pay you.
Consistent operations and documented systems — far less firefighting.
The business keeps performing when you step away.
Built to cope with setbacks, risk and change.
We score the whole business, find the constraint, and improve it — one area at a time. Score yourself 0–10 on each, then see your three focus areas instantly.
A wheel is only worth the honesty you bring to it. This is the scale I use, so a 6 means the same thing in every area.
Not really there. Nothing in your week supports it, and you know it.
Happens when conditions are good. Falls over the moment you get busy.
Reliable — because a routine holds it up, not willpower.
A genuine strength. You could teach it to somebody else.
Illustrative figures, not a client. A six-person service firm delivers about 30 jobs a month at an average price of £1,200 — roughly £432,000 a year. Four of those jobs come back for rework each month, and each one takes about five hours to put right at an internal cost of £45 an hour.
That is £900 a month and £10,800 a year, and it appears nowhere in the accounts, because the people doing the rework were already on the payroll. What it shows up as instead is “we're flat out”. In capacity terms it is 20 hours a month, or 240 hours a year — more than six working weeks, spent redoing work you have already been paid for.
Now put that next to the usual answer, which is hiring. Another pair of hands at £30,000 carries employer's National Insurance at 15% of everything above the £5,000 secondary threshold — 15% of £25,000, or £3,750 for the 2026-27 tax year (GOV.UK, checked 28 July 2026) — before pension contributions, software, equipment and the weeks of your own time it takes to make them useful. Eligible employers can set up to £10,500 of Employment Allowance against their employer NI bill for the year, which is precisely why “what does a hire cost?” is never answered by the salary.
Against that, writing down the five jobs that generate the rework is a cheaper project with a faster payback — and it makes the hire work better when you do make it, because there is finally something to hand the new person. That is what scoring the wheel is for. Not to make you feel audited, but to put the leak and the growth plan on the same page so you can see which one to fund first.
Ten areas, ten tests you can apply this afternoon. If you cannot answer one of them without opening a file or asking somebody, that is your score.
Coaching develops you and your team to improve the business yourselves. When you'd rather have an experienced operator in the engine room every week — building the systems with your team — that's my Fractional COO work.
Every improvement should buy you more of these. If it doesn't, it isn't worth doing.
Increasing financial strength, resilience and choice — so money pressure stops distorting your decisions. Enough margin to turn down the wrong client and afford the right hire.
Increasing control over your time, with the business depending on you less each quarter. Measured honestly: what breaks if you switch the phone off for a fortnight, and how fast.
Sometimes called personal freedom. Choices made on your own terms, and a head that isn't re-running the numbers at three in the morning.
Every engagement ends with one thing you own: your Business Performance Plan.
See where the business sits on performance and purpose.
Rate the ten areas, 0–10.
Pinpoint what's really holding growth back.
Focus on the areas with the biggest payoff.
A 90-day Business Performance Plan.
Track the metrics that matter; re-score quarterly.
Improving a business is mostly unglamorous arithmetic done consistently. Here is a week's worth that pays for itself.
Build the one-page scoreboard: cash in the bank, proposals out, proposals won, revenue delivered, gross margin by service, jobs that came back. Six numbers, reviewed the same 30 minutes every Monday.
Count last quarter's rework honestly — number of jobs, hours each, internal hourly cost — and write the annual figure at the top of that page.
Take the five jobs you do most often and write the process for one of them. Not a manual. One page, in the order it actually happens.
Take your lowest wheel score and name one measurable change for the next 90 days. One. Measurable means a number you can check in week twelve.
Book the review before you need it: same 60 minutes, same day, every week, with whoever owns the numbers.
The decision rule: before you buy a tool, make a hire or launch anything, say out loud what the constraint is. If the answer is not the thing you are about to spend money on, do not spend it yet.
Three pillars, one method. Most owners work them in sequence rather than all at once — start where the lowest honest score is.
Where this pillar sits: the quadrant, the three freedoms, and how person, leader and business fit together.
See the method →Pillar oneThe ten personal areas underneath it all — energy, focus, habits, confidence and resilience.
Score the personal wheel →Pillar twoThe twelve areas of leading other people — delegation, decisions, accountability and difficult conversations.
Score the leadership wheel →Coaching develops you and your team to improve the business yourselves; the fractional COO work puts an experienced operator in the engine room to build it with you. Coaching starts at £1,000 + VAT a month and suits owners who have the capacity to do the work and want thinking partnership, challenge and a plan that gets held. The COO route is £4,000 + VAT a month for one day a week, and suits businesses where the work genuinely will not happen unless somebody senior is doing it. If you are not sure which you need, score the wheel first — the answer usually falls out of where the low scores cluster.
Then you are the person this matters most for, and the fix is smaller than you think. You do not need management accounts to run a business well. You need six numbers on one page, reviewed weekly: cash in the bank, proposals out, proposals won, revenue delivered, gross margin by service, and jobs that came back. That is a page anyone can build in an afternoon and read in five minutes. Precision comes later and matters less than rhythm. A rough number you look at every Monday will change more decisions than a perfect one you see in November.
Every 90 days, and no more often than that. Anything shorter and you are measuring noise rather than change, because the improvements that matter — a documented process, a pricing correction, a hire settling in — take a quarter to show up in how the business feels. Re-scoring quarterly also gives you a record: four scores a year, and you can see whether the areas you left alone deliberately held steady or quietly slid. Score it the same way each time, ideally on the same week of the quarter, so you are comparing like with like rather than comparing moods.
Yes, and two areas do most of the work for solo businesses. Systems, because you are the only person who can be ill, and anything undocumented stops entirely when you do. And owner time, because with no team the temptation is to score it by how busy you are rather than by what the hours actually went into. Team still scores — it covers subcontractors, your accountant, your virtual assistant, anyone the work passes through. Resilience matters more, not less: with one person delivering, client concentration is the risk that quietly decides everything.
No, and trying to is the most common way this goes wrong. The wheel exists to find the one or two areas that everything else is waiting on, not to hand you a ten-item improvement programme. A business with three areas at 8 and one at 3 performs like a business at 3, so the entire return sits in that one area. Pick one, occasionally two, work them for 90 days, and deliberately leave the rest alone. Deciding not to work on something is a decision, and it is the one that makes the plan survive contact with an ordinary busy month.
Book a free, no-obligation 30-minute call. We'll find the biggest opportunity in your business — then you decide if you want a hand fixing it. No pitch, no fluff.
Prefer email? andy@andyjackson.com
