Business By Design

Stuart Wemyss & Mena Abraham
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  • Entrepreneurship
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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. 

  1. 5d ago

    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.

    18 min

  2. Jun 23

    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.

    19 min

  3. Jun 16

    Ep 184: Stop hiring on gut feel: a scorecard process that works

    Send us Fan Mail Most business owners have at least one hiring regret, and most can trace it back to a decision that felt right at the time. The problem is rarely a lack of effort in the interview. It is a lack of structure before and during it. Gut feel tends to reward confidence, charm, and the ability to perform well in a conversation, none of which reliably predict how someone will actually perform in the role. This episode introduces a structured, scorecard-based hiring process designed to replace impression-driven decisions with evidence. Stuart and Mena begin with the pre-work most businesses skip entirely: defining not just what the role involves, but what success looks like across three to five core accountabilities, each with measurable outcomes. From there, the discussion moves to how to assess strengths, experience, and attitude separately, and why attitude, despite being the hardest to evaluate, is often the most important of the three. The scorecard itself becomes the thread running through the entire process,  generating interview questions, enabling independent scoring across interviewers, surfacing meaningful disagreements, and ultimately transitioning into a performance management tool after hire. The episode also covers why reference checks are evidence, not administration, how transparency at the offer stage shortens the onboarding gap, and why the cost of one poor senior hire can set a business back by twelve to twenty-four months. 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.

    22 min

  4. Jun 9

    Ep 183: How business owners can navigate the proposed tax changes

    Send us Fan Mail The proposed 2026 budget tax changes have generated significant concern among business owners, but most of the commentary has focused on politics rather than practical strategy. This episode cuts through the noise and addresses what small business owners should actually be thinking about before any of these changes become law. Stuart and Mena work through three areas where the proposed changes have the greatest potential impact. On trust taxation, the discussion explores how limiting income splitting to family members on lower tax rates shifts the planning focus from who receives income to when and why an interposed company structure may offer meaningful flexibility under the new rules. On capital gains tax, the episode makes the case that the biggest risk for most business owners is not future CGT changes but failing to access the generous small business CGT concessions that already exist today, many of which require years of preparation to qualify for. And on negative gearing, the discussion examines what the removal of deductions means for the economics of established residential property, and why markets often create the best buying opportunities when sentiment is at its weakest. The broader message runs through every segment: tax rules change, governments change, and business owners who build valuable businesses with clean structures and genuine flexibility consistently come out ahead, regardless of which policy environment they find themselves in. 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.

    17 min

  5. Jun 2

    Ep 182: EOFY tax planning for business owners

    Send us Fan Mail EOFY Planning for Business Owners: What to Do Before 30 June With the end of the financial year fast approaching, business owners still have time to make decisions that can legitimately reduce tax, improve cash flow, and strengthen their financial position before 30 June. In this episode, Stuart and Mena cut through the noise surrounding EOFY planning and focus on the practical strategies that matter most. They discuss the key areas every business owner should be reviewing in the final weeks of the financial year, including the timing of deductions, managing year-end cash flow, maximising superannuation contributions before the relevant cut-offs, and understanding how the instant asset write-off rules may apply. The conversation also explores the importance of structure, substantiation, and documentation. Many EOFY strategies fail not because the idea was wrong, but because the paperwork, timing, or commercial rationale was not properly considered. Stuart and Mena explain the common mistakes business owners make when rushing to implement last-minute tax strategies and why acting under pressure often creates more problems than it solves. Most importantly, this episode reinforces that effective EOFY planning is not about chasing loopholes or making purchases simply because they are deductible. It is about ensuring the decisions you have already made are properly documented, the opportunities available to you are not overlooked, and any action taken before year-end makes commercial sense as well as tax sense. Whether you are running a small business, managing a growing company, or navigating your first EOFY as a business owner, this episode provides a practical framework to help you approach 30 June with greater clarity and confidence. 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.

    19 min

  6. May 26

    Ep 181: Buy your premises or trap your cash? The OpCo-PropCo test

    Send us Fan Mail Owning your business premises feels like progress, security, control, and the satisfaction of paying rent to yourself rather than a landlord. But for many founders, it is a decision that quietly traps capital, reduces flexibility, and concentrates risk in ways that only become apparent years later. This episode introduces the OpCo-PropCo framework as a structured way to think through one of the most consequential capital decisions a business owner can make. Stuart and Mena explain why the trading business and the property holding entity have fundamentally different risk profiles, return expectations, and time horizons, and why mixing them clouds decision-making and performance visibility for both. The discussion covers how to model the rent-versus-buy decision properly, including opportunity cost, yield comparisons, and realistic assumptions about growth and space requirements. It also addresses the compliance obligations and structural pitfalls of related-party arrangements, the genuine constraints of using an SMSF to hold business premises, and the concentration risk that arises when both business value and personal wealth are tied to a single location. The episode closes with a four-question OpCo-PropCo decision rule designed to bring commercial clarity to what is often an emotionally driven choice. Because owning the building should make the business stronger, not harder to run, harder to fund, and harder to sell. 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.

    14 min

  7. May 19

    Ep 180: Expansion math: when a new site actually makes you poorer

    Send us Fan Mail A second location, a new service line, a broader geographic footprint, expansion feels like the logical next step for a business that has found its footing. But for many founders, it is precisely where profitability begins to quietly unwind. This episode confronts the expansion illusion directly: the belief that more locations automatically mean more profit. Stuart and Mena explain how revenue growth can mask margin compression, duplicated overhead, and the cultural and operational drift that sets in once founder oversight is stretched across multiple sites. The emotional drivers, ego, validation, boredom with the core, are named honestly. The discussion covers how to model true break-even, including fully loaded costs, management time, training, and the inefficiency of ramp-up; how to set realistic timeline expectations across setup, launch, early traction, and stabilisation; and how to fund expansion without pulling capital and attention away from the proven engine. Structure decisions, branch versus subsidiary, liability containment, and intercompany pricing are framed as strategic choices, not administrative afterthoughts. The episode closes with a clear expansion decision rule built around four questions every founder should answer before committing capital. Because fragmented, inconsistently run sites do not increase enterprise value, they reduce buyer confidence and complicate the eventual exit. 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.

    12 min

  8. May 12

    Ep 179: From lumpy projects to predictable annual recurring revenue

    Send us Fan Mail Project-based businesses face a fundamental structural problem: every quarter begins at zero. Revenue can look strong on the surface while cash flow remains volatile, pipeline uncertainty delays hiring decisions, and the founder stays personally essential to winning and scoping every engagement. Effort scales linearly. Value does not. This episode challenges the treadmill dynamic head-on, starting with a clear diagnosis of why project businesses stall at scale, utilisation ceilings, margin leakage, scope creep, and inconsistent client experience. Stuart and Mena then reframe the recurring revenue conversation, pushing back on the idea that recurring means subscriptions only. Retainers, service contracts, bundled support, staged programs, and usage-based models all qualify; what matters is predictability and ongoing value, not billing mechanics. The discussion covers how to productise what a business already does well, design offers clients stay for rather than exit from, get revenue recognition and tax timing right, and control churn before trying to scale acquisition. ARR is positioned not as a metric to report but as a tool to improve forecasting, hiring confidence, and investment timing, and ultimately as a proxy for business quality in the eyes of future buyers. The closing decision rule is simple: Does this offer create ongoing value, or does it just extend delivery? 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.

    13 min
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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. 

Information

  • Creator
    Stuart Wemyss & Mena Abraham
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    186
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Business By Design
  • Show Website
    Business By Design

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