I sat in that meeting and understood nothing.

At eighteen I started Concept7, a web design agency, with friends. It read like an adventure story for a while, and then one day we had people on the payroll and clients with real budgets, and I was putting on a suit to go and see the accountant.

He took me through the annual accounts. I understood none of it. Not the figures, and not the language they were being explained in. My head was somewhere else entirely: on the market, on where it was going, on what we could do next. I nodded in the right places and left none the wiser.

Concept7 came close to going under twice. Not because the work was bad or the clients were unhappy, but because I found out what the figures were saying too late to do anything about it.

When I finally did understand them, something unexpected happened: I fell for the arithmetic. That is the trap, and it is worth stating plainly. When a company feels good, when sales are coming in, the staff are happy and the customers keep returning, it feels as though all the ratios underneath must be fine too. They are often not. Nothing about a good week tells you what happened to the share of your turnover that a supplier is quietly taking.

Since then I founded srprs.me, I am building Nooch, and I have helped dozens of companies, large and small, with strategy and with how they actually run.