Weeknotes 20 Feb

There’s been a lot of meetings this week. A lot of energy. A lot of being in rooms together in London — which always changes the texture of things. You can feel ideas move faster in person. There’s more laughter, more challenge, more momentum. I’m tired, but it’s the good kind of tired. The kind that comes from building.

Some of that energy went into shaping the journey for when a client moves from one accountant to another. It’s a deceptively sensitive moment — relationships shifting, ownership changing, expectations resetting. The work wasn’t about adding more explanation. It was about deciding where reassurance matters, where precision matters more, and where restraint builds trust. Transitions like that are small on a roadmap, but big in experience.

Q4 planning is properly in motion. I’ve been building out a content prioritisation matrix — less as an artefact, more as a function. It’s easy to treat content as elastic, to assume it will somehow stretch to meet ambition. Putting Large, Medium, or Small against initiatives makes the cost visible. It invites better conversations. It also requires a certain steadiness — saying “this is bigger than it looks” without drama, and “this is smaller than we think” without diminishing it.

I’ve also been training our custom GPT — not technically, but strategically. Trying to encode judgement is an interesting mirror. You realise how much of what you call “taste” is actually accumulated pattern recognition. Making that explicit sharpens your own thinking. It forces you to articulate why something works, not just that it does.

One of the quieter highlights of the week was seeing a thoughtful session on AI and content spark the question: should we share this more widely? That instinct to open up internal thinking feels like a marker of maturity. Leadership isn’t just generating ideas; it’s recognising which ones deserve a bigger room.

There were fewer long stretches of deep work than I’d like. I felt the trade-off. But being in the room with people — properly in it — builds a different kind of alignment. Sometimes progress looks like output. Sometimes it looks like shared context.

Right now, the work feels less about speed and more about steadiness. Holding clarity while excitement builds. Choosing deliberately, even when there’s momentum. And getting comfortable with being a little tired, as long as it’s for the right reasons.