You want to build or extend your coaching business. But you don’t know what steps to take.
Here are three strategies from former finance director Steve Berry. Pay attention – this works.
How to build a coaching, consulting and speaking business
Giraffes, crocodiles and warthogs don’t come instantly to mind when you think of business leaders devising corporate strategy.
And that’s precisely the point.
If you tell business leaders they should do what African animals do, they’re going to remember you.
And in 2006 Stephen Berry, then a finance and management coach, told them with one single strategy. By writing a book about it. And this book, in turn, helped him kickstart a successful corporate speaking career.
So he’s now the guy who strides on to the conference stage dressed in flak jacket and explorer’s hat, and teaches the business people in the audience why elephants flap their ears and pretend to charge – and why their businesses need to know about it.
Thanks to writing that book, he has spoken at conferences all over the world. Oh, and he’s also sold a lot of books, selling out the first edition of Strategies of the Serengeti and updating it in 2010.
Where did the idea come from?
So where did such an unforgettable idea come from?
It all started, Steve says, when he came up with a useful analogy on a two-day training course he was running called Learning Strategy.
‘There was one small module in that two-day course that lasted 15-20 minutes,’ he says. ‘And it was a module on “What are the strategies that you can enact when you encounter a previously unseen threat? You are surprised by this threat. What do you do?”
‘And in that module we used the analogy of the zebra. What does the zebra do?’
Businesses facing hidden threats, he suggests, are much like zebras encircled by predatory lions. The zebras know the lions are there, but they don’t know when they will strike. So they have to be constantly alert, ready to pick the right survival strategy at the right time.
He found that the zebra analogy worked well as a teaching tool. It sparked the participants’ imagination and was memorable. And that got him thinking.
‘Having been teaching the zebra’s approach to threats as strategy, that was my launch pad or starting point for thinking, “Well, what do other animals do?”’
In passing, he wondered whether a wider exploration of animal strategy might be the basis for a book. It could be interesting. But ‘interesting’ wasn’t a strong enough reason to spend all the time needed to research and write it. You need a more compelling reason than that.
Step 1: craft an unforgettable idea
Luckily, he had one. He was ready to move into corporate speaking – and a book supporting that ambition might be the first step.
Still, at the time he only had a vague idea of what his book would be about.
One evening, however, while he was staying in a hotel in York in north-east England before running a training course next day, the idea really took hold of him.
‘My wife and I had been on honeymoon in Kenya,’ he says. ‘We’d seen these animals first hand. And I was thinking, “If the zebra is something we can learn from, what other animals can we learn from?” And straight away, four or five other animals came into my mind.’
He grabbed a piece of flipchart paper and spread it on the bed. ‘The desk wasn’t big enough in this hotel room, this “cupboard” in York in which they’d put me.’
As his initial thoughts flowed, he captured them on the single sheet of paper. ‘The lion is a co-ordinated hunter, so there’s got to be lessons of co-ordination from the lion. The ostrich is a bird, it hasn’t got any teeth. Yet it bluffs – it uses height and supposed threat to chase away much bigger and more threatening predators. So the strategies of bluff.’ And so on.
He sketched out about six or seven of what he calls the 12 ‘serious’ animals he would eventually use in the book. ‘There are 13 animals, 12 of them serious, in Strategies of the Serengeti,’ he explains. (He reveals more about the 13th later.)
‘The majority came out in overall sketch view just on that first evening sitting in York. So much so, I got so into it, I forgot to go and have dinner. I looked at the clock, it was 11 at night, I’m thinking, “My goodness, I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m running a training course tomorrow.” But that was the start.’
He felt he had a good idea, and he could imagine how to use it to make his move into corporate speaking.
Get ready to move on and up
This wouldn’t be his first career change – or his last. He had started out as a finance director, or CFO. ‘I remember in my finance career coming to the point where I think, I’m a finance director, I’m a plc [public limited company] finance director. I’ve done what other people aspire to do. Well, what next? Is it another plc, then a bigger one, and then a bigger one, and then I die? That’s not really what I want to do.’
Moreover, he was no longer content to be seen solely as a finance guy. ‘I also came to the realisation that, when you’re in the higher echelons of finance, you don’t actually do much finance. If you’re doing your job properly, you are mostly involved in leadership and in strategy. And that was the push for me, when I left my last company, to say I want to just have a go at strategy consulting. I might not be very successful – I’ll give it 12 months and we’ll see how it goes.’
