Hi Reader, If you've been here for a while you know the importance I place on partnerships as a way to grow organisations. I've closed 250+ deals that have materially changed the trajectories of my businesses and those of the leaders I coach. In 2025, I converted that knowledge into a program that included nine self-paced video tutorials, templates, workbooks and ChatGPT-based AI-assistants. This program, called The Partnership Lab, helped students to dramatically accelerate the...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 9 MINUTES | 22 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM A year into building Drop Bio Health, I caught myself thinking about growth in a way I never had at any company before it. We were trying to put blood testing in people’s kitchens. A finger-prick sample, taken at home, used to catch chronic disease long before they could be diagnosed. And we were doing it in the middle of a pandemic, when the idea of anyone going anywhere near a clinic...
10 days ago • 7 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 15 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I made the Australian age-group triathlon team in 2004 and competed at the World Championships that year. If there had been a most-unlikely-to-succeed award for that, my name would have been at the top of the list. My method was simple and stubborn. Show up to training twice a day, work hard, repeat. The 100km swim weeks were met with 100km run weeks. As far as I was concerned, recovery...
17 days ago • 5 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 8 JULY 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM ‘I’m surrounded by people who mean well, but I can’t really talk to them.’ These were the words of a CEO I work with. She has a board that backs her, an executive team that respects her, investors who returned her calls on the same day and on paper she looked well supported. I’ve heard a version of that sentence from nearly every CEO I’ve sat with. We tend to file it under loneliness, as if...
24 days ago • 5 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 8 MINUTES | 1 JULY, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM At Drop Bio Health, I was convinced of something simple. If people could take a blood sample at home, from their finger, and post it back to our lab, they’d do it more often. And if they did it more often, we could see the changes that matter, like the early signals of chronic disease long before symptoms arrived. Convenience was what made early detection possible, and early detection was...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 24 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM In 2013, I co-founded a company called Air Share. If you know Shazam, you know the shape of what we were building. Shazam is software that listens to a few seconds of a song and tells you what it is. We built something similar for radio. Our technology went further and recognised songs, ads, interviews and stories playing on any station, so the moment you heard something worth remembering...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 11 MINUTES | 17 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I closed my first deal at seven. It was summer. I knocked on a neighbour’s door and offered to fix her garden. She said yes. Certain I couldn’t complete the task on my own, I found three other kids on our street, “borrowed” their parents’ tools, and turned up the next morning as a four-person crew. We weeded, we raked and when the job was done, we returned the tools. By the end of that...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 8 MINUTES | 10 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM The room had been going for forty minutes and nobody was listening anymore. I was there as an observer. The CEO ran a biotechnology company that had two therapies slated for market, and almost none of the pieces sat under one roof. Development in one place. Manufacturing in another. Distribution somewhere else again, inside a partner organisation with its own culture, its own incentives,...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 9 MINUTES | 3 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM It doesn’t take long to see ‘us’ and ‘them’ cultures in organisations. It shows up in militaries, emergency services, break rooms and executive team meetings, and it operates whether it’s intended or not. I felt it soon after enlisting in the Army and again in my corporate jobs. I started paying closer attention to it recently. As the worst of COVID passed and the teams I work with began...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read