Phil Dawson - Business Coach

10/09/2026

There’s a point in growing a business where you can find yourself thinking:
“I used to make more money when it was just me.”
I get it.
I’ve hired more than 500 people across my businesses over the years.
I know what it’s like to get the late-night sick text, cover the gap yourself and watch your best people get frustrated because they’re carrying others.
The lesson for me was that hiring more people isn’t enough.
You need a clear vision.
A culture people actually want to be part of.
And a way for everyone to understand what good performance looks like.
More people don’t have to mean more problems.

It’s one of the reasons I’m running a free workshop with Coffs City Council called
Build a Team Good People Want to Join on Wednesday 23 September.

If managing people is taking more out of you than it should, this workshop is for you.

Register here:

Attract good people, build the right culture and turn wages into performance

08/09/2026

I’ve hired more than 500 people over 15 years, and I’ve learned the hard way that adding people doesn’t automatically make business easier.
Vision, culture and clear performance expectations matter.

06/09/2026

Nobody starts a business because they love spreadsheets. They start it for the people waiting at home.

Happy Father’s Day to the dads out there building something.

Not just a business. A life. A better one, for the people you go home to.

Nobody sees the version of you that lies awake doing the maths. Wondering if the quiet month is just quiet, or the start of something worse. Nobody sees the meetings you took at 6am so you could be at sports training by 5:30pm. The invoices chased between school drop-off and the first job of the day.

You didn’t start a business to work more. You started it so one day you wouldn’t have to answer to anyone else. So your time could actually be yours. So your kids could have a life you didn’t grow up with.

It’s not a straight line. I know that better than most - I’ve had plenty of nights lying there running numbers in my head instead of sleeping, early on in my past businesses. It’s a roller coaster, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But I’ll tell you what’s on the other side of the rough patches. Harmony. Being actually present for your kids, not just physically in the room. Time with your partner that isn’t half-there, half-thinking-about-work. A life to be proud of, built on your own terms.

Today, if you can, put the phone down for a bit. Whatever the business needs, it can need it tomorrow.

To the dads carrying more than anyone realises - I see you. And I hope today you get a moment to just be present with the people you’re doing all of this for.

Happy Father’s Day.

05/09/2026

🍛 For Som, the incredibly talented chef behind Guru's Indian Cuisine , hospitality has always been about more than great Indian food. It’s about creating a place where people can slow down, feel comfortable and genuinely enjoy being together.

His journey began in India, where he studied hospitality and spent seven years as a chef, including working in a prestigious five-star hotel. After running restaurants in Brisbane, a new opportunity brought him to the Coffs Harbour area in 2012. 🌏

After settling here with his family, they opened an Indian grocery store before Guru’s followed. More than 12 years later, the restaurant remains proudly family-run. ❤️
The menu reflects his experience cooking alongside chefs from across India, with regional dishes including a particularly special goat curry made from his late mum’s recipe. 🥘

But there’s another ingredient that makes Guru’s what it is: the atmosphere.
The whole experience is deliberately relaxed. Calm surroundings, comfortable dining and no feeling that you need to rush. People might come in expecting a quick meal, settle into the space and find themselves still chatting a couple of hours later. 😊

That connection runs deep. Some customers first came in as teenagers with their parents and now return with families of their own. For a recent 80th birthday held at the restaurant, around half the guests were already regular customers.
That’s the kind of community you can’t manufacture. 🙌

👍 Like, comment and share to celebrate the local businesses that make the Coffs Coast feel like home.

04/09/2026

Most business owners think delegation is about not being able to do the job.

It's actually a speed decision - and it's the same instinct that gets people out the other side of business ownership, not just through it.

My dad built a genuinely successful business, sold it, and retired in his early forties. Was super grateful to have him up for a week helping clear a backlog of jobs around the house - shed, pool filter, shelves, tech and automation, a gym space to sort out. One week, work still running, my kids still had sport.

He didn't try to do it all himself. Same habit that got him out early: work out what's actually a High Payoff Activity for you, and what's just costing you time you've never put a rate on.

The pool filter job we'd earmarked half a day for - a specialist did it in 30 minutes for $100.
The shed we'd blocked out a whole weekend for - a local handyman had it standing in two and a half hours.
The tech and automation work, that's his High Payoff Activity, so he kept that and moved fast on it.

Everything else, he delegated.

A list that would've realistically taken six months of "getting around to it" was done in a week, for a few hundred dollars.

The Law of Leverage applies at home the same as it does in a business: if it doesn't multiply your time, clarity or money, it's noise - or it's someone else's job.

Worth asking this week: what's still on your plate because you've never actually costed what your time is worth against what it'd cost to hand it off?