At this time, the idea of becoming an author was nowhere on his horizon. ‘There was never any intention to write a book,’ he says. He was happy to be a consultant.
The move into consulting went well and, more importantly, he enjoyed it. ‘In that time I had a great time playing with a perfume manufacturer, a horticulture company, a training company – which eventually led on to me being involved in training – and some others as well. So it was one fantastic year of mostly SME [small and medium enterprises] strategy.’
It turned out, however, that things were about to change once again. ‘The training company won a contract to do some finance work, asked me if I would oversee it, and paid me so to do. That contract was then renewed. So they asked me if I would not oversee it but run it. I eventually ended up becoming part of that company and a few years later, with some of the people from that company, launched out and formed my own training company.
‘We were training in finance, we were training in leadership, and we were training in strategy. There were not many people at that point who would be training executives in strategy.’
This is when he came up with the zebra analogy, which in due course he would develop into a book. And he knew exactly why he should write that book.
‘For me this was a launch pad into corporate speaking,’ he says. ‘So I’ve now spoken at business conferences in about 30 countries on four continents. And the book is the reason why people ask me to speak.’
And it’s worth mentioning again, a Stephen Berry talk is a memorable event.
‘So I will come on stage dressed as if I’ve just walked off the Serengeti, with my flak jacket and hat on, and start talking about the animals. All the slides that go up are just pictures of animals. Because when one’s doing a presentation such as that, you are the main event. The PowerPoint isn’t.
‘Far too many people cram a PowerPoint full of words and full of models. No – you are the main event. And the animal is the vehicle through which I bring out the learning. And I’ve had a lot of fun doing that.’
Some people might saythis is all a gimmick. But Steve is clear that it’s far more than this – he uses the animal analogy to help convey the message and enhance the learning.
‘It’s a hook – a hook for the learning,’ he says.
‘If I have 10 items of learning that I want to put together and I give you 10 bullet points, if you’re lucky you might remember three of them. If on the other hand I structure them so they are all to do the hippopotamus, or something like that, then they fit together in your mind.
‘And next time you see on television a hippopotamus, or think of it for any reason, there you are – the 10 learning points follow through.’
He knows that the animal concept engages people, because they tell him so. ‘I still to this day, even though we’re talking 14 years on from first publication, I will get emails saying, “Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that?” Another piece of strategy that would have come from the hyena, or something like that. And yes, I might well have thought of it, or no, I might well not have thought of it. But it was just a hook.
‘The key thing is the business strategy and the application. The animals are the hook.
‘And absolutely not a gimmick. A hook.’
He reinforces the learning by involving the audience as much as he can. ‘I can also do some fun, creative things. I remember speaking at a global entrepreneurs’ award in South Africa. There were some very interesting people from all over the world.
‘We talked about the wildebeest. So I picked on people at random, including this absolutely huge Russian, and brought them up on to the stage. In order to be on the program, you had to have been a self-made multimillionaire. And you had to have already got through the regional stages to the global stages. These were big people in business, not just physically big like the Russian.
‘And I got them to behave like a herd of wildebeest. So we had the dominant male, the Russian, walking around his herd. Meanwhile, I got somebody else, who was another dominant male, trying to steal some of the females from his herd. And we had all that going on on stage, and we were looking at some of the strategies of the wildebeest. And this was only a one-hour session I was doing, and that was probably 10 minutes of messing around as an interlude.
‘As we were there in the evening, there was a gentleman, again a self-made multimillionaire, saying, “That wildebeest strategy element really helped me realise, with a particular situation I’m in at the moment, what I must do.” So that was fabulous.
Step 2: Think visually, create hooks
The book took some time to produce – not least because he had to do a lot of zoological research, both desk-based and in person. All this took about three years, and some bits proved more crucial than others.
‘Of course I did the field research. You don’t have the credibility if you haven’t physically gone out and poked a crocodile with a stick. I’ve got the photographs to prove it, which are wonderful.
‘But if I’m perfectly honest, the desk research was a lot more useful than the field research. The field research was for the photographs and the credibility. The desk research was what gave me, “Well, this is what the elephant does. This is what the cheetah does. This is what the warthog does.” I was determined to get the warthog in.
‘After about three years of research, I had a whole load of material. It was roughly segmented. “This is what I’m going to do in the zebra chapter. This is what I’m going to do in the giraffe chapter.”’
