The Most Important Business Decision I Make Every Day

I want to tell you about the moment everything changed.

I'm sitting in a waiting room with my wife next to me, about to go in for our 20-week scan. The one where you find out the gender. My phone buzzes. It's the NHS app. My test results are in. Impaired kidney function. Significant decline. A referral to a nephrologist, which I had to look up, and which turns out to mean kidney doctor. A 45% decline in kidney function in eighteen months.

I put the phone back in my pocket. We got called in. The room was dark, and when they told us it was a girl, my first daughter, I held my wife's hand and felt the tears run down my face where nobody could see them. The thought going round my head wasn't joy. It was this. What if I'm not here for her? What if the last two years of 4am starts and seven-day weeks, grinding this business into existence, meant I'd run myself into the ground for nothing?

That was the moment. Everything since has been different.

This is the most personal thing I've written, and the one I've put off the longest. There are no frameworks in it and no tactical takeaways. I recorded the episode version this week, straight after my biannual kidney checkup, because sitting in that clinic again reminded me exactly why I do what I do and why I say what I say. So bear with me on this one, because I think it matters for you whether you've ever had a health scare or not.

How I got there

Let me take you back to 2020. I'd just gone full-time in the coaching business. My wife had found out she was pregnant with our first child and she wanted to be a full-time mum. That was her dream, and I had the length of her pregnancy plus her maternity leave to work out how on earth I was going to make this business earn enough to cover both of us.

So I went all in. Hell for leather, all in. 4am starts, seven days a week, daily podcasts, daily livestreams, daily everything, through COVID and through lockdown, in a two-metre-by-two-metre shed at the bottom of my garden that I called my office but privately thought of as my fortress of solitude. I barely moved and I barely stopped. My ADHD brain locked onto the goal and hyperfocused for two years straight. If you want the fuller version of how that all started, I've written it up separately in who I am and where this came from.

And it worked. The business grew, the income came, and my wife got to stop working. The goal I'd set got hit.

But by the back end of 2021 I was fraying. Not dramatically. Quietly, in the background. Tired in a way that sleep wasn't fixing. Lethargic. A low, constant sense that something wasn't right, which I kept pushing past, because the business needed me and there was always more to do. By early 2022 I was in and out of A&E with a run of different problems, all of them, looking back, the same problem wearing different clothes. I'd worked myself sick. I just didn't know it yet.

I'd reached 115 kilos, which at five foot nine is a lot of me. My blood pressure was over 180 at points. I couldn't run 500 metres without what felt like an asthma attack, and I don't even have asthma. I'd built a business inside that shed, and in doing it I'd slowly, quietly, completely neglected the body that was running the whole thing.

Then the results came back, I sat in that dark scan room, my daughter existed in the world for the first time, and I cried and wondered what on earth I'd done.

The diagnosis

IgA nephropathy. That's what I have. A rare autoimmune disease, a chronic degenerative kidney condition. Those were the words I eventually got once every other test had come back and the specialists had ruled everything else out.

It doesn't go away. That was the first thing I had to get my head around. This wasn't a hurdle I was going to clear and move past. It was something I'd be managing for the rest of my life. How fast it progresses, how much function I keep, what my long-term picture looks like, all of that would be shaped largely by the choices I made every single day. Blood pressure, diet, exercise, sleep, stress. Every lifestyle variable either protecting what I had left or speeding up the loss of it.

I did what everyone does. Googled it, read everything, watched everything, sat in the fear of it for a while. And somewhere in there, the fear started to feel more like purpose. Because I realised I already knew how to do this. Not the medical side, obviously. The doctors do that. But the discipline required to change everything about how I was living, the structure, the consistency, the doing of the right thing even when it's hard, I knew how to do that in my sleep. I'd been teaching brokers how to do it for years. I'd done it to build the business. I'd just never once turned it on my own health.

What I actually did

So the day after I got the full picture, I made a decision. I was going to go at my health with the exact same energy I'd gone at the business. No half measures, no prisoners, total commitment to the outcome.

I changed everything my doctors and the research pointed me towards. My diet, my drinking, my sleep, my training, all of it. I went vegan overnight, which for someone who loves his meat was no small thing. I made eight hours of sleep non-negotiable and I started treating stress management as seriously as any task in my diary. I even shaved my head and went full monk mode, because I needed the identity shift to be visible, to me more than to anyone else. This was my medical situation, guided by the people treating me, and yours, if you ever face one, will be your own. So I'm not handing you a plan here. What I'm handing you is the engine underneath it, because the engine had nothing to do with medicine.

