A few years ago I had 80 online clients, 40 hours a month on Zoom, constant travel, back-to-back calls, and almost no uninterrupted time to think. From the outside it looked successful. From the inside it felt impossible to maintain.
In 2019 I was diagnosed with a precancerous tumour. My daughter was eighteen months old. That forced me to ask a harder question: what did I actually want my life to look like?
The way I was working wasn’t sustainable, and no productivity hack was going to solve the real issue. So I rebuilt the way I worked from first principles. Before consulting, I spent years in specialist policing and counter-terrorism work, solving high-stakes problems under hard constraints.
Diagnosis first.Principles next.Tactics last.
I applied the same thinking to my business. Six years later, this is the system that runs my week. Today I typically work 25 to 30 focused hours most weeks, take a full week off every eight weeks, and advise founders running seven and eight-figure service and online businesses.
But the real outcome wasn’t the income. It was being able to close my laptop at the end of the day and be fully present with my daughter, instead of mentally carrying the business into every evening.
Quotes are from Integrated Growth advisory work, which the Lab grew out of. Individual results vary.