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.