It was discipline. Structure. Consistency. Doing the unglamorous thing over and over until the result turns up. Discipline as an identity rather than a burst of motivation. It's the same method I teach in every coaching conversation I have, just pointed at a kidney instead of a business.

Over the next six months I lost just under 40 kilos, from 115 down to 75. My blood pressure came back to normal. My energy returned in a way I hadn't felt in years. And when I went in for my first checkup after the diagnosis, my kidney function had climbed back to 100%. My consultant told me he'd never seen that happen before. Ever.

I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because the method that produced it is the exact same one I ask brokers to trust. The only real difference this time was that the stakes made it impossible to half do. My daughter was going to grow up. My wife needed me. My family needed me present and healthy for decades, not burnt out and broken at fifty. When the stakes are that clear, discipline stops being hard. It becomes obvious.

The part I didn't see coming

Here's the bit I genuinely couldn't have predicted, and couldn't get my head around when it happened. When my health got better, the business got better. Not slightly. Significantly.

My income went up. My thinking got clearer. My content got sharper. Decisions I'd been agonising over for weeks suddenly became obvious. The noise I'd been drowning in just fell away. And I couldn't understand it at first, because on paper I was doing less. I was sleeping more, training every day, protecting my evenings and weekends, refusing to let the business swallow every hour I had. Less time in, better results out. It made no sense to me.

What I eventually worked out was this. For two years the business had been running on a depleted engine. I thought I was being productive with my 4am starts and my always-on seven-day weeks, but a tired brain doesn't perform anywhere near the level a rested one does. The hours were there. The quality wasn't. The moment I stopped treating my health as the thing that happened in whatever time was left over, and started treating it as the foundation everything else sat on, the whole thing shifted.

Rest is productive. Sleep is productive. Exercise is productive. Protecting time with your family is productive. Not in some soft, philosophical way. In the measurable, income-generating, client-outcome-improving way. Your body is the business. Running it into the ground doesn't get you more output. It gets you worse output for longer, until one day it gets you no output at all.

Why I'm telling you

I'm not doing this to be inspirational. You can probably hear in how I write about it that I don't much enjoy talking about it. That checkup was this week, and it brings all of it back. I still get real anxiety walking into that clinic. I still feel that vulnerability every time, waiting for the result, knowing that one day it might be the bad one, because at some point it probably will be.

But I think it needs saying, because our industry is getting louder and louder about a version of success that is quietly wrecking people. The hustle content. The 4am posts. The choose-the-business-over-family-every-time badge that gets celebrated and shared and held up as something to aspire to. It isn't something to aspire to, and it's getting stronger in the story our industry tells itself.

I've now coached over 300 brokers one-to-one. I've sat with clients who've had terminal diagnoses. I've been on calls with people whose worlds were coming apart, bereavements, divorces, serious illness, sick children, and watched them try to hold a business together through it. That closeness is one of the things I love most about coaching one-to-one, because you get to understand the actual person on the other side of the screen. And the truth running under every single one of those conversations is the same. Nothing matters if your health is gone. Nothing. Not the income, not the followers, not the case count, not the awards.

You have one body, one family, one life, and the business exists to serve those things, not to eat them.

I designed the garden office I'm sitting in with enough room for a dialysis machine, if it ever comes to that. I'm not naive about what this condition might mean for me down the line. But I also know that the choices I make every day, about sleep, about food, about stress, about how I structure my time, about doing the work that actually fills my cup, are either protecting my future or eroding it. Knowing that my health is the most important business decision I make each day has made me a better coach. A better husband. A better father. A better version of me than the one grinding it out at 4am in a shed in 2020.

I really hope it doesn't take a diagnosis to make you see it the same way. But if you needed someone to just say it plainly, here it is. Your health is not a reward you get once the business succeeds. It's the thing that makes the business mean anything at all.

So one question before you go. What are you sacrificing for your business right now that, if you were completely honest with yourself, you know isn't worth the trade? Is it your sleep? Your training? Time with your kids? Your own head? Something is sitting on the back burner because the business is taking everything, and you already know what it is.

I'm not asking you to fix it today. I'm just asking you to name it. Because naming it is where treating it differently starts.

Where to find me

Work with me. My one-to-one coaching for established brokers. No courses, no group programmes. Just the two of us fixing the structure underneath your business.

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