Here let me read it to you, or listen direct on Spotify

---

Success, guaranteed

 

Want a sure-fire process to create rocket-ship growth? Want a system proven to generate cut-through results in a competitive marketplace?

I’m sure you’d like those things. But if those questions sound legit and desirable to you, get used to disappointing results.

Because those are the lines of confident advice people. The guys – it’s 99% guys – who know exactly what’s right for you. No need for any knowledge of your individual situation. Here’s what you should do – what everyone should do – delivered with Level VIII Operating Thetan confidence.

They have been with us since the dawn of time. The term confidence man* existed a couple of centuries before online platforms allowed every grindset bro to pump out self-assured nonsense at scale.

It makes normal people running regular businesses feel like they’re missing something important.

 

Another book review, sort of

 

That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed Zoë Foster Blake’s novel Things Will Calm Down Soon, another stop on my Writing Less So I Can Read Books tour.

 

 

Uniquely for a novel, it captures the confusion and lack of confidence that is normal in new business owners. Which doesn’t mean you’re not good. The book is a peek behind the curtain of business when everyone else is out front putting on a grand show of Crushin It^TM.

The story: sought-after editorial hair stylist Kit Cooper turns entrepreneur, launching a haircare brand, Second Day, with no business experience while juggling relationship chaos and single motherhood.

(As a male business owner and parent, I haven’t had to deal with the 24/7 feeling that I’m letting everyone around me down in all areas of my life, or that I’m not doing any one thing as well as I feel I should. Just occasionally, and that’s a luxury.)

Business books, in general, cover business like it happens in a vacuum, unaffected by the chaos of the rest of your life. It’s all very well to have a military-spec morning success routine if you’re a guy in his twenties with no responsibility for anyone but himself.

For most other people, particularly those under siege by school parent WhatsApp groups, it’s not realistic and sets you up for more feelings of failure.

 

The Kerry Packer 360⁰ sale

 

This modesty is all the more enjoyable in the context of ZFB’s stellar business track record. She turned a cosmetics column into a substantial cosmetics brand from scratch and sold it. Then executed a full Kerry Packer reverse-Bondy manoevre on the deal.

(If you haven’t heard of this legendary business dinosaur battle, media Tyrannosaurus Kerry Packer sold the Nine TV network to Perth mega-grifter Alan Bond for over a billion. It was the height of the 80s WA Inc era, when the state government underwrote a platoon of shonky hustlers who mostly spent the money on yachts. Three years on, after Bond’s inevitable cash flow trouble but before his well-earned jail term, Packer got it back for much less than Bond paid. “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine,” Packer said at the time.)

Foster-Blake did the same for her brand Go To, selling 50.1% to serial acquirers BWX for $89 million in 2021. After BWX went into receivership in 2023 , she bought back a controlling interest for a tenth of that.

She beat Packer by a year. Well played.

 

Learn how to read the numbers to win your freedom

 

Foster-Blake has been through the phase many of us go through, particularly if you’ve come from any kind of creative background. The feeling that you can’t be a proper businessperson because you don’t have a head for numbers. From a 2024 AFR profile ($) headlined “I still think it’s hilarious that I’m in business”:

 

“For the first few years of Go-To, Foster Blake would tell interviewers that she and numbers went together ‘like smoothies and oysters’. ‘It was cute to say that for a while,; she says, acknowledging both an internal impostor syndrome and something more akin to being a tall poppy. The numbers don’t come naturally to me, but I must be a businesswoman because I run a business. It wasn’t cute any more to say, ‘I just do the products’.”

She’s done the work and learned how to do the numbers. Frankly business numbers have a mythology of being rocket science, when the success of most businesses revolves around a handful of essential percentages. Using maths you covered by the end of primary school.

No head for numbers can become a badge of rebellious identity when you’re starting out. No way are you like those dull numbers people, your creative brain is busy with cooler stuff etc.

Sorry, at some point you need to know those numbers. Unless you want to be powerless and dancing to the tune of those numbers people your whole working life.

I feel a little bad looking back at this, but I truly did not care about the financial figures when I was an employee, even though I was on the board.

It was not my money.

Now they’re our own numbers, I’m sitting there in week two of each month hitting refresh on Dropbox, waiting for the P&Ls to drop. I love them. They tell essential stories that are otherwise invisible to you. They can bring you freedom to do whatever the hell you want to do.

 

Another fucking thing: Details that all ring true

 

Obviously the book is an adapted version of Foster Blake’s own experiences with Go To. And if you’ve started a business, the little details in the book make it feel very real.

Whatever your belief in your idea and skills, business is still a random unpleasant surprise generator. The packaging you set your published price on is no longer available. A customer poaches an invaluable staff member. Endless different types of tax notices in amounts that seem larger than your entire revenue this quarter.

You find yourself alone late at night thinking: really? Another fucking thing? What next?

The book has lots of these episodes that make you nod and think, yep, been there.

The whole batch of product with labels printed with lorem ipsum** placeholder copy.