Design drives content
He came up with a design for the chapters. ‘All the chapters have the same thread. They start off talking about the animal, and then gradually they move you into talking about the strategies of the animal, and then gradually leave the animal behind and start talking about the business implementation of those strategies.’
This design works well – something that gives him a lot of satisfaction. ‘Very early on, one person gave a compliment which I’ve held dear ever since. He said, “I didn’t realise we had stopped talking about the animal until the last page of the chapter.” And I think, “Result.” Because it’s not a book about animals. It’s a book about business strategy.’
He was determined to make the lessons on strategy flexible enough to suit readers in different situations. ‘I lectured on an MBA program in business strategy for 10 years. And I was very dissatisfied with a lot of the stuff to teach on the MBA program. It was very static, it was very dated.
‘I wanted to produce a book where the strategy was dynamic. You were able to move and change. You can switch from the strategies of the hippopotamus to the strategies of the wildebeest, for example.
‘A lot of the strategies that we had to teach on the MBA courses, for example, were, “Well, here’s a model.” You put a few things on the model – what the heck do you do with it next? You string together a few models, and it gets you a pass or a merit or a distinction in your MBA, but it’s not that much use in real life. It had to pass the test of being useful in real life.’
At the same time, he wanted to make it clear that he was the creator of the models in the book. ‘Some of the models in this book I also wanted to make sure they were published, because they were models I’d developed and used with customers. And from a copyright perspective I wanted to make sure we had put in tablets of stone “2006, first edition, here’s the model”. That proves that it can be attributed to me from 2006.’
Another author’s book published slightly later uses models with some similarities. But by publishing his own book, it’s clear that Steve developed his own models independently. ‘By publishing it, I’d made sure that I could prove copyright at any point,’ he says. ‘That was another important driver.’
As well as being dynamic, the lessons in the book also need to be practical. This is something not all academic authors achieve.
‘If it can’t be implemented practically in real life, then it was never going to make the cut in Strategies of the Serengeti,’ he says. ‘So all of the models in there have been used in real life.
‘I’m thinking of one model. It’s called Radar, it’s a competitive strategy model. And I give two instances, one in the UK and one in Asia, where the particular organisation I was working with was under threat from a new entrant to their market. And we used the Radar analysis, put it on the floor in a huge structure with gaffer tape and so on.
‘Radar is a circular model. I think we had about a 10-foot diameter with gaffer tape. We were positioning where our company is, where the new entrant is, on each of these Radar elements. If we did Situation X or Initiative Y, where would that move us? And then planning from it.
‘And both of those two, the Asian one and the UK one, it gave a shaft of light. In fact I’ve just thought of a third – there was an Eastern European one. It gave a shaft of light that had not been seen before, which was the salvation in each of those three cases.
‘The same model, that shaft of light was generated through exploring it. That’s real-life consequences, with real-life millions of pounds, dollars, whatever, and people’s jobs as a result of a model. So if it’s just an academic model, it looks very pretty and it gets us an MBA, but it hasn’t given anyone a job.’
Get ready to plan
Getting the research and the positioning of the book right are key before you start to write. But equally important is the planning.
‘I think that the effort is always in the planning,’ says Steve. ‘If you get the planning right, then the execution becomes a lot easier.
‘So every extra hour or 10 that you spend on the planning will save you two times, three times, five times that when it comes to the writing afterwards.’
He believes this is true in all endeavours worth doing – whether you’re at school or university or in the workplace.
‘I have brainwashed my children with this as well. My eldest daughter is currently studying law at university. And [before that] she did an EPQ, an extended project qualification, worth half an A-level – it’s about a 5,000-word essay. So it’s just taking A-level students and giving them a little bit of an idea of what a mini thesis would be.
‘She was very taken by a trip to Auschwitz. So her EPQ was on, “Can there be justice for Holocaust victims?” And unpacking that, she found, “Well, what do I mean by justice?” There’s a whole series of different things with justice. And what I, as the coach in this environment, pushed her really hard with was: you structure your EPQ. You’re going to have it not necessarily paragraph by paragraph, but aspect by aspect. So you start off saying, “These are the seven different types of justice that I have found. Here is where I found it from. Next, here is each of these seven, and I unpack them. Next, then I look at each of these seven and say has that happened?” So very planned.
