by Jay Allen | Jul 17, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
Faithful, Not Just Compliant
What the Military Taught Me About Ethics That No MBA Ever Could
In 2017, a firm called Smith & Williamson invited me to a private event in London (where I first met, amongst others, a very young Steven Bartlett) having looked at how My TrueNORTH actually operated — not how we marketed ourselves, but how we operated — and decided to describe us as an Ethical Coaching Company. We didn’t put that as a slogan on our own website first, and hope it will stick. Somebody else watched the work, watched the decisions we made when there was money on the table to make a worse one, and named it themselves. I’ve carried that description ever since, not as a catch phrase, but as something I now have to keep earning every single time a decision gets difficult.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because most businesses that call themselves “ethical” have appointed themselves to the title. I’d rather tell you the story of how we aim to deserve it every single day, than simply repeat a self-professed label.
A few years ago, I wrote about cancelling a subscription. It doesn’t sound like the beginning of an article on ethics, I know. But it was one of the clearest lessons in corporate ethics I’ve had in years — precisely because nobody involved broke a single law.
I’d decided a service wasn’t the right fit and went to unsubscribe. What followed was screen after screen of manufactured friction: escalating discount offers, a confirmation button designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, thirteen individual features I had to manually decline one by one, and — after I’d finally succeeded — a “you’ve made a mistake” email dangling a countdown timer and a bigger discount to pull me back in. Every part of that sequence was legal. Somebody had genuinely sat down, mapped it out, and built it on purpose. And that’s exactly the problem. Ethics was never the question in that boardroom. Conversion rate was.
I called that post Why Do So Many Not Understand Ethics? Because that experience crystallised something I’d been circling for years: most businesses don’t behave unethically because they’re bad people. They behave unethically because nobody in the room is asking the ethics question at all. They’re asking the legal question, the compliance question, the “will this convert?” question — and assuming that if it’s legal, it must be fine.
It isn’t the same question. And the gap between those two questions is where most of British business quietly goes wrong.
Ethics Is Not the Same as Legal, and It’s Not the Same as Nice
I want to be precise about this, because “ethics” gets used so loosely in business content that it’s practically lost its edge. Ethics isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t a marketing adjective you bolt onto your homepage because “Ethical Coaching Company” sounds warmer than “Business Coaching.” It’s a discipline — a set of decision rules you apply, especially when nobody would notice if you didn’t.
Legal is the floor. It’s the absolute minimum a regulator will let you get away with. Ethical is a completely different question: not “can I do this,” but
“Should I do this to another human being, knowing exactly what I know about how it will land on them?”
The subscription company I wrote about broke no law. Every dark pattern in that cancellation flow would survive a compliance audit without a scratch. But they made a decision, consciously, to extract a few more pounds from customers by making leaving deliberately harder than joining. That’s not a legal failure. That’s a character failure, dressed up as a growth strategy.
I hold an MSc in International Business Ethics for a reason, but I didn’t need the degree to understand this. I understood it years before I ever wrote the dissertation, because I learned it somewhere far more unforgiving than a lecture theatre.
What the Rod and Serpent Actually Teach Me About Ethics
I’ve written before about the RAMC cap badge I wore for years — the Rod of Asclepius, the laurel wreath, the motto In Arduis Fidelis, Faithful in Adversity. What I didn’t spell out is how directly that world shaped my understanding of ethics specifically, not just resilience.
Medical personnel in a warzone occupy an unusual position. Under the Geneva Conventions, non-combatant medical corps are protected — but that protection exists inside a code, not outside one. You don’t get to pick and choose who you treat based on which side of a line they’re standing on. The ethics of the role are not negotiable, not situational, and not something you get to relax “just this once” because it would be more convenient. You treat the injury in front of you. That’s the entire ethical framework, and it doesn’t bend under pressure — if anything, pressure is the only real test of whether you actually hold it.
That’s a very different starting point for understanding ethics than most business owners get. Some employees learn “business ethics” from a compliance training video once a year, ticked off, forgotten by lunchtime; many others, and most of the business owner community, never sit down and learn it- more often experience it (usually when they are hard done by, from someone else who probably hasn’t learnt it either). I learned it as something that either holds under real strain or it was never actually a principle in the first place — it was just a preference you were willing to abandon the moment it became inconvenient.
That’s the test I still apply now, in a completely different theatre. Not “what does the policy say.” What happens to this principle the moment it costs me something?
What Earning the Name Actually Looks Like
I try not to lean on the label Smith & Williamson gave us as if the description alone proves anything. A name someone else gave you eight years ago doesn’t stay true on its own — it has to keep being true, decision by decision, in an industry that’s full of exactly the kind of dark-pattern thinking I described in that subscription story, just wearing a more sophisticated suit.
You’ll find it everywhere once you start looking. Programmes engineered to create dependency rather than capability, because a client who can stand on their own two feet stops paying you. Contracts with cancellation terms designed to trap rather than clarify. Sales processes built to manufacture urgency rather than establish a genuine fit. None of it is illegal. Almost all of it would pass a compliance check. And all of it fails the only question that actually matters: would I be comfortable if the client could see exactly how this offer was constructed and why?
That question is the entire engine behind the HONESTY Agenda, the framework I built to replace the traditional “up-front contract” language you’ll find in most sales training. Traditional sales methodology asks you to secure commitment early and manage objections as they arise — which, done carelessly, is just a more polite version of the dark pattern I described in that cancellation flow. The HONESTY Agenda works differently. It assumes forward movement is always available, but it never manufactures false urgency to force it. The final step doesn’t ask for a yes or a no. It asks which option feels most aligned — because an honest sales conversation should end with the client choosing correctly for themselves, not with them being manoeuvred into choosing correctly for you.
That’s ethics applied as a mechanism, not a mood. It’s not “be nice to people.” It’s “build your systems so that the ethical outcome and the profitable outcome are the same outcome, on purpose, by design.”
Where Accidentally Successful Business Owners Meet Their Own Ethics Test
Here’s where this stops being theory and starts being uncomfortable, because most of the founders I work with never intended to build anything large enough for ethics to become complicated. You started out well at the work. You got busy. You hired help. And somewhere in that growth, without ever deciding to, you inherited a set of ethical decisions you never consciously signed up to make.
You didn’t design your pricing strategy to be exploitative — but is your contract cancellation process actually easier than your sign-up process, or did nobody ever check? You didn’t set out to build a culture where your team is afraid to bring you bad news — but if everything genuinely still runs through you, ask yourself honestly whether that’s because you’re indispensable, or because you’ve built an environment where speaking up feels risky. You didn’t intend to trap clients into renewals they’ve outgrown — but have you actually audited your own offboarding experience the way I audited that subscription company’s, or have you simply assumed you’d never do something like that because you’re a good person?
Good people build unethical systems by accident more often than bad people build them on purpose.
