One business owner told me networking wasn't working.
She was doing plenty of networking. She just didn't have a clear offer to sell the people she was meeting.
Hi, I’m Zoë. I ask a lot of questions.
I help business owners who are flat out working but still feel like they’re earning 2p an hour work out why, and what needs to change.
Usually that involves me getting very interested in something that doesn’t quite add up.
You tell me you need more leads, but you haven’t followed up with the ones you’ve got.
You tell me networking isn’t working, but there’s nothing obvious for the people you meet to buy.
You tell me you need to sell more, but the maths says the offer can’t make enough money anyway.
That’s normally where I start.
Work with meMy career makes more sense in hindsight.
I’ve worked across sales, marketing, operations, systems, data, AI and automation.
For a long time, that made my CV look slightly like I was collecting professions rather than choosing one.
Turns out that’s quite useful when your job is figuring out what’s going on inside a business.
I started in the wedding industry, where I spent years selling and coordinating weddings and eventually oversaw more than £3 million in sales.
Then came sales management, followed by running my own business, followed by several years working behind the scenes in online businesses across operations, launches, systems and delivery.
I came back to self-employment properly in 2023.
And eventually realised the useful bit wasn’t choosing whether I was a sales person, systems person, data person, marketing person or operations person.
It was being able to look across all of them.
Because businesses don't organise their problems neatly by department.
A pricing problem can look like a sales problem.
A capacity problem can look like a marketing problem.
Something that looks like a lead problem might have bugger all to do with leads.
Give me a business and I will immediately start poking it.
Why are people buying that one?
Why does this cost £90?
What happened to those 200 customers?
Why are you doing that manually?
Where did these clients actually come from?
How long does this take you?
And hang on. You said something completely different twenty minutes ago.
I need to know why.
Sometimes that means opening a spreadsheet.
Sometimes it means working backwards from the money you want to make.
Sometimes it means looking at your customers, offers, sales, capacity or how you're spending your time.
And sometimes you say something in a conversation and I think:
That. That's the bit we need to look at.
I bloody love a contradiction.
Another was charging £90 an hour.
When we worked backwards from what she wanted to make and how much time she could realistically sell, she needed to generate roughly £454 per chargeable hour.
Another thought a templated service should cost less because she'd become quicker at delivering it.
The client was still getting the value.
She'd just got better at doing the work.
Being more efficient had somehow become a reason to pay herself less. Nope.
That's the stuff I like finding.
Not because every business has one secret answer hidden in row 846 of a spreadsheet.
Because the thing you think is wrong and the thing that's actually constraining the business are not always the same thing.
What you’ll get from me
I’m not particularly good at nodding along when I think you're fixing the wrong problem.
I will ask questions.
I will have thoughts.
I will probably open a spreadsheet.
And if two things you're telling me cannot both be true, we're going to talk about it.
What I won't do is arrive with twelve steps I've already decided your business needs before I've looked at it.
I want to understand this business, not Business™.
Then I can give you my judgement about what actually deserves your attention.
What clients say
“She has an incredible ability to cut through the noise and quickly identify the root of the problem. Not only that, she has the knowledge and experience to help you solve it. I truly enjoyed chatting with her and am grateful for her time and insights.”
Kirsty Waite
Founder, The Ethical Coaching Company
“In a world full of coaches who tell you what they think you want to hear, Zoë stands out by telling you what you need to hear. She's done the background work. She's tested the methods. She doesn't just talk the talk. If you're not frightened of hearing the truth and are serious about moving forward, she's the real deal.”
Zoe Lea
Author & copywriter
“Zoë dives deep into the details and asks the right questions to make you think about what you actually want to achieve. After our session, I felt a renewed sense of clarity and purpose. Her 'burning down' question was a game-changer for me.”
Jane de Vos
Fractional COO
When I’m not poking around in somebody’s business
I live in Lancashire with my husband, Reggie the dog and Dexter the cat.
I’m AuDHD, very fond of craft beer, 00s television, travelling and then being disproportionately pleased to be back home after travelling.
I have a habit of making obscure references to television programmes that stopped airing about fifteen years ago and waiting to see who notices.
I like restaurants, good hotels, stupidly specific research rabbit holes and coming up with ideas that absolutely did not need to become projects.
Which, admittedly, is how quite a lot of things start.
Anyway. Back to your business.
If you're flat out working and the money still doesn't seem remotely proportionate to the amount you're putting in, that's exactly the sort of thing I want to investigate.
You don't need to know whether the problem is your pricing, offers, customers, sales, capacity, marketing or something else entirely.
Working that out is part of the job.
In Control is my 90-day private advisory for business owners who want me properly inside the problem with them.