‘And by the way, you’ve a 5,000-word limit. So you now know you have these 25 – I made that number up – 25 paragraphs, you’re going to have a 250-word introduction, you’re going to have a 250-word conclusion. Now you divide your paragraphs into an average of that. So that saves you the pain of writing.
‘Whereas if you start with a blank sheet, and you get to point number 17 out of 25 and you’re already on 6,000 words, it’s going to take you forever to edit it.
‘So any university student, bachelor degree, even A-level, plan, plan, plan, plan. To the point of, I can afford 200 words on that paragraph, then the next paragraph I can stretch that one to 300 words. That makes your life so much easier.’
In the case of his book, the planning focused on what should go in which chapter. He knew how he wanted to structure each chapter, but what should he include?
‘The first bit was scribbling together the ideas,’ he says. ‘So let’s say I had the strategies of the giraffe chapter [to write]. I knew what I wanted to get in on the strategies of the giraffe, but how am I going to do it? So this is before I’m actually writing text, it’s where I’m structuring – what order does stuff go in? If I’m going to produce models, how am I going to produce that?
‘And the reason why strategies of the giraffe sticks in my mind, I was in York again, a different time. And I was trying to get a model that would show all these elements of business that we have coming together. So you have your vision and your brand and your structure and your strategies and your goals and your data activities. How can I get this model that comes together?
‘I was sitting in this restaurant, scribbling things. They would give me this table for four, just for me. Lots of screwed-up paper where I reject that idea, lots of screwed-up paper with another day. And eventually, one that was in the form a ladder came through. And it was, “Yes, that’s it.” But it took me that evening of “How do I show brand and structure and all that together in one go?”
‘So I eventually get all these bits of paper with these structures and with the flow of each chapter together.’
Once you have your overall book structure and individual chapter designs, it’s time to start crafting the words.
‘Now I’ve got to write it,’ he says. ‘And those hours spent sitting in front of the laptop, conjuring together the words, getting the right level of example versus humour versus animal analogy. And you think you’re going to get it right every time, but of course you don’t.
‘So I’ve then got it into what I would call a strong draft level.’
Editing
Completing the first draft is a tremendous achievement. But now you need a second pair of eyes.
‘That’s where the editor comes in,’ he says.
‘With the first edition, I had a very nice, competent and experienced editor. If I was to criticise, I would say he was probably too kind to me. He should have been a little bit tougher.
‘And tragically he died in between the first edition and the second edition.’
He found another editor for the second edition much closer to home.
‘My wife decided she was going to edit the second edition.
‘She knows my head inside out, and is a brilliant editor, very patient as well.’
She certainly wasn’t afraid to make neercessary cuts. ‘It started out about 300 pages, the Strategies of the Serengeti book,’ Steve says. ‘She then referred to it as the two-page Strategies of the Serengeti pamphlet!
‘That was very good, to have the critical evaluator, a person who is not afraid to challenge you and to argue their case if necessary.
‘So I would say, choose your editor carefully.’
In addition to Strategies of the Serengeti, which Steve self-published, he published three books with Hodder & Stoughton. An editor working for a traditional publisher tends to follow a house style, meaning he or she makes corrections to spellings and grammar according to the publisher’s preferred method. This, it seems, hasn’t always suited him.
‘One of those books, the editor would produce their own thing but we didn’t see eye to eye on certain nuances of the English language. So I had to push quite hard that, in this situation, I do want to split that infinitive, because that’s acceptable now. In this particular situation, I do want that Oxford comma, and I don’t want you to take it out.’
Once the final draft has been produced and the manuscript has been typeset, you need to find a proofreader.
‘Having chosen the editor and gone through the editing, I would then also say get a separate person to do the proofreading,’ he says. ‘It’s a separate skill. And make sure they go through in detail. They will pick up mistakes. Every book everywhere has a mistake somewhere in it.’
Create a memorable title
Marketing the book depends partly on finding a catchy title. ‘You need to have a title that will do something for people,’ he says. ‘In my case there’s alliteration – The Strategies of the Serengeti.’ He says you can also play on something familiar and well known, as we did with The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders. ‘So whether it’s alliteration, or in your case with the Seven Habits it’s a play on something that everybody else has heard of. So get the title that sticks out.’
It’s also worth checking on your author name – when Steve did that he discovered he was not the only Steve Berry out there.
