04/09/2026
Freediving down a line in Fujairah some years ago 🇦🇪
I understood something about depth then that I understand much better about business now:
You rarely get there by doing more.
Freediving punishes wasted effort.
Unnecessary movement burns oxygen.
Tension makes everything harder.
Urgency works against you.
The deeper you go, the more important the economy becomes.
I increasingly think the same is true commercially.
I speak to experienced coaches, consultants and experts who are already very good at what they do.
They’ve built up years of experience, credentials, relationships, ideas, frameworks and, in many cases, a strong professional reputation.
Yet when growth becomes inconsistent, the instinct is often to add another layer: content, a new platform, networking, a funnel, a different offer, another programme.
Activity accumulates.
The underlying problem remains.
Because the constraint often isn’t effort.
It’s coherence.
Their expertise has matured faster than the commercial system around it.
The market isn’t completely clear on what to associate them with.
Their offer hasn’t fully translated the breadth of what they know into something people can easily understand and buy.
And all the individual pieces of marketing they’re doing don’t necessarily form a connected path from:
expertise → positioning → familiarity → conversation → client.
That’s a very different problem from “I need to market myself more.”
And it requires a very different solution.
One of the things I’m becoming increasingly convinced of is this:
Experienced experts rarely need more things to do.
They need greater clarity about what actually creates commercial movement - and the discipline to remove what doesn’t.
The analogy with freediving only goes so far.
But there is something about learning to go deeper without wasting energy that has stayed with me.
Depth is not always the product of greater force.
Sometimes it comes from becoming far more deliberate about where the effort goes.
