Your business grows to the level of your leadership and shrinks to the level of your systems. That gap—between your ceiling and your floor—is the roller coaster. The highs feel amazing; the lows can be lethal. In this episode, I show you how to smooth the ride and tilt the whole line up and to the right.

First, we raise the ceiling. You’ll learn how to focus your effort where it matters most: buying back your time from low-value tasks, concentrating on high-leverage work like offers, sales, and partnerships, and practicing consistent self-leadership. I’ll walk through using The Golden Hour—a protected daily block to move one meaningful growth task forward—plus simple ways to partner smarter and make better decisions faster.

Then we raise the floor. We’ll stabilize delivery by teaching changes before we make them, documenting the essentials with quick, practical SOPs, and keeping 90% of operations on the proven playbook while reserving 10% for controlled experiments. You’ll also hear how to set a single primary decision-maker for day-to-day operations with clear escalation rules, so the business keeps running when you’re not in the room.

You won’t get off the roller coaster—but you can change the pattern from one step forward/one back to three forward/one back. Manage yourself first, then lead the team. Make your current “best day” the standard, raise it, and repeat.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

You don’t need every skill right now—you need the right skill for the stage you’re in. In this episode, I map the journey from Founder → Farmer → Tinker → Chief and show you the two keystone skills that unlock growth at each step, plus quick drills you can run this week.

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• Founder: It’s you against friction. The superpowers are resilience and work ethic—shipping V1s, selling before perfecting, and turning chaos into cash. I share daily habits that keep you moving when everything feels uphill.
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• Farmer: Consistency beats heroics. Here the wins come from focus and a practice mindset. We install a simple weekly scorecard (traffic → leads → show → close → ARPU → churn), build 10-minute SOPs, and kill “new idea whiplash” with a monthly change window.
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• Tinker: Your machine runs; now you protect attention and capital. The keys are an investor mindset and patience—delegating <$100/hr work, measuring Effective Hourly Rate, testing small, and only scaling what beats baseline.
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• Chief: At scale, outcomes are powered by people. Become a connector who goes first—over-introducing, sharing platform, and compounding goodwill. We’ll add simple rituals like “5-Intro Friday” and a give-first calendar.
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You’ll leave with a field guide to identify your stage, the two skills that matter most right now, and a 30-day plan to practice them. As a bonus, I’ll point you to templates (scorecard, SOP checklist, EHR audit, and intro scripts) so you can start today.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

You can build the best product in your category and still fall behind. Why? Because the market doesn’t reward “best”—it rewards best at business. In this episode, I unpack the pattern I’ve seen in conversations with very smart founders: they perfect the thing, but neglect the system that sells the thing.

We start with the two brains of your business:

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3. Product/Delivery drives retention.
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7. Marketing & Sales drive attention and acquisition.
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9. Being great at #1 is necessary—but insufficient in a noisy, novelty-driven world where people discover the loud before the great.
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Then we dig into three traps that smart people fall into:

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• The Technician’s Curse: When numbers dip, you “improve the product” instead of the pipeline (offer → traffic → show → close). We’ll install a simple weekly scorecard and fix the bottleneck first.
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• The Projection Trap: Assuming customers and staff think like you do. We replace assumptions with customer interviews, plain-English messaging, and clear “definitions of done.”
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• The “I’ll Figure It Out” Fallacy: Brains and hustle aren’t enough without context and reps. Borrow them—via mentors, playbooks, and proven scripts—so you make right moves faster.
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Finally, we make you best at business: choose a focused market, sharpen your promise and proof, show your mechanism, and adopt a weekly operating cadence—one growth action every morning, one bottlenecked metric every week, one small test at a time.

You’ll leave with a playbook to turn smart into scale—and the three actions to run this week so your best product finally wins.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Ever “improved” your business and watched revenue dip? This episode is about the Tinker phase—when a little success gives you a little freedom…and you accidentally starve the golden goose that got you here. I unpack the three ways owners drag healthy businesses down:

1. Fiddling for “better.” Endless tweaks to offers, pricing, scripts, and schedules without evidence. Fix: install a change discipline—a monthly change window, small A/B tests, a simple decision log, and a weekly dashboard (leads, show/close rate, ARPU, churn, CSAT).
2. Neglect via distraction. A shiny side project steals your best hours while the core engine slows. Fix: a Minimum Care Plan—a daily Owner’s Power Hour (one growth action before anything else), a crisp scorecard cadence, 10-minute SOPs for recurring tasks, and one Primary-in-Command with clear escalation thresholds.
3. Blowing it up. Panic leads to firing staff, scrapping models, or rebranding from scratch. Fix: a 30–60–90 recovery—stabilize, repair what worked, then improve surgically (one test at a time).

You’ll leave with a practical cadence to keep speed, protect consistency, and grow without self-sabotage—plus three quick actions to run this week: schedule a monthly change window, add a daily Power Hour, and pick one metric to protect every Friday.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

What was the last nonfiction book you read—and what did you do with it the week after? Books are great for ideas and inspiration, but business results come from guided action. In this episode, I trace how business books evolved—from gatekept publishing to self-published “book-as-business-card”—and why AI now lets anyone draft a passable book in hours. As Jim Rohn put it: don’t let your learning lead to knowledge; let your learning lead to action.

Enter bots. AI agents can turn a single idea into a step-by-step plan: bite-size tasks, checklists, quizzes, role-plays, even “office hours” on demand. They follow a proven teaching arc—I do, we do, you do—so you practice, get feedback, and actually ship. Books still win at narrative and worldview; bots win at behavior change.

I’ll show where creators are already selling bots (not just books or courses), when to use each format, and a simple playbook to convert one chapter into a 7-day action bot. Then I’ll invite you to try my Mentor GPT—built on the Simple Six framework—so you can feel the difference between reading and doing.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Ever stood in line for a passport or permit and thought, “How did it get this bad?” Bureaucracy doesn’t start broken—it creeps in. In this episode, we unpack why even great companies calcify: Pournelle’s Iron Law (organizations drift to serving themselves), and Parkinson’s Law (headcount grows 5–7% a year regardless of workload). Wikiquote+1

You’ll hear how complexity multiplies—extra layers, approvals, and legacy tech—until speed dies. (Yes, a major UK rail operator still uses fax to reach crews.) And why some governments deliberately keep paper ballots for auditability: simple systems are often the most resilient. The Guardian+1

Then we get practical: map the customer journey with value-stream mapping, replace approvals with “freedom within a framework” (think Netflix’s culture), flatten spans & layers, and run a quarterly “kill-a-rule” review. You’ll leave with an audit checklist to keep decisions close to customers—and bureaucracy out of your business. Lean Enterprise Institute+1

Sources: Pournelle’s Iron Law; Parkinson’s Law; EAC paper-ballot policy; Northern Rail fax reports; Lean Enterprise Institute (VSM); Netflix culture deck.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Time off won’t be handed to you—you must design for it. Run the “hit-by-a-bus” test, appoint a single decision-maker with thresholds, take a 3-day zero-contact trial, then audit and patch your playbook before booking a 7-day break. Think Kintsugi: vacations reveal cracks you can repair, making the business stronger—and you less fragile.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) tells the truth about your role. If it looks like frontline pay, you’re doing frontline work. Learn how to buy back time (cleaner → VA → fulfillment → sales support), climb the Value Ladder from operator → manager → owner, and follow a 180-day plan to shift your calendar into $100–$1,000/hr tasks—so your pay finally matches your value.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/