The 10% Rule

Three years ago, I started The Emerald Agency on my own. My dad was my business advisor — still is — but more than that, he's one of my closest friends. This year, I decided it was time to stop borrowing his advice privately and start sharing it.

So we're bringing him in. Properly. The big wigs, or as I call him — my crocodile farming father.

But before I explain what we're doing together, I want to tell you about a farmer in Zambia.

Dad was young — before he'd even met my mum — and he'd hitched out to Zambia to visit an old family friend. He turned up at a farm looking for a family friend, and a man he'd never met looked at him and said, "You're Bill Lowe's son, aren't you?"

(I wonder if this is becuase he looked like grandpa or if it's a way the Lowe men hold themselves.)

He ended up spending time with this farmer instead. And at some point, walking around the land, dad asked him what his basic approach was. The farm looked good. Well-run. Nothing flashy, but solid. The farmer's answer has stuck with our family for decades:

"All I've ever done in my life is look at other farmers and try to do 10% better."

That's it. Not revolutionise farming. Not reinvent the wheel. Just find what works, study it honestly, and do it a fraction better than the person before you.

Why this matters more than you'd think

I've said that to clients and watched it land. Every time. Because we live in a world that's obsessed with transformation. With big promises and overnight success stories and courses that will change your life. And most of us, quietly, know that's not how it actually works.

The overnight success took ten years. The business that looks effortlessly well-run has been through three near-collapses you'll never hear about. The founder who seems completely in control has been building those habits since before you knew they existed.

10% better isn't a humble ambition. It's a radical one, because it compounds. Do 10% better this quarter. Then this year. Then the next. Build something that isn't optimised for the launch announcement but for the long question: what foundation are we laying that means this can still be standing long after we're gone?

Dad's version of that is "build it for your great-grandchildren." I've thought about that in relation to the Agency and the bookshop more times than I can count. Not because I expect either of them to look the same in 200 years — but because if the foundations are strong, something survives. Something grows from it.

That's what we're trying to help businesses do.

What we actually do together

Dad thinks at altitude. He goes into a business, asks the questions nobody else is asking, looks at the architecture of how decisions get made and how people are structured and whether the governance holds — and then he tells you what needs to change. He's not there to do the work. He's there to give you the clarity to do it properly. Decades of transformation consulting at board and executive level means he's seen most of it before, and the ones he hasn't he's not afraid to say so.

I translate. I take the thinking and I give it shape — a story, a message, a way of communicating what's happening and why it matters, to the people who need to hear it. Crisis communications, strategic messaging, digital presence — the bit where the strategy has to become something people can actually understand and act on.

He's the straight talker. I'm the one who gives it the frame. Between us, we cover the ground from what's actually brokento how do you talk about it without losing anything in between.

And honestly — I think we make a good team. I've known that since we first worked together. It took us a little while to figure out how to talk to each other as colleagues rather than as father and daughter, with all the baggage that comes with that. But once we did, something clicked.

Why now

The Emerald Agency has always been built on one idea: the big agencies weren't made for you. We are. For the community organisations, the development trusts, the businesses doing important work on the fringes that the glossy agencies overlook.

Three years in, I'm bringing dad on board because the work is growing into territory where his experience is exactly what our clients need. Strategic organisational support at the level he operates isn't something you just go and find. And the fact that I trust him completely — professionally and personally — means our clients get the benefit of that without the politics.

It's a different kind of family business. The daughter started it. The father joined. We're figuring it out as we go, exactly 10% at a time.

If that sounds like the kind of thinking your business could use — whether it's the strategy side, the communications side, or the bit where those two things need to talk to each other — we'd love to hear from you.