That’s the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath most of what I see when I run a Business Freedom Assessment with a new client. Nobody sat down and decided to trap their customers or intimidate their team. It accumulated, decision by small decision, while attention was somewhere else entirely — usually on survival.
This is precisely why ethics can’t be a value statement on your website. It has to be a system you actively design, the same way you’d design your pricing or your onboarding — and then it needs auditing with the same rigour you’d apply to your financials. Being a good person is not a strategy. It’s a starting intention. The system is what actually determines the outcome your customers and your team experience.
Ethics Doesn’t Stop at the Exit
This matters just as much — arguably more — when a business owner reaches the point of stepping back or selling up, which is where my work increasingly sits.
An unethical exit looks a lot like that subscription company’s cancellation flow, just scaled up. It’s the founder who dresses up a struggling business to extract maximum value from a buyer who won’t discover the truth until it’s too late. It’s the leader who negotiates their own golden parachute while quietly restructuring the team out from under people who trusted them. It’s the “I’m stepping back” announcement that conveniently omits the fact that the business can’t actually survive without them, leaving a successor or a buyer holding a structure built to fail the moment the founder’s hands come off it.
Faithful in adversity was never a motto that only applied while you were still standing in the business. It applies right through to the door. An ethical exit means the business you hand over — to a buyer, a successor, or simply to your own future self in a different role — is genuinely what you represented it to be. Not because a due diligence process would catch you out if it wasn’t. Because catching you out was never supposed to be the mechanism keeping you honest in the first place.
The Test I Still Use
I still come back to the same question I learned to ask long before I ever wore a business suit: what happens to this decision the moment it costs me something?
Not “is this legal.” Not “will this convert.” Not “can I get away with it.” What happens to my answer the moment being ethical is genuinely inconvenient — when the sale is on the line, when the quarter is tight, when nobody would ever find out either way?
If the answer changes under pressure, it was never a principle. It was a preference, and preferences don’t survive adversity. That’s the whole difference, and it’s the difference the subscription company I wrote about years ago never seemed to grasp. They optimised every screen for the moment it was convenient to lose a customer’s trust, and never once asked what kind of company that made them the other 364 days of the year.
Faithful in adversity was drilled into me long before I understood what it would eventually be asking of me in commerce. It turns out the theatre has changed. The test doesn’t.
Where This Leaves You
If you’re building, scaling, or preparing to exit a business right now, I’d ask you to do what I did with that subscription company, except point it at yourself. Become a secret shopper of your own business. Walk your own cancellation flow. Sit in on your own sales calls with a stranger’s ears. Ask your team, properly and privately, whether they feel safe telling you the truth.
You may not like everything you find. Almost nobody does the first time they actually look. But the businesses that last — and the founders who exit them well, with their name and their conscience intact — are the ones willing to ask the ethics question deliberately, before growth forces the answer on them by accident.
That’s the whole premise behind why My TrueNORTH exists. Smith & Williamson gave us the words “Ethical Coaching Company” back in 2017. Whether we still deserve them isn’t something I get to decide — it’s something every client, every contract, and every exit either confirms or quietly disproves. I was trained to hold that standard long before I ever called myself a mentor, and faithful in adversity was never really about the adversity. It was always about what you do when nobody’s checking, and whether the name still fits when someone finally looks.
Jay Allen is the founder of My TrueNORTH Limited, the UK’s leading Ethical Coaching Company, creator of the #ADDAZERO Methodology, and host of The Accidental Business Owner Podcast. This piece builds on his earlier article,
Why Do So Many Not Understand Ethics?
by Jay Allen | Jul 3, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
In Arduis Fidelis
What “Faithful in Adversity” Taught Me About Building, Scaling, and Letting Go of a Business
There’s a moment every Combat Medic remembers. It isn’t the training. It isn’t even the first casualty. It’s the first time you understand, properly understand, that the badge on your beret isn’t decoration.
Mine sat an inch above my left eye — a serpent wound round a rod, framed in laurel, a crown above it, and beneath it all, a scroll carrying three words: In Arduis Fidelis. Faithful in Adversity.
I didn’t choose that motto. The Royal Army Medical Corps had been carrying it since 1898. By the time it landed on my cap, it had already outlived two World Wars, twenty-seven Victoria Crosses (and 2 Bars), and more forward patrols than anyone could count. I didn’t know any of that history before I joined the Army, but I knew much of it by the time I left training to join my first Regiment. By then, I knew what it meant when things went wrong: you don’t leave. You stay faithful to the task, and to the people relying on you, precisely when adversity makes that hardest to do.
Like Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, who was awarded his first VC for extraordinary bravery during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He earned his second (a Bar to the VC) in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, where he continued to treat and rescue wounded men for two days despite suffering severe, ultimately fatal wounds himself.
I’ve spent the better part of two decades since discovering that this motto doesn’t retire when the uniform comes off. It just changes battlefields.
The Rod, the Serpent, and the Real Meaning Underneath
The symbol on that badge — the Rod and serpent coiled around a staff — traces back to the ancient Greek god of healing. It’s the same emblem the World Health Organisation uses today. It’s older than any army, older than any empire, and it exists for one reason: to mark out the people who stay when everyone else has permission to run.
That’s the part people miss when they hear “faithful in adversity” and file it away as a nice bit of Latin on a museum badge. It isn’t a statement about loyalty in comfortable conditions. Loyalty is easy when nothing is on fire. The motto exists specifically for the moment when everything is on fire — when the plan has failed, the position is compromised, resources are gone, and the only thing left standing between chaos and control is whether you hold your ground.
As a Combat Medic, I learned that lesson long before I fully understood it intellectually. You learn it in your hands first. The moment training stops being theory and becomes instinct is the moment “faithful in adversity” stops being a motto and becomes a nervous system response.
It was actually in exactly that kind of moment — waiting ahead of a forward patrol, running through worst-case scenarios in my head because that’s what you do when the stakes are real — that I first sketched out what would eventually become one of the psychological frameworks I still use with business owners today. I wasn’t thinking about business. I was thinking about threats, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths under pressure — a version of TOWS analysis built not in a boardroom but in the field, because when adversity is genuinely arduous, you don’t have the luxury of getting the order of operations wrong. Threats and weaknesses first. Then, and only then, opportunities and strengths. That sequencing has stayed with me for over twenty years, and it still shapes how I think about strategy for the founders I work with now. One of the many ways this segments me from any other business coach/mentor.consultant.
When the Deployment Ends Early
Here’s the part of my story that doesn’t fit neatly into a highlight reel: I didn’t get to finish on my own terms. A medical discharge ended my service earlier than I’d planned, earlier than I wanted, and earlier than felt fair. There is a particular kind of grief in that — not the grief of loss through failure, but the grief of a chapter closing while you’re still mid-sentence.