The troll attacks because someone you worked with once posted something problematic.

The partner whose dividend policy is to draw money when their disorganised personal life means they need cash now.

And this:

“She (Kit) was busy, and the older she got the less inclination she had to create content for whatever new social media platform crawled out from the depths of hell.”

So much to unpack in that one that there isn’t space here, it’ll be a whole spinoff story next time.

 

Plagued by uncertainty

 

Throughout the book, Kit is plagued with the niggling feeling that everyone else knows how business really works, and she has missed all the memos about valuation multiples, shareholder contracts, exits and so  on.

That’s ok. Modest and uncertain is good.

That mindset lets you see nuance and other people’s viewpoint, rather than bulldozing everyone with egotistical certainty all day. Bulldozing can work well for a few years, but after a while people will tire of you. Exhibit A: self-professed bulldozer and one-term Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the man who ruined the reputation of marketing for an entire generation.=

I know a good number of business high-performers who live in a constant state of modest underestimation of their skills, and it’s what makes them great. They run rings around most in their industry because they will never get complacent. They never offer unsolicited advice and certainly have no success system to sell you because they’re busy being good at what they do.

If you can seek out successful people who are not in the habit of giving advice, that’s the most useful advice you’re likely to get.

 

A hair product Barbarians At The Gate

 

Some of the customer reviews of the book are a bit “I’m a keen ZFB reader but this book has too much business for me”.

Yes, the business content does ratchet up toward the end as Kit and her team shop the business around the Sydney private equity circuit. And as a business enthusiast, I was very much there for it, like a hair product Barbarians At The Gate. Again, it felt very real.

There’s that strange feeling of putting your beloved brand in the hands of people whose PowerPoint says they truly understand you, and they are buying because they admire what you’ve built.

But the details of their plans say: nah.

Like the PE guys who were keen to put Second Day’s product in the mega-chain “Chemshop”.

“We know the fellas in there and their turnover is astonishing … you could be in the fanciest stores, right in the front window, but sell very little. Or you could be in the cheaper stores, make a big volume play, and shoot the lights out.”

With zero awareness that stocking a premium product adjacent to Sabrina Carpenter Sweet Tooth Eau De Parfum with a “20% off RRP” tag will trash the brand and kill its margins. And exile it from prestige retailers forever.

(Zero disrespect to Sabrina Carpenter by the way, her work is prolific and great, and if she wants to put out Eau De Parfum then she deserves to.)

I’ve known that private equity so-close-yet-so-far feeling. In my old job in corporate events, the founders exited and we got new private equity overlords. We had 800-ish dedicated staff who lived for the colour and excitement of corporate showbiz.

The PE guys announced that we should be super excited for their next purchase after us.

“They’re also in events,” they said. “So there will be synergies!”

They had just bought the country’s largest funeral home conglomerate.

 

Better than a business book for many aspiring entrepreneurs

 

An issue with business books is that they mostly come in two types.

Books written by business achievers, who aren’t writers, so they aren’t much fun to read and the message is basically: I’m awesome and you should be more like me. Or:

Books written by pro writers who can craft a great story, but because they’ve not been in business themselves, they don’t dig down to the coalface details of what starting a business is really like.

Foster Blake has a proper track record in both sides of that equation. Though this is not a business book, there’s a lot for aspiring biz people to learn while they’re enjoying a story.

There are business concepts in there that I didn’t know when we started our place.

If you know someone young who’s thinking of starting their own thing one day, it will genuinely help them. The odds are way against them taking off at the start like Second Day does. But even so, it will help them think about early-days errors that get set in cement and will come back to bite you, particularly giving equity away too freely.

Foster Blake knows how to keep you turning the page, so your future entrepreneur niece is much more likely to actually read it than if you bought her a copy of Good To Great or The Lean Startup.

Perhaps one day she’ll be in a situation where someone’s talking about drag-along clauses or minimum batch sizes for custom packaging. She may not remember the specifics, but she will know that these are things that exist and are important. And that will put her ahead of most.

And if someone reads it and thinks: that all seems too hectic, it’s not for me and I think I’ll get a job, that’s also an invaluable service that will save them years.

There are no right answers for everyone.

 

* There was an original confidence man: William Thompson, who operated in New York in the 1840s. The New York Herald dubbed him the Confidence Man for his skills in persuading people to let him have their watches.

** I’ve been looking at lorem ipsum for a lifetime and only found out today those two words are the truncation of dolorem ipsum (“pain itself”). Seems about right when it’s on your packaging.

 

---

 

Liked the story? Help me out by sharing it or dropping a comment over on LinkedIn, thanks.

Here’s another book to consider: my book Undisruptable. The #1 business book by customer review on Booktopia. Zoë Foster Blake was kind enough to say: “Ian is a cheeky, funny, disruptive (and proven: important) business rascal and thank goodness for that.”

Maybe you’ll get a deal if you buy it AND Things Will Calm Down Soon. Not saying there is any such deal.

On paper, electronic or audio book with me reading it. Get it here: