Business By Design

ProSolution
ProSolution
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Business by Design is the podcast for owners who want to start, scale or exit a business. Each week, Stuart Wemyss and Mena Abraham unpack the four things every business must get right: value, engine, reach and team. Using the VERT flywheel, they show how these fit together to build a business that runs without you, and how the choices you make inside the business flow through to your personal wealth, lifestyle and exit options. Every episode is short and to the point, with no fluff and no sales pitches. Go to https://www.businessbydesignpodcast.com 

  1. 6 days ago

    Ep 192: Can you describe your business model in four sentences?

    Send us Fan Mail Here's the challenge Stuart opens with: describe your business in four honest sentences, one each for why customers pay, how you deliver profitably, how the right people find you, and how quality holds as you grow. Most owners can talk about their business for an hour but can't compress it into four sentences that survive scrutiny, and that vagueness is itself the problem. This isn't an elevator pitch; it's a decision filter that reveals where you're genuinely strong and where you're quietly weak. Mena walks through the four questions in plain language, warning that "we work hard" is not an engine answer, while Stuart uses Apple as a worked example of what clarity actually looks like. The gap between your four sentences and Apple's is precisely the work to be done. Crucially, the discipline is sequencing, not simultaneous effort: score each sentence, find the weakest, and make it your ninety-day project while the others sit in maintenance. Stuart names the expensive mistake of scaling reach before value and engine are solid, which just spreads weakness faster, and Mena shows how the sentences become a tool for saying no. The goal isn't four polished sentences. It's a business that compounds by design. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  2. 4 Aug

    Ep 191: Why your business has four problems, not forty

    Send us Fan Mail The three "killers" thin margins, poor reach, and weak demand- tell you what's failing, but not what to build. In this episode, Stuart and Mena introduce VERT: Value, Engine, Reach, and Team the operating system underneath those symptoms, and the four things you actually control. By the end, you'll have a single model to run every business decision through, instead of juggling forty disconnected problems. Mena maps the four pillars onto the three killers: margins sit at the intersection of Value (what you can charge) and Engine (what it costs to deliver); Reach gets you chosen but can't manufacture demand; and Team touches everything, holding the whole system together. Stuart then explains why VERT is a flywheel, not a checklist, each pillar reinforcing the next, so momentum comes from consistent pressure on the right point rather than one dramatic push across everything. Mena shares the green flags and red flags for spotting your weakest pillar, and the misdiagnosis trap, where the symptom and cause live in different pillars. Stuart closes with the four-bucket test: a two-question filter for every decision, and a rule to focus your weakest pillar for ninety days while the rest run in maintenance mode. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  3. 28 Jul

    Ep 190: Thin margins and empty pipelines are design problems

    Send us Fan Mail A thin margin and an empty pipeline both feel like effort problems, so owners respond with more hours. It rarely works. In this episode, Stuart and Mena reframe both as outputs of how a business is designed its pricing, positioning, and channels- not how hard anyone is trying. Working harder on a broken design just scales the problem and burns the founder out. Mena starts with margin, and the distinction most owners never consciously made: are you a price maker or a price taker? In a price-taker industry like mortgage broking, the market sets the ceiling and effort can't move it. She lays out the three layers that shape margin: industry, business model, execution—so you can locate your own constraint. Stuart then reframes reach as an asset you engineer, not marketing you bolt on, introducing the "trust path": why low-risk, frequent purchases convert fast while high-risk, infrequent ones need a long runway of proof. Mena names the two ways reach breaks: expensive reach that drains cash, and fragile reach where one channel carries too much, plus a simple stress test to expose it. The takeaway: redesign the system rather than push through it. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  4. 21 Jul

    Ep 189 : Does anyone actually want what you sell?

    Send us Fan Mail Before you fix your product, your marketing, or your team, Stuart and Mena argue you have to pressure-test something more fundamental: demand. Get it wrong, and everything else simply compounds a weak foundation. The uncomfortable question most owners skip is deceptively simple: what problem are you solving, for whom, stated specifically rather than in flattering generalities? Plenty of clever products are just solutions looking for a problem. The single best test is asking what it costs your customer to do nothing. When the cost of inaction is high, financially, emotionally, socially, motivation is real. Mena turns that instinct into a practical filter: urgency, frequency, and affordability, including whether a customer can actually fund the purchase at the moment the need hits. Stuart then draws the crucial line between demand you capture and demand you must manufacture, why educating a market that doesn't know it has a problem is brutal, and the rare exception where a big player does the heavy lifting for you. Mena asks whether your market is quietly growing or dying, and how to read the early indicators. The verdict? Compliments tell you nothing. Only a paid invoice tells the truth. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  5. 14 Jul

    Ep 188: Most failing businesses are failing at one thing, not twenty

    Send us Fan Mail When a business underperforms, owners tend to assume the cause is complex and set about fixing everything at once. It feels productive, and it almost always fails. Stuart and Mena open with a contrarian claim: struggling businesses are far simpler to diagnose than their owners think. The trouble usually traces to a weakness in just one of three fundamentals. They lay out the three "killers" plainly. First, the revenue you don't keep: thin margins can make a business look healthy while leaving no buffer for mistakes, volatility, or investment. Second, a great business nobody finds, where genuine quality is worth little if the right customers never see it, and referrals get mistaken for a strategy. Third, the cost of demand you have to manufacture: the difference between capturing urgent, existing demand and slowly, expensively educating a market that doesn't yet feel the pain. Running through all three is one sharp distinction, whether a weakness is structural (the industry makes it hard) or self-inflicted (your model or execution), because the fix is completely different in each case. They finish with a two-minute self-score and a rule: work your weakest link for ninety days, and let the rest wait. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  6. 7 Jul