If you’ve built a business you didn’t intend to build this big, this fast, or this complicated — you might recognise that feeling. It’s not the grief of failure. It’s the disorientation of whatever is next arriving on a timeline you didn’t choose, while you’re still holding the plan you had for how it was supposed to go.
I didn’t get to choose when my service ended. But I did get to choose what I did with the years that followed. I retrained — change management and blue ocean strategy — because if the operational theatre I knew was closed to me, I was going to understand the theatre I was moving into with the same seriousness I’d applied to the last one. Adversity doesn’t ask permission before it arrives. But it does leave you a choice about what you build in the space it clears.
Corporate, and the Itch That Wouldn’t Settle
I spent three or four years in corporate life after that. It taught me things I still use — structure, process, the discipline of scale done properly rather than accidentally. But it also taught me something about myself: I am not built to be faithful to a system I don’t believe in. I can be faithful in adversity. I cannot be faithful to mediocrity dressed up as strategy.
So I left, and I became a business owner instead.
Buying, Building, and Losing — the Adversity Didn’t Stop
Since then, I’ve bought, grown, and scaled two businesses successfully. I’ve also lost one — not through poor decision-making, not through lack of graft, but to Brexit, when a European supplier relationship that the business depended on simply ceased to be viable overnight. No warning system built by any consultant could have fully protected against a geopolitical shift of that scale. I’d put serious preparation into that business. It didn’t matter. The supply chain was gone, and so, eventually, was the business built on top of it.
I want to be honest about that loss rather than skip past it, because I think too much business content pretends that the founders writing it never actually lost anything.
I did.
And the motto that got me through a medical discharge is the same one that got me through the most challenging times in my past businesses – my third, watching a business I’d built with real care become unviable through no fault of my own: stay faithful to the work, even when the outcome you wanted is no longer available to you.
That’s not resilience as a personality trait. That’s resilience as a discipline you were trained into, and were willing to die on a hill to uphold, long before you needed it for anything as ordinary as commerce.
What “Accidentally Successful” Actually Means
This is where the motto stops being autobiography and starts being relevant to you.
I work with a very specific kind of business owner. Not the founder who set out with a five-year exit plan and a private equity roadmap. The one who set up a business, was good at what they do, got busy, hired in some help — and woke up one day to discover they’d built something considerably bigger than they first intended.
If that’s you, you’ll recognise one of two positions.
Either you’re trapped in the centre of it. Every decision still runs through you. You’ve built a team, but somehow you’re still the bottleneck, still fielding the questions that should never have reached your desk, still the one who has to sign off on things that a competent operations lead should be handling without you. You’ve built a business, but you haven’t built a business that can run without you standing directly underneath it holding the whole structure up.
Or you’ve done the harder work — you’ve built the team, the processes, the systems — and you still can’t extract yourself. Not because the business needs you, but because you’ve spent so long being “the business owner” that you no longer know who you are without that identity strapped to your back. The company can survive without you now. The question is whether you can survive without the company defining you.
Both of these are forms of adversity. They’re just quieter than the ones I trained for. Nobody’s shooting at you. But the pressure is real, the stakes are real — your finances, your health, your family, your future are all riding on how you navigate this — and the motto still applies. Faithful in adversity doesn’t mean staying stuck in the same position out of stubbornness. It means staying committed to the outcome that actually matters even when the path there requires you to change everything about how you’ve been operating.
Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do for the business you built is learn how to leave it well.
Why I Built #ADDAZERO the Way I Did
When I sat down to build the #ADDAZERO Methodology, I wasn’t starting from a business school textbook. I was starting from twenty years of learning what it actually takes to hold your position — or know precisely when and how to change it — under real pressure.
The framework has two tiers, deliberately. Eight Universal Laws that hold the principles, and beneath them, the eight practical Rules — #ADDAZERO itself — that translate those principles into what you actually do on a Monday morning when the business is demanding more of you than you have to give.
I built the HONESTY Agenda the same way. It replaces the old up-front-contract language you’ll find in traditional sales methodology, because in my experience, business owners in adversity don’t need another script. They need a framework that assumes forward movement is always possible, even when the honest answer in the room is “I don’t know yet.” The final letter — Y — never asks for a binary yes or no. It asks which option feels most aligned. That’s not softness. That’s what faithful, honest strategy actually sounds like when you strip the sales-floor theatre out of it.
And the three exits framework that runs through the entire #ADDAZERO Trilogy — GROW, SCALE, EXIT — exists because I refuse to let business owners believe that “exit” only means selling up and disappearing. Sometimes the exit is from the centre of the business, into a role where you actually enjoy your work again. Sometimes it’s a genuine sale. Sometimes it’s handing the reins to someone else while you stay involved on your own terms. All three are legitimate. All three require the same underlying discipline: faithfulness to the outcome, even through the adversity of changing your own role in the story.
The Thread That Runs From the Beret to the Boardroom
I think about that cap badge more than people probably expect. Not with nostalgia exactly — more as a kind of internal compass check. When a client is mid-crisis, when a launch is wobbling, when a partnership is fraying, when the numbers aren’t where they should be three weeks before a deadline that can’t move — I ask myself the same question I’d have asked on operations: are we still faithful to the actual objective, or have we quietly started protecting our comfort instead?
Those aren’t the same thing, and adversity has a way of blurring the line between them if you’re not paying attention. Comfort says: stop pushing, lower the ambition, quietly retreat from the plan and call it “being realistic.” Faithfulness says: the objective hasn’t changed, only the conditions have — so adapt the method, not the mission.
That’s the whole difference between a business owner who survives a hard season and one who’s still standing five years later having actually built something that outlasts them.
What This Means If You’re Reading This as an Accidentally Successful Business Owner
You didn’t sign up to be tested this way. Most people who build businesses that grow beyond their original intention didn’t draw up a plan for managing four, forty or four hundred staff, or extracting themselves from day-to-day operations, or working out what their identity even is once the business no longer needs them standing in the middle of it every hour of every day. You backed into this. That doesn’t make the adversity any less real, and it doesn’t make the discipline required to navigate it any less demanding.
But here’s what I want you to take from a badge I wore for years before I really understood what it was really asking of me: faithfulness in adversity was never about grinding through unchanged. It was about staying loyal to the mission while being willing to completely change your own position within it. Medics don’t win battles by refusing to move. They win by staying exactly where the mission needs them — which sometimes means holding ground, and sometimes means falling back to reorganise before pushing forward again.
Your business is asking the same thing of you right now, whichever side of “accidentally successful” you’re sitting on. The question was never whether you’re capable of adversity — you clearly are, or you wouldn’t have built something this substantial in the first place. The question is whether you’re willing to be faithful to what the business actually needs from you next, even when that means letting go of the role you’ve been playing so far.
