I started PTL in 2003. I had a product range I believed in, a phone, and the particular kind of stubbornness that’s useful in the early years of a business and occasionally frustrating in the later ones.
Twenty years later – different offices, different team, different scale, different problems – I find myself in a reflective mood. We’re in the middle of a significant shift in how PTL operates, and I’ve been going through some old papers that reminded me, with some force, how much I didn’t know when I started.
Here’s what I’d tell the 2003 version of me, if I could get him to sit still long enough to listen. The truth is, I know he wouldn’t.
The relationship is the asset. Not the contract.
Every client relationship I’ve lost that genuinely hurt was one I’d let drift. I’d got comfortable. Showed up when called. Delivered what was ordered. Invoiced on time. Completely adequate. Completely forgettable. The clients we’ve kept through difficult periods were the ones where we’d invested in the actual relationship – where we knew what they were trying to achieve, not just what they were trying to order. The contract is an outcome of the relationship. Looking back, I see that I spent too many years treating it as the goal.
Your expertise is worth more than you think. You’ll undercharge for it until you stop.
We spent years pricing ourselves as a supplier. We should have been pricing ourselves as specialists who happened to supply. The components are the delivery mechanism. The knowledge – twenty years of understanding why things fail, what the procedure doesn’t cover, what the site really needs versus what they think they need – that’s the value. It took a long time to act like that was true. Seriously, don’t underestimate the added value you bring to the equation.
Clarity is a competitive advantage.
Being clear about what you do, who it’s for, why it matters, what you won’t do – is not a marketing exercise. It’s an operational one. When your team is clear on what you’re building and why, they make better decisions without you in the room. They know what a yes looks like. They know what a no looks like. You don’t have to be involved in everything. I learned this too late.
Ask for help sooner.
The moments of genuine progress in this business have almost all involved bringing in a perspective from outside. Consultants, peers, mentors. People who could see what I couldn’t because they weren’t standing inside it. I’m better at this now. I started too late.
Build it like you’ll sell it one day – even if you never plan to.
Documenting processes. Building systems that work when you’re not there. Creating assets that have value beyond your personal effort. These things make the business better every day – not just at exit. The discipline of building something that stands on its own makes it stronger regardless of what you do with it. I should have started earlier. I didn’t, because I was too busy being the business rather than building it.
Twenty years is long enough to make proper mistakes and learn from them. Long enough to build something you’re genuinely proud of.
The most useful thing about experience isn’t what you know. It’s knowing which questions to ask earlier.
We’re not done. Far from it. But it’s not a bad place to be starting the next chapter from.
Twenty years in. Still learning which lessons I needed to hear at year one – and which only make sense from here.
Still learning after
twenty years.
PTL – built on experience, honest about what that actually means.
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