    Ep 187: Why We Retired "The Holistic Accountant"

    Send us Fan Mail After five years, Stuart and Mena are deliberately retiring a brand that was working, and the reasoning matters more than the rename. Through an accounting lens, they argue, you can tell what already happened to profit and cash, but never why a business produces those numbers or whether they'll repeat. A clean tax structure sitting on top of a fragile business is still a fragile business. Optimising the tax bill was only ever treating the symptom. In this episode, they introduce VERT—Value, Engine, Reach and Team, the four reinforcing parts that actually drive business performance, and the test the whole year keeps circling back to: profit, multiplied by growth, made repeatable. It's a shift from looking backward at the scoreboard to understanding the machine generating the score. They're also refreshingly clear about who the show is now for: owners of Australian businesses turning over roughly $1m to $100m who want to scale, lift profit, or keep their exit options genuinely open. And they spell out the promise that sets it apart: the decisions you make inside your business shape your wealth, your retirement and your lifestyle, not merely this financial year's tax outcome. A new direction, and a sharper reason to listen. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  7. 30 Jun

    Ep 186: The Holiday Test: Can your business run without you?

    Send us Fan Mail The holiday test is deceptively simple. If you took four weeks off with no phone, would your business hold its standard, or would it quietly degrade without you? For most business owners, the honest answer points not to a workload problem but to a design problem, and this episode tackles it directly. Stuart opens by reframing the issue: a business that depends on the founder for most decisions is not really a business. It is a job that pays the owner to turn up. That dependency creates a single point of failure, limits growth, and reduces the business's value to any future buyer or successor, since the value is tied to the founder. Mena challenges the most common objection that professional or technical work is too bespoke to systemise, and explains why the real barrier is usually that expert judgement has become automatic and invisible, not that it is genuinely impossible to document. The episode then moves through a practical framework: how to prioritise the critical few processes rather than documenting everything at once, how to turn implicit judgement into decision trees and case libraries, why modern documentation lives in workflows rather than manuals, and how to give every process a named owner with real authority to maintain it. Stuart closes with the metric that matters: count how many decisions escalate to you each month, and treat driving that number down as the real measure of progress. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

  8. 23 Jun

    Ep 185: Warning- Asking for feedback and ignoring it is a liability

    Send us Fan Mail Asking for customer feedback and then ignoring it is not a neutral act; it tells the customer more about the business than any service failure could on its own. This episode opens with a real example of a high-profile restaurant that solicited specific criticism, replied with a templated response, and confirmed the original concern in the process. It is a pattern more common than most business owners realise, and the commercial cost is significant. Stuart and Mena work through why business owners are structurally poor at seeing their own weaknesses, why silence from customers is not evidence of satisfaction, and why not all feedback deserves equal weight. The discussion challenges the widespread use of Net Promoter Score, arguing that behaviour-based questions, whether a customer has actually referred the business, not whether they intend to, produce more honest and more actionable information. The episode then moves to system design: how short the survey should be, when to ask, who owns the responses, and what a genuine reply looks like versus a template that bears no relationship to what the customer actually said. The B2B context receives specific attention, where feedback conversations work better as structured check-ins than post-project forms. The closing decision rule is direct: a feedback system is only worth building if the business is genuinely prepared to act on what it hears. Anything less is a liability, not an asset. If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating on your favourite podcast platform. It helps us reach more incredible listeners like you. Thank you for being a part of the journey! Click here to subscribe to our weekly email. SPECIAL OFFER: Buy a one of Stuart's books for ONLY $20 including delivery. Use the discount code blog here. Work with Mena & Stuart's team: At ProSolution Private Clients we encourage clients to adopt a holistic and evidence-based approach when making financial decisions. Visit our website. Follow us: Stuart: Twitter/X and LinkedIn.  Mena: LinkedIn IMPORTANT: This podcast provides general information about finance, taxes, and credit. This means that the content does not consider your specific objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is crucial for you to assess whether the information is suitable for your circumstances before taking any actions based on it. If you find yourself uncertain about the relevance or your specific needs, it is advisable to seek advice from a licensed and trustworthy professional.

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Hosts & Guests

About

Business by Design is the podcast for owners who want to start, scale or exit a business. Each week, Stuart Wemyss and Mena Abraham unpack the four things every business must get right: value, engine, reach and team. Using the VERT flywheel, they show how these fit together to build a business that runs without you, and how the choices you make inside the business flow through to your personal wealth, lifestyle and exit options. Every episode is short and to the point, with no fluff and no sales pitches. Go to https://www.businessbydesignpodcast.com 

Information

  • Channel
    ProSolution
  • Creator
    Stuart Wemyss & Mena Abraham
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    192
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Business By Design
  • Show Website
    Business By Design

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