In Arduis Fidelis. Faithful in adversity.
That motto got me through a medical discharge I didn’t choose, a corporate career I outgrew, a business I lost to forces entirely outside my control, and two businesses I built and scaled with everything I had. It’s the same motto sitting underneath every law in the #ADDAZERO Methodology, whether the reader ever knows where it came from or not.
If you’re in the middle of your own version of adversity right now — trapped in the centre of a business that’s outgrown you, or stuck holding an identity a business no longer requires — that motto is available to you too. Not as decoration. As discipline.
Stay faithful to the mission. Just be honest about what the mission actually needs from you next.
Jay Allen is a former Rapid Deployment Combat Medic Veteran and now the founder of My TrueNORTH Limited, creator of the #ADDAZERO Methodology, and host of The Accidental Business Owner Podcast. His book trilogy — GROW, SCALE, EXIT — launches on 11 September 2026.
by Jay Allen | Jun 18, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
The Speaker’s Oath
No Manipulation, No Shortcuts, No Compromise
Keynote speaker, Jay Allen – Founder of My TrueNORTH, the Ethical Coaching Company Image courtesy of: Steven Thompson, ST Audio Visual Ltd
There are things the military teaches you that never leave.
Not the drills. Not even the battlefield skills.
But the standards.
In the Army, the role of the standard bearer was never just ceremonial. Carrying the flag into formation or battle was a position of trust. You weren’t just holding fabric—you were holding identity, values, and the reputation of everyone who stood under it.
You didn’t earn that position because you wanted attention.
You earned it because you could be trusted not to let the standard fall.
And that has shaped how I view speaking ever since.
Because whether people realise it or not, every time you step onto a stage, onto a webinar, or into a room… You are carrying a standard.
The question is: what standard are you carrying?
The standard most people never think about
Over the last 20 years, across 34 countries, I’ve seen every type of speaker you can imagine.
Technically brilliant.
Charismatic performers.
Storytellers who can hold a room effortlessly.
And also…
People who should never have been given the microphone.
Not because they lacked confidence or polish—but because they lacked responsibility.
Because somewhere along the line, speaking stopped being about service and started being about extraction.
You see it in subtle ways at first.
- Over-rehearsed stories designed purely to trigger emotion without substance.
- Content that is recycled regardless of the audience.
- A focus on applause, not application.
But more recently, there’s been a shift into something more concerning.
Techniques being taught—not to help the audience think better—but to bypass their thinking altogether.
I’ve come across “speaker training” where individuals are being taught elements of NLP and even light-touch hypnotic techniques—not as tools for clarity or communication—but as mechanisms to increase compliance.
To “lower resistance.”
To “prime buying states.”
To move people into decisions they weren’t fully intending to make when they walked into the room.
Let’s call that what it is.
It’s not influence.
It’s manipulation.
And it fundamentally breaks the standard.
Why this matters more than people think
Now, you might argue—“But isn’t all speaking about persuasion?”
Yes. But there is a line.
Persuasion respects autonomy.
Manipulation overrides it.
A professional speaker helps someone arrive at a decision that is in their best interest, with full awareness.
An unethical speaker nudges, pressures, or engineers an environment where the decision is made for them—emotionally, subconsciously, or under influence.
That might create short-term sales.
But it erodes long-term trust—not just in that individual, but in the industry as a whole.
And here’s the deeper issue:
When you stand on a stage, you are often positioned as an authority.
People lower their guard.
They assume credibility.
They become more open to suggestion.
That is a position of power.
And power without standards is where things go wrong.
The standard-bearer mindset
This is where the military analogy matters.
Because a standard bearer doesn’t ask:
“How do I maximise what I get from this moment?”
They ask:
“What do I represent in this moment?”
So before anything else, the question remains:
1. Is it me?
Am I the right person to carry this message to this audience, in this context?
Not: Can I deliver it?
But: Should I deliver it?
Because if your primary driver is stage time, visibility, or revenue, you will always find a way to justify saying yes.
But if your driver is responsibility, you will often recommend others or simply say no.
And that is what protects the standard.
2. Client-centric is not a buzzword
If you step forward as the right person, then the focus shifts entirely away from you.
Not your story.
Not your framework.
Not your signature talk.
The audience.
- Who are they really? Not just demographics—but mindset.
- What do they already believe?
- What have they tried that hasn’t worked?
- Where are they sceptical?
- Where are they stuck?
Because if you don’t understand that, you don’t have the right to influence it.
And this is where ethical speaking diverges sharply from what is increasingly being taught in some circles.
The goal is not to “move the room.”
The goal is to meet the room.
There is a difference.
3. Outcome over control
Finally, we get to the content.
And again—the standard matters.
Because there are two very different ways to design a talk:
One is to control the audience’s state.
The other is to elevate their thinking.
Control says:
“How do I get them to feel what I want them to feel so they do what I want them to do?”
Elevation says:
“How do I help them see what they need to see so they can choose what is right for them?”
The first is about compliance.
The second is about clarity.
And clarity is harder.
It requires better thinking.
Better structure.
Better understanding of human behaviour—not to exploit it, but to support it.
It also requires trust in your own value.
Because if you genuinely believe that what you offer can help someone, you don’t need to bypass their critical thinking to sell it.
You can invite them into a decision—openly, honestly, and with full agency.
The line in the sand
This isn’t about calling out individuals.
It’s about calling out a direction of travel.
Because if speaking becomes a vehicle for manipulation, it loses its legitimacy.
And for those of us who have built our careers—and our reputations—on doing this the right way, that matters.
Deeply.
So the line in the sand is simple:
If your methods rely on reducing someone’s ability to think clearly, question, or choose freely…
You’re not carrying a standard.
You’re dropping it.
What a professional actually does
A professional speaker—the kind who deserves the platform they stand on—does three things consistently:
They take responsibility for whether they should be there in the first place.
They build everything around the audience, not themselves.
They design for outcomes that serve the individual, not just the sale.
And above all…
They understand that every time they speak, they are carrying something bigger than themselves.
A message.
A reputation.
A standard.
The only real question is whether they’re worthy of holding it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
If you are planning an event, a keynote, or a session where the outcome genuinely matters—not just the applause—then the conversation needs to start in a different place.
Not with slides.
Not with stories.
But with standards.
Because the right speaker is not the one with the most polished delivery, but the one best positioned to serve the outcome you need.
Over the past two decades, I have delivered across 34 countries, working with business owners, leadership teams, and organisations navigating growth, complexity, and change. As a former British Army Combat Medic and now Managing Director of My TrueNORTH—The Ethical Coaching Company—I bring a perspective grounded in responsibility, clarity, and results.
My work is centred on helping business owners and leaders move from being the bottleneck in their business to building scalable, sustainable, system-led organisations—without compromising their values.
If you are looking for a speaker, I am happy to have an honest conversation about your event.