Happy to talk it through: https://calendly.com/phildawson-trustedadvisor/15min

03/09/2026

At a Chamber event recently , one of the panellists - an electrical contractor - said something worth repeating to every business owner reading this...
He reviews his KPIs and sales targets on a set schedule, with the right people in the room, in a way that removes emotion from the conversation. Not how does the business feel like it's going. What do the actual numbers say.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Most owners run their business on a feeling. Busy feels like winning. A good month feels like the trend. A hard conversation with a client feels like it wasn't worth chasing the invoice.
None of that is data. It's mood dressed up as insight.

A simple structure worth borrowing:
Pick 3–5 numbers that actually predict how your business is going - not vanity numbers, the ones that move before everything else does. Labour percentage. Gross profit by job or client. Cash position, 13 weeks out.
Review them on the same day, every week or fortnight, whether the week felt good or bad.
Bring the right people into that conversation - not just you, alone, staring at a spreadsheet at 9pm.

Owners who do this consistently make faster, calmer decisions. Not because they feel more confident - because they're finally arguing with facts instead of moods.
If you don't know your labour percentage right now, off the top of your head, that's usually the first sign this isn't happening yet in your business. Worth fixing before it costs you a season.

Better numbers. Calmer decisions. Better business.

01/09/2026

Someone I met recently pointed out you can usually tell how an owner feels about their business just by watching the team. If the owner's flat or negative, customer service dips, the team's not as sharp, and there's a real gap between what the business promises and what it delivers.

Flip it around, and everything lifts. Same team. Same market. Different energy at the top.
You don't need to be relentlessly upbeat - that's not realistic, and nobody buys it anyway. But it is worth noticing what you're feeding your own head each day, because your team is watching. So are your customers.

This week, try this: before you walk into work, ask yourself what you've been looking at and listening to. If it's mostly noise, change the input before you try to change the mood.

Your business follows your attention. Not the other way around.

31/08/2026

Went along to a LinkedIn Local event here in Coffs a couple of weeks ago. Anna ran a mastermind session for the group - sat a handful of us around a table (photo below, me with an engineer, a marketing specialist and a photographer - about as random a mix of businesses as you'll find) and gave us a simple set of questions to work through for each other.

Who's one person you'd like to be introduced to? What's a problem you're trying to solve right now? What's something you're proud of that you haven't told anyone?

Nothing fancy. No slides, no pitch. Just good people asking good questions and actually listening to the answers.

It reminded me why Napoleon Hill built the idea of a "mastermind" into Think and Grow Rich almost a hundred years ago. He studied the most successful people of his era and found the same thing in every one of them - none of them did it alone. They all had a small group around them, different skills, different perspectives, working toward something together.

That still holds up. You can't be great at everything yourself. The trades guy at our table had never thought about his branding the way the marketing specialist saw it in thirty seconds. I hadn't thought about my own business the way an engineer does - no emotion attached, just logic.

That's the value. Not more information. Different eyes.

If you don't have a group like that around you, it's worth building one. Doesn't need to be formal - four or five people, different industries, same level of ambition, willing to be honest with each other.

You can't be great at everything. But you can surround yourself with people who are.

28/08/2026

3 numbers worth sitting with.

If your GP% is 40% and you increased your prices by 20%, you'd need to lose 33% of your customers just to be worse off. As tough as pricing conversations feel right now, that gap protects you more than most owners realise.

What could that extra profit do for your business, what cold you afford to invest in all of a sudden, who could you hire, if you had that kind of extra margin? Could that also protect you from a turn down in trade better, remove risk, allow you to take a holiday with the family?

If you want to sense check the best way to do this in your business, comment below and we can chat about it over the phone, or come along to a workshop, I run pricing specific ones every 8 weeks. Event details on my page on Facebook or Eventbrite…search ‘Phil Dawson’

27/08/2026

Spent half a day at an aged care expo this week with one of my clients.

That’s not really “consulting.” That’s just how I like to work.

I’ll never be the advisor who shows up once a quarter, glances at a P&L, and disappears. I want to understand the industry my clients are in - who they serve, how they serve them, what actually matters on the ground. You can’t help someone build a stronger business if you don’t understand the business.

While we were there, I watched him sit with an elderly woman who had no idea where to start navigating in-home care for a loved one. She was overwhelmed. He slowed right down, listened properly, and gave her exactly what she needed - not because it was his job, but because helping people stay in their homes longer is genuinely why he does this.

That’s the kind of operator I love working with. And it’s why the plan now is simple: help him become the person this whole region turns to when they’re facing that exact moment.

I’ve run businesses for 15 years. I know what it’s like to be in the deep end. That’s probably why clients tell me the same thing - it helps that I’ve actually been there.

If you want an advisor who takes the time to properly understand your business, not just your numbers, let’s have a chat. Booking link in first comment
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