‘My mother calls me Stephen, everyone else has always called me Steve. Steve Berry is an American fiction author. I read his book The Amber Room and I really enjoyed it. But I can’t publish as Steve Berry if there’s already another Steve Berry out there.
‘So I went to Stephen Berry. And there are several other Stephen Berrys, if you go on to LinkedIn. I think one is a chemistry professor, one is something else, but nobody actually published as Stephen Berry. It’s always Stephen R. Berry, Stephen C. Berry, so I thought great, that’s it – stephenberry.com. I’ve purchased that.
‘That’s another thing, make sure you buy whichever URL you’re going to use and get in there early. So stephenberry.com. And not many people are going to type in strategiesoftheserengeti.com, but I needed to make sure that I owned it. So that’s something to make sure of.’
Sort out the design
Anyone picking up Strategies of the Serengeti can’t help but be struck by the design. Each chapter is illustrated with a black and white illustration of the animal it concerns.
One of Steve’s colleagues in the training company located the illustrator.‘He found the most amazing artist, a guy called Stephen Mead, who lived – I don’t know if he still does – in Bath. And gave him the brief of these animals, and Stephen did some fantastic research and produced all the internal pictures.
‘I remember there’s a story I tell very early in the book of the hippopotamus and the butterfly. So I wanted a picture of a hippopotamus submerged except for his head with a butterfly on his nose, because the hippopotamus and butterfly are having a conversation. He did the research to make sure the butterfly he drew was a butterfly that was actually in the Serengeti. That quality, that detail, was fabulous.’
Steve was so taken with the illustrations that he bought the originals and the copyright, and offers them for sale via his website.
‘I did buy the copyright of all the artwork from Stephen, because that was one of the things that I thought might be an add-on. It hasn’t been very successful selling the artwork, which is a shame because I think it jolly well should be. It’s good artwork.’
The cover is also striking. It gives an impression of the wide Kenyan plain at sunset with colours blending from blue and purple at the top, through orange, yellow and red, to black at the bottom, with a single silhouetted tree and person. The cover artist was also suggested by his colleague – a fairly easy task as she was the colleague’s daughter-in-law.
‘The cover is a beautiful piece of artwork – it strikes you,’ Steve says. ‘The artist gave me several options – this was the one that stood out the most.’
He now has the originals of the cover and Stephen Mead’s illustrations in his study at home.
The book is printed on crisp, white paper – a deliberate decision. ‘Yes you can economise,’ says Steve. ‘If you want to produce a book that looks like a cheap book, yes you can, and you can save a few pounds. Is that the market that you’re aiming for?
‘Strategies of the Serengeti is very much an executive level book, an MBA and above level book. Therefore, having it on cheap, tacky paper doesn’t quite work.’
The printer was Cambridge University Press, which also fitted the high-level brand. ‘There were a number of people that could have produced it, but they were absolutely excellent in terms of the advice and customer service. I don’t think they do that anymore, and by the second edition, which was 2010 I think, Biddles then printed that. But again, there are plenty of printers that will produce it.’
Step 3: embrace self-publishing
The decision to self-publish this book was an obvious one to make, he says.
‘I have three books that are with a traditional, mainstream publisher, and this one that is self-published. This one came first.
‘I made a deliberate decision to self-publish and the main driver of that was control. I wanted to say what happened. And I had three chapters that were significantly larger than the others. By significantly, I mean three times larger than the other chapters.
‘So the giraffe, which is all about strategy and vision, because the giraffe has a very large, effective and high-mounted eye. The elephant, who has a brain at least four times the size of a human brain, it’s all about strategies of corporate knowledge. And the zebra, which is my original thought, the strategies of threat. Now those three chapters, each of them is three times bigger than the chapters on the strategies of the cheetah, the strategies of the warthog, the crocodile and so on.
‘Now no sensible publisher would have let me get away with that. And if I had expanded the strategies of the crocodile, for example, to the same length as the strategies of the elephant chapter, it would have become unwieldy. It wouldn’t have been a book, it would have been a library. If I had condensed the strategies of the zebra to the level of the strategy of the ostrich, say, it would have just been a very brief overview. I would not have given the depth that I wanted to.’
Another advantage of self-publishing is the improved profit margins from book sales. This might not be the top priority for most business authors – but it doesn’t hurt.
As Steve says, if you choose to publish with mainstream publisher, ‘you will make a fraction of the amount you would make if you self-published’.