And that starts with a simple question:
Am I the right person for you?
If I am, we can explore what outcome you need and how best to achieve it.
If I am not, I will always point you in the direction of someone who is.
Either way, the standard remains the same.
You can see my speaker page/examples of my work here
You can book a conversation here.
by Jay Allen | Apr 3, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
Another Win – Still No Reason to Celebrate
Lessons From the Courtroom
A few months ago, I wrote a blog called Why We’re Taking a Client to Court.
I didn’t write it to embarrass anyone (as no names were mentioned).
I didn’t write it to position us as tough or intimidating.
I wrote it because I believe in transparency, and because every business owner I’ve previously worked with, am currently working with, or those considering working with us deserves to know the level to which ethics run through everything we do.
One that holds its standards, even when it’s inconvenient.
This week, that case concluded. The court found in our favour.
And I’ll be honest with you, there’s no part of me that wants to shout about that.
I Wish the Record Didn’t Exist
We now have an unbroken 100% success rate in small claims court. Nine cases across more than a decade. Nine wins.
I wish it were zero.
Not because of what the wins represent — clarity, fairness, documented delivery, but because every one of those cases represents a relationship that broke down. A conversation that should have happened and didn’t. A commitment made and not honoured.
That’s not a success metric I ever wanted to track.
But since the record exists, it exists for a reason. And I think it’s worth explaining what I actually took from this one.
What the Courtroom Teaches You That the Boardroom Doesn’t
When you stand before a judge as a litigant in person — no barrister, just you, your evidence, and your preparation — it strips everything back.
There’s no spin. No charm. No brand positioning. There’s only what you agreed, what you delivered, and whether the facts support both.
What I’ve learned, case by case over the years, is that our 100% record isn’t really about being good at going to court. It’s about how we run the business before it ever gets near a courtroom.
Every session confirmed. Every piece of work is evidenced. Every commitment — ours and theirs — documented from day one.
We don’t prepare our contracts like we expect to use them in court. We prepare them because transparency and accountability are what ethical coaching actually looks like in practice, not just in a values statement.
The court simply confirms what was already true.
This One Was for You
To every client who has ever invested in the #ADDAZERO methodology. Who showed up, did the work, honoured their commitment, and trusted us with their business — this result matters because of you.
Not because of the money, though fair exchange of value is fundamental.
Not because of the principle in the abstract, though I’ll always defend it.
But because when someone receives the full value of a coaching engagement — the frameworks, the accountability, the access, the results — and then walks away without honouring their side, they’re not just shortchanging me. They’re devaluing the investment of every single person who did pay. Every client who stretched to make it work. Every business owner who committed when it felt uncomfortable.
You deserved someone who wasn’t going to let that slide.
So we didn’t.
One Thing I’d Change
If I’m being completely candid, there’s one thing I’d do differently.
Not the pursuit. Not the documentation. Not the outcome.
The conversation earlier.
Every one of these cases, when I look back, had a point where a more direct, more uncomfortable conversation — had it happened sooner — might have resolved things without a courtroom. That’s not always true, and I won’t pretend the outcome would always be different. But it’s a reminder I carry.
Holding the line on standards doesn’t have to mean waiting for the line to be crossed. It can mean naming the tension earlier, with more honesty, before it becomes something that needs resolving in front of a judge.
That’s the real lesson.
I’ve Been on the Other Side of This Too
I want to be clear about something: I am not someone who has only ever been wronged.
Last year, I also wrote separately about four joint ventures that didn’t survive their first year. Ego, including my own blind spots. Misaligned values I spotted too late. Relationships that looked right on the surface and weren’t underneath. Uncomfortable conversations I delayed, just like the ones I’m describing here.
Those experiences didn’t just happen to me. In some cases, they happened because of me. Or at least, because of decisions I made or didn’t make quickly enough.
I raise this not to invite sympathy, but because I think it matters. The reason I believe so strongly in clear agreements, honest conversations, and early intervention isn’t theoretical. It’s because I’ve seen what happens — and felt what it costs — when those things are absent from both sides of a table.
The standard I hold clients to is the same standard I hold myself to. That’s what ethical business actually means.
What Doesn’t Change
Our terms. Our transparency. Our delivery. Our documentation.
And our willingness to defend all of it. Not to win, but because the 850+ clients who trusted us with their businesses, their livelihoods, and their freedom deserve nothing less.
In arduis fidelis.
7 April 2026 (4 days after I originally wrote this post)
The Aftermath After You Win
I didn’t plan to write this part.
The original post ended where I thought the story ended — with a judgment, a lesson, and a reminder of why we do things the way we do them. In arduis fidelis. Faithful through adversity. Case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
What Nobody Tells You About Winning
Within hours of the court entering judgment in our favour, the contact started.
Not an acknowledgement. Not a plan to pay. Not even silence — which, frankly, I’d have welcomed.
What followed was a sustained campaign of harassment across two platforms, beginning on the evening of the judgment itself and continuing through the Easter weekend. Offensive messages. Threats. The deliberate weaponisation of personal information shared in confidence during a professional relationship. An explicit instruction from me to stop — sent simultaneously on both platforms, read on both platforms — followed by an escalation of the unsolicited contacts in direct defiance of it.
I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I don’t need it, and quite frankly, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
I’m sharing it because nobody talks about this part.
The business books cover how to pursue a debt. The legal guides tell you how to enforce a judgment. But nobody writes about what it actually costs to be right — in time, in energy, in the quiet erosion of an Easter weekend that should have been spent doing anything else.
The Real Price of the Judgment
The court awarded us the outstanding debt, plus interest, plus costs.
What it didn’t account for was the hours spent building the evidence bundle. The months of preparation. The cost — financial and personal — of doing all of that while running a business, managing a team, and keeping clients moving forward.
And then the aftermath. The screenshots. The evidence logs. The formal notices. The careful, measured responses when every instinct says something far less measured.
None of that appears in the award.
I raise this not to suggest the pursuit wasn’t worth it — it was, and I’d do it again, not for the money, but on behalf of over 850 other clients, and over 8,500 invoices sent out, that have been paid on time — because I think business owners deserve an honest picture. Especially the accidentally successful ones, who are often so busy keeping their businesses moving that they absorb these costs in silence and call it the price of doing business.
It isn’t. And you shouldn’t have to.
What It Confirmed
Here’s the thing about adversity. It doesn’t reveal character — it confirms it.
When someone loses with grace, you learn something about them. When someone loses without it, you learn something too. The response to a judgment is, in many ways, more revealing than anything that happened before it.
I already knew what kind of business we are running. I already knew what our standards looked like and why they existed. The courtroom confirmed it. The aftermath confirmed it again, but differently.
What both the win, and the vile and unsolicited response from the Defendant has shown, it a mirror of exactly who and what ‘standards’ they operate within.
