This site is for anyone who wants to take control of their business and make it skip.

You know the kind of place. Where staff skip in to work, where customers quietly appoint themselves as guerilla evangelists, and where owners are supportive and happy. Where customers, staff and owners can all put their hand on their heart and say “I’m glad I got involved”.

In the pursuit of skippiness, I focus on the two areas where leaders and teams have the most impact: going to market, and company building.

Every other Thursday I write on one of these topics, and once in a while I latch on to a team who is pursuing their own definition of greatness. Everything I write is in the context of:

• Doing – overcoming the issues of day-to-day life that leaders and teams face when they’re trying to make things happen. In this blog I cover some of the questions of leadership, management and change that come my way.
• Planning – the point of the plan is in the planning. I try to write about the “how to” of planning, which for me means making active choices that set direction and act as a compass for the “left a bit, right a bit, we didn’t think of that” manoeuvring of day-to-day doing.
• Foundation-ing – committing to a vision for a business or product is amongst the most important, exciting and difficult acts a leadership team can undertake. I write about foundations in the belief that building strong and tall means connecting to bedrock.

I hope you’ll subscribe to email updates and comment on the posts, or you can simply follow along by RSS or just check in every now and again.

About Nick

I’m on a life long mission to understand the business of business and I’ve never met a concept or whiteboard I didn’t want to introduce to each other.

I cut my management teeth with information giants Dun & Bradstreet and Reed Elsevier before starting my second life as an outsider. In the past few years I’ve consulted and interimed in the web and technology worlds, run the world’s oldest newspaper, and set up a market development company – all using the ideas I’m exploring here.

These days, I’m the Chief Executive of Feedback. Founded in 1958, Feedback is a manufacturing company in the South East of England, and my mission is to build it into an extraordinary company where great teams get together and bright sparks are ignited.

Whether working from the inside or out, I’ve always been an organisation geek. I don’t mean corporate stooge, I mean I’m fascinated by how things happen, change and get done inside the walls of organisations. I’m not interested in steady-state, administering, incremental. I want to know how teams set and achieve objectives? What levers move which parts? What leadership means? What makes a company break through? What is an organisation anyway?

Most importantly, what are the building blocks of success for great products, great teams and great companies?

I eat, sleep and breathe business and market development and I love hearing stories so do get in touch, leave comments, (I’ll be your friend for life), or reach out by email:

nick [at] shearinglayers [dot] com.

I promise to reply with a skip.

Out of the office I swim, bike and run in training for triathlons. My best Ironman was my first, in France; most beautiful and fastest (9:53), Karnten, Austria; toughest (12:23), Lanzarote; and I had varying degrees of misery/ecstasy in Switzerland, Florida and Arizona. Ironman: months of training followed by a single day in the sun; each race a ritual of humility, determination, patience and just showing up.

I live with my wife, two children and a beagle named Pi in Brighton, on the south coast of England.

nick [at] shearinglayers [dot] com