Step 4: Plan for bulk sales
Although sales of individual copies online or from stores may not be a priority, bulk sales may well be. Taking along a few boxes to a speaking engagement or other event can bolster your fee.
‘In my case, the book was there to feed conference speaking,’ says Steve. ‘Of course, as soon as I’m out of conference, people want to buy the books.
‘So if I’m speaking to 1,000 people, on average I’m going to sell 100 to 120 on that.
‘I did one just last autumn in Johannesburg. I could have taken out three times as many books as I did. We just ran out very, very quickly indeed. Sometimes I misjudge it.
‘But as a rule of thumb, I find 10-12% of the population of a conference will buy the book.’
He recalls a couple of conference speeches he did for the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in Zambia. ‘They were producing two conferences, both on successive Wednesdays. So would I go out and speak at both of them? They wanted the Serengeti theme, because even though technically the Serengeti is Kenya and Tanzania, well, it’s close enough. It’s just another country down from Zambia. They still have the same animals, it’s just a slightly different view.
‘And it really was the great and the good of Zambian business. So it was chief executives only on the first Wednesday. The second Wednesday, it was all other executives. I think there was probably about 300-350 at the first one and probably about 500 at the second one.
‘So the organiser said to me, “Can you fly out a pallet of books?”
I said, “Do you realise how many are on a pallet?” And I did the calculation and told them – I can’t remember now.
So there was, “Yes, you’re right. That might not be quite enough. How many can you send?”’
If you self-publish and print your book – as opposed to using an online print-on-demand service – you need to be able to store all the copies you print. At this time Steve had about one and three-quarter pallets left.
‘I sent a pallet and a half of books – flew them down to Zambia. It wasn’t cheap. But the overwhelming majority of them went after the first conference, so the 300 chief execs probably took two-thirds of the books and the 500 other execs were left scrabbling for the rest.
‘But there were guys walking out with handfuls of 10 books, that they all wanted signing, of course, because they were taking it for their entire board.’
Step 5: A Website That Sells
As with any business, a website is now essential for selling books. And Steve has lots of ideas for attracting new readers.
The first thing visitors to his website can do is a quiz, ‘Which Animal Is Your Organisation?’ You can also download some free chapters, buy individual chapters for a couple of pounds or, of course, buy the book for £19.99.
‘There’s a little quiz or assessment,’ he explains. ‘I prefer the word quiz, because it is light-hearted. It’s not an academically solid analysis of your organisation and strategy.
‘You answer a few questions, and on the basis of where you click the radio buttons, it says, “Your company is operating most like the hippo, a little bit like the ostrich, not at all like the dung beetle.” That’s the joke one that’s in there, by the way, it’s in the opening chapter in the prologue. You don’t want to be like the dung beetle. Effectively you’re pushing other people’s poo around all day with the intention of truing to impress female dung beetles.
‘And if you did that quiz, but you’re not sure about buying the book yet, you might say, “Well, actually we came out with the hyena as the top. Well, I can get the hyena chapter for just a few pounds. That’s worth it. I’ll have a look at that.”
‘They download the chapter and the idea is they would say, “Well, I like that. I’ll go and buy the book. I like the style, I like the humour, I like the fact that it’s the animals.” So it was the lead-in. So the reason I did the quiz was the lead-in to the individual chapters, which is a lead-in to the book.’
The ultimate aim is that the people who buy the book will buy other services from him. So he also offers a range of training courses, both open and custom, via the website, all adhering to the Serengeti theme.
Just get on with it
Steve has one final piece of advice for other business people worried now is not the time to start writing a book. He remembers running a training course for the UK National Health Service in 2004 – a course we were also involved in. SO Steve and Steven Sonsino chatted afterwards about the merits of writing a book.
He recalls what Steven told him at the time. ‘What you said to me was, “Just get on with it. What are you waiting for? Just get on with it.” And that’s why your name appears in the acknowledgements.
‘If it wasn’t for you telling me “just get on with it”, I might have waited another year or two or three, if ever, before doing it.
‘So don’t wait until you’re 100% ready. That was the advice you gave me. Don’t wait until you’re 100% ready. If you’re 80% ready, then make a start.
‘And so I, with pleasure, reflect back that advice from 15 years ago.’
So if you’re worried whether now is the right time that book, stop worrying. Just do it.