Because staying measured when you’re being provoked is harder than staying measured when everything is calm. Choosing the right response when the wrong one would feel entirely justified — that’s where values either hold or they don’t.
Ours held.
Why I’m Still Not Celebrating
I said in the original post that there was no part of me that wanted to shout about winning.
That’s still true. More so, if anything.
Because a win that costs this much — in time, in energy, in having your personal history used as a weapon by someone who once called themselves a colleague — isn’t something you raise a glass to. It’s something you process, document, act on appropriately, and then quietly move past.
The judgment was fair. The response to it was not. Those are both true, and I can hold both without letting either of them define what comes next.
What comes next is the same thing that always comes next.
The work. The clients. The mission. The standard.
In arduis fidelis.
Faithful through adversity. Not just when adversity looks like a difficult hearing. But when it looks like an Easter weekend, you didn’t get back.
Ready to work with a coach who holds the line — and holds themselves to the same standard?
Start with your Business Freedom Assessment: www.mytruenorth.club/bfa
Or if you’d like to experience the methodology in person, join us at the next #ADDAZERO Game Changer: www.mytruenorth.club/game-changer
Jay Allen is a Business Freedom Coach and the founder of My TrueNORTH Limited — the UK’s leading ethical coaching practice — and creator of the #ADDAZERO Methodology, a proven framework used by business owners across 34 countries to grow, scale, and exit successfully. A former British Army Combat Medic, Jay holds an MSc in International Business Ethics and is the author of the #ADDAZERO trilogy. He works with accidentally successful business owners who are ready to reclaim their freedom.
Business Coach Warrington | Business Coach Cheshire | Business Coach Manchester | Ethical Business Coaching UK
by Jay Allen | Mar 31, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
WHAT DOES “ETHICAL” ACTUALLY MEAN?
And why it matters more now than it ever has
Ethics compass
In 2017, Smith & Williamson — one of the UK’s most respected financial and professional services firms, founded in 1881 — gave My TrueNORTH the title “The Ethical Coaching Company.”
I want to be clear about what that means. This wasn’t a trade association handing out badges at a conference. This wasn’t a peer group voting for their favourite. Smith & Williamson built their reputation over generations as a firm that doesn’t attach its name to anything lightly. They advise some of the most scrutinised businesses and individuals in the country. They know what rigour looks like. They know what standards look like. And they know what the absence of both looks like.
I didn’t apply for it. I didn’t campaign for it. They looked at how we operate, what we stand for, and how we treat the people we work with — and they called it what it was.
I’ve carried that title with enormous pride, and equal responsibility, every single day since.
But it still brings a question I’m asked more than any other.
“What does ethical coaching actually mean?”
It’s a fair question. And what people are really asking — beneath the surface of it — is: is this just a marketing line, or do you actually mean it?
I mean it. So let me explain precisely what I mean.
FIRST, LET’S CLEAR SOMETHING UP
Most people use the words ethics and morality interchangeably. A few years ago I ran a survey — across social media and a CRM of business owners — with a simple statement: “There is a difference between ethics and morality.” True or false?
76% said true. 18% said false. 5% didn’t know.
Then I asked the 76% who said there IS a difference to explain — concisely — what that difference actually is.
Nobody could.
Which tells you something important. We’re using language that carries enormous weight in business and in life, and most of us couldn’t define it clearly if our reputation depended on it. In some cases, it does.
So here’s my take — because this distinction matters, and it’s the foundation everything else is built on.
Morality is internal. It’s your personal compass. The code you carry inside you, shaped by your upbringing, your background, your community, your experiences. It’s what you feel, instinctively, to be right or wrong. It doesn’t shift much. It’s yours.
Ethics is external. It’s the framework — the deliberately constructed set of principles that guides how decisions get made, especially in professional and organisational contexts. Ethics can be written down. It can be agreed upon. It can be held up and examined.
Here’s the line I keep coming back to:
Ethics is what I believe and say I believe. Morality is what I do. Integrity is what I’ll have — if the two match.
That gap — between what we say we stand for and how we actually behave — is where most business owners quietly live. Uncomfortable territory. Which is exactly why it’s worth examining.
THIS ISN’T ABSTRACT. IT’S YOUR BUSINESS, EVERY DAY.
There’s a tendency, when words like ethics and morality enter the conversation, for people to assume this is philosophical territory. Interesting in a seminar room. Largely irrelevant to the day-to-day reality of running a company.
I’d push back on that hard.
The accidentally successful business owner — the person who set up a business, was good at what they did, got busy, hired in help, and woke up one day running something bigger and more complex than they ever intended — is making ethical decisions constantly. They just don’t always call them that.
Do you take on a client you know isn’t right, because the cash is useful right now? Do you make a promise to an employee you’re not confident you can keep? Do you present your business as more stable or more established than it currently is, because the alternative feels too vulnerable? Do you hold a supplier to terms you know are squeezing them, because you can?
These are ethics. Every single one of them.
And the way you answer them — consistently, under pressure, when nobody is watching and there’s no commercial incentive to do the right thing — is what defines the culture of your business. Whether you’ve written it down or not.
THE TWELVE PRINCIPLES I BUILD EVERYTHING ON
Over years of working with business owners — and long before that, in the Army, where the consequences of ethical failure weren’t measured in lost contracts but in lives — I’ve come back to twelve principles that I believe underpin genuinely ethical leadership. Not as a checklist. Not as a poster for the office wall. As a lived standard.
Honesty. Say what is true. Don’t mislead by omission, overstatement, or selective framing. This sounds obvious. It is also one of the most consistently violated principles in business, because the pressure to present a better version of reality is relentless.
Integrity. Do what you believe is right, even when the pressure to do otherwise is significant. This is the one that gets tested most often — and the one most people discover they’ve compromised only in hindsight.
Promise-keeping. Your word is your bond, or it is nothing. Make commitments you intend to keep. If circumstances change, say so — early, directly, and without dressing it up.
Loyalty. To your people. To your clients. To the commitments you’ve made. Loyalty isn’t blind obedience — it’s a steady, reliable presence that others can depend on. It also means being honest when something isn’t working, rather than quietly disappearing.
Fairness. Exercise authority without arrogance. Don’t exploit mistakes, vulnerabilities, or the power imbalance that comes with being the owner. Treat people with the same consistency you’d want applied to yourself.
Concern for others. Your job is not just to extract value. It’s to create it — for your clients, your team, your community. The business owner who measures success only in what they take out will always be missing something.
Respect. For the dignity, the time, and the contribution of every person who interacts with your business. Full stop.
Law-abiding. I shouldn’t need to write this one. And yet.
Commitment to excellence. Good enough isn’t. This isn’t about perfectionism — it’s about taking the standard seriously, staying informed, and constantly asking whether what you’re delivering is the best version of what you’re capable of.
Leadership. You set the tone. What you permit, you promote. What you model, you multiply. If the ethical standard in your business isn’t what you want it to be, the first place to look is in the mirror.
Reputation and morale. Your reputation is built over years and lost in moments. Guard it — not as a vanity project, but because the people who work for you and the clients who trust you deserve to be associated with something worth being associated with.
Accountability. Own your decisions. Own your mistakes. Don’t outsource the consequences of your choices to the people around you. This is the one that separates leaders from passengers.
These aren’t aspirational. They’re operational. The question isn’t whether you agree with them — most people will. The question is whether you’re actually living them, under pressure, on a Tuesday afternoon when it’s inconvenient and nobody’s watching.
YOUR CODE OF ETHICS. WRITTEN OR NOT, IT EXISTS.
Here’s something most business owners don’t realise: you already have a code of ethics. You just might not have written it down.
Every decision you make — who you hire, who you fire, which clients you take on, which ones you walk away from, how you handle a complaint, how you treat a supplier when they’re struggling — all of it adds up to a code. Your people can read it, even if it’s never been committed to paper. Your clients can feel it. Your competitors can see it.
The question isn’t whether you have a code. The question is whether the code you’re living by is the one you’d be comfortable defending in public.
Writing it down matters — but not for the reasons most people think. The value isn’t in having a document. The value is in the process of creating it. Because sitting down with your leadership team and saying “what do we actually stand for, and what lines will we not cross?” is one of the most clarifying conversations a business owner can have. It surfaces assumptions. It exposes inconsistencies. It forces you to choose.
And when you involve your team in that process — rather than issuing a policy from above and expecting compliance — something shifts. Because people will defend standards they helped create in a way they will never defend standards that were handed to them.
One more thing on this. A code of ethics isn’t a founding document. It’s a living one. Your business changes. The market changes. The pressures on your people change. Your code needs to keep pace — reviewed regularly, held to account by someone with both the authority and the spine to call it out when it’s being breached.
WHAT CHANGED WHEN WE BECAME “THE ETHICAL COACHING COMPANY”
I’ll be honest with you about what happened when Smith & Williamson gave us that title.
The enquiries changed. The clients changed. The conversations changed. People came to us differently — with more openness, more willingness to be honest about what wasn’t working, more readiness to do the hard work rather than look for the quick fix.
And our competitors changed, too, in how they positioned themselves relative to us. Ethics became, for some of them, a word to borrow. A badge to print. A message to carry without the substance to back it up.
Which brings me back to where I started.
I believe — genuinely, not as a marketing position — that we are at the end of the era when appearance was enough. The era when a confident brand, a polished message, and a persuasive sales conversation could carry a business indefinitely regardless of what was actually being delivered.
The business owners I work with have been burned too many times. By suppliers who over-promised. By coaches and consultants who looked the part and delivered nothing. By their own instincts, which told them something wasn’t right and which they ignored because they were too busy, too tired, or too hopeful.
They are not as easy to fool as they once were. And that, frankly, is a good thing.
Know. Like. Trust. Three words that have been in marketing vocabulary for decades. But the only way to earn all three — genuinely, durably, in a way that compounds over time rather than collapsing under scrutiny — is through transparency. Honesty. Vulnerability. A willingness to say this is who we are, this is what we stand for, and this is what you can hold us to.
Ethics isn’t a constraint on commercial success. It’s the foundation of it.
People buy people. They always have. And what they’re buying, beneath the product and the price and the pitch, is trust. The only currency in business that can’t be faked indefinitely.
In arduis fidelis.
Jay Allen | Scale & Exit Mentor | My TrueNORTH Limited | co******@*********th.biz | mytruenorth.club/bfa
by Jay Allen | Mar 16, 2026 | 1. Vision, Value, Culture, Purpose
Positive Culture
One of the Eight Universal Laws of Sustainable Business Scale
You can tell a lot about a regiment in the first twenty-four hours.
Not from the briefings. Not from the welcome. Not from what anyone says to you when you arrive. You can tell from the way people move. The way they talk to each other when nobody senior is watching. The way a junior soldier responds when something goes wrong. The way the room changes when a senior rank walks in.
As a Combat Medic attached to different regiments throughout my service, I had an unusual vantage point. I wasn’t a permanent member of any of them. I moved in, deployed alongside them, and moved out again — back to the Medical Corps, ready for the next attachment. Which meant I experienced something most soldiers never do: multiple cultures, from the outside, in rapid succession.
And the difference between them was not subtle. It was immediate, visceral, and (as I came to understand over time) entirely predictable in its consequences.
Two Regiments. Two Cultures. One Lesson.
The first was an infantry regiment with a long history and a proud tradition. On paper, it had everything. Heritage. Reputation. A set of values that had been handed down through generations.
In practice, it was run on fear.
The leadership was authoritarian in the oldest and least effective sense of the word, not the disciplined, standards-driven authority that produces excellence, but the bullying, status-protecting, compliance-through-intimidation variety that produces silence. Junior soldiers learned quickly that the safest response to any situation was to say nothing, do nothing beyond the minimum required, and avoid drawing attention. The initiative was not rewarded. It was punished because initiative implies judgment, and judgment implies that the person exercising it believes they have something to contribute.
As a medic, I saw the consequences of that culture with a clarity that perhaps others didn’t. Because fear doesn’t stay in the barracks. It deploys with you. It shows up in the decisions people make under pressure, in the information that gets withheld because nobody wants to be the one who raised a problem, in the physical and psychological toll of operating in an environment where your worth is measured by your compliance rather than your capability.
The culture killed people. Perhaps not directly. But the environment that culture created, the suppression of judgment, the erosion of trust, the isolation of individuals who should have been functioning as a unit, made everything harder, slower, and more dangerous than it needed to be.
Then I had the privilege of serving alongside the Gurkha Rifles.
If the first regiment showed me what broken culture looks like, the Gurkhas showed me what culture at its most extraordinary looks like. And the contrast was not marginal. It was total.
The pride was the first thing you noticed. Not the performative pride of a unit that talks about its history — the lived, daily, entirely unselfconscious pride of soldiers who genuinely believed that belonging to this regiment was one of the great privileges of their lives. It wasn’t imposed from above. It wasn’t mandated by the officer class. It was carried, individually and collectively, by every person in the unit (from the most senior to the most junior) as something personal, something earned, something worth protecting.
And that pride translated directly into behaviour. Not because anyone was watching. Because that was simply who they were.
When things got hard (and they got very hard), the response was never individual. It was collective. The challenges that would have fractured other units, that would have produced the blame, the withdrawal, the self-protection I’d seen elsewhere, produced the opposite in the Gurkhas. All for one. One for all. Not as a slogan. As an operating principle that holds under every conceivable pressure.
I have never forgotten the difference. And I have seen both of those cultures, in civilian dress, in every business I have worked with since.
What Culture Actually Is
Most business owners understand culture as something they have, rather than something they do.
They have values on the website. They have a mission statement in the boardroom. They have a vision for where the business is going and a set of principles that describe how it intends to get there. And they believe, genuinely and not unreasonably, that these things constitute the culture of the business.
They don’t. They describe it, at best. They aspire to it. But they are not it.
Simon Sinek’s foundational argument, that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, gets closer to the truth. Culture is not the what. It is not even the why, though the why is where it starts. Culture is the how. It is the daily, lived, behavioural expression of what the business actually believes, as distinct from what it says it believes.
And the gap between those two things, between the stated culture and the lived culture, is where most businesses are quietly losing the war.
The values on the wall of the bullying regiment I served with were probably admirable. Heritage. Courage. Honour. The officers who enforced compliance through fear almost certainly believed they were upholding those values. They weren’t. They were demonstrating, through every interaction, every decision, every moment of how they showed up, that the real values of that unit were hierarchy, self-protection, and control.
Culture is not what you say. It is what you tolerate. It is what you reward. It is what happens in the room when you’re not in it, and whether what happens then is recognisably the same as what happens when you are. It is the invisible code that every person in the business reads and responds to, not from the handbook, but from the accumulated evidence of how this place actually works.
The Three Ways Culture Kills a Business
Culture that is misaligned, where the stated values and the lived behaviours are in conflict, doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly, and its effects compound over time in ways that are easy to attribute to other causes.
It drives out the best people first.
The individuals most likely to leave a culture that doesn’t match its stated values are precisely the ones the business can least afford to lose, the people with enough self-awareness to recognise the gap, enough options to act on it, and enough integrity to find the dissonance intolerable. What remains, over time, is a team selected not for capability but for tolerance of the way things actually are here. Which is a polite way of describing a team that has either stopped noticing, stopped caring, or stopped believing that it could be different.
It makes every other law harder to apply.
You cannot build systematised operations in a culture where people protect their knowledge because knowledge is power, and power is the only security available. You cannot develop leaders in a culture where showing capability is a threat to those above you. You cannot multiply a team in a culture where trust is rationed and autonomy is withheld. Culture is not one law among eight. It is the environment in which all the other laws either take root or fail to. Get it wrong, and the systems, the pricing, the leadership model, and the team you build will all underperform — not because they are wrong in themselves, but because the culture they’re operating in is working against them.
It becomes invisible to the people inside it.
This is the most insidious consequence, and the one I witnessed most clearly in the broken regiment. The people who had been there longest, who had been shaped by that culture from the beginning of their careers, could not see it. They had normalised the fear, the compliance, the suppression of initiative, to the point where it simply felt like how things were. How they had always been. How they were supposed to be.
The same thing happens in businesses. The culture that is slowly eroding performance, driving away talent, and preventing growth becomes invisible to the owner who built it, not because they are blind, but because they are inside it. The accidental business owner who micromanages because the culture of control was established on day one, and has calcified quietly over the years that followed, does not experience themselves as a micromanager. They experience themselves as thorough. As caring about quality. As the person who holds the standard.
They are correct. And the culture they have built is, regardless of their intentions, killing the business’s ability to grow.
What Positive Culture Actually Looks Like
The Gurkha Rifles did not have a culture document. What they had was something far more powerful and far more durable: a shared identity so deeply embedded that it shaped behaviour automatically, without instruction, under conditions that stripped every other variable away.
This is what positive culture looks like at its most fundamental. Not a set of aspirations. A set of behaviours so consistently demonstrated, so thoroughly reinforced, and so genuinely believed in by the people inside them that they persist regardless of circumstance.
In a business context, this translates to something specific and achievable, but it requires the owner to make a shift that many find genuinely difficult.
The shift is this: from defining the culture to embodying it.
The businesses with the strongest cultures are not the ones with the best-written values. They are the ones where the owner and the leadership team around them demonstrate those values in every interaction, every decision, every moment of difficulty, without exception and without inconsistency.
Because culture is transmitted not through documents but through observation. Every person in the business is watching, constantly and often unconsciously, for the signal that tells them what this place actually values. They watch what gets rewarded and what gets overlooked. They watch what happens when someone makes a mistake, and whether the response is curiosity or blame. They watch whether the standards that apply to the team also apply to the leadership, or whether the values are for display and the leadership is exempt.
What they see is the culture. Not what’s on the wall.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
In the military, the phrase we used was simple: improvise, adapt, overcome. It wasn’t a slogan. It was a cultural baseline, the minimum expectation of how a soldier would respond to any situation that didn’t go to plan.
It didn’t matter which regiment I was attached to, which terrain, which conditions, which set of circumstances had conspired to make the mission harder than it was supposed to be. The expectation was the same. You improve what you can, you adapt to what you can’t change, and you overcome whatever is in front of you. Not because it was written in a handbook. Because that was the culture, and the culture was what you were.
The businesses that scale, the ones that retain their best people, that develop leaders, that build something genuinely transferable and genuinely valuable — have a version of this embedded in how they operate. Not improve, adapt, and overcome necessarily. But a cultural baseline that is lived rather than stated, demonstrated rather than described, and resilient enough to hold under the pressure that growth, change, and difficulty inevitably bring.
That baseline starts with the owner. It is transmitted through every decision they make, every behaviour they model, every moment of difficulty in which they either demonstrate the culture they say they want or reveal the one they’ve actually built.
You cannot outsource it. You cannot document your way to it. You cannot hire a consultant to install it while you focus on something else.
But you can build it. Deliberately, consistently, and with the understanding that the gap between the culture you have and the culture you need is not a communication problem. It is a behaviour problem. And behaviour, unlike strategy, is entirely within your control.
Where Do You Start?
The most honest diagnostic for culture is not a survey or a workshop. It is a single question, asked without defensiveness: if I were attached to this business as an outsider for thirty days, what culture would I observe?
Not the values. Not the mission statement. The actual, daily, behavioural evidence of what this place believes and how it operates.
The Business Freedom Assessment won’t answer that question for you. But it will surface the structural conditions, the dependencies, the bottlenecks, the leadership gaps — that are either enabling your culture or working against it. Because culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the systems, the team, the leadership model, and the pricing decisions that either reinforce what you believe or contradict it.
It’s free. It’s thorough. And it’s the most honest conversation most business owners have had about what they’ve actually built, versus what they intended to.
Ready to find out what culture you’ve actually created — and what it’s capable of becoming?
Take the FREE Business Freedom Assessment at www.mytruenorth.club/bfa and let’s build the cultural foundation that makes everything else possible.
Have you read the other Universal Laws?
Transferable Value
Predictable Revenue
Systematised Operations
Values-